The Bluestocking 347: Thurber's scrawl and festive quizzes

I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides

Happy Friday!

Hope you’re about to clock off work for the holidays. This is me from 6pm today:

As a result, this is a BUMPER edition of the Bluestocking.

Happy Christmas!

Helen

---

Photograph by Tung Walsh

Everyone’s Thirsty for Danny Dyer (Esquire)

When it comes to himself, Dyer is in on the joke; it’s why he wore a ruff on Danny Dyer’s Right Royal Family. But this one – he doesn’t get it. Rivals is a show where Poldark’s Aidan Turner takes his shirt off (again), where Alex Hassell strides full-frontally nude across a tennis court in the sun. So why is he the subject of the nation’s horny memes?

There was a time when Dyer’s fanbase was exclusively, as he puts it, “Young men with scars down their faces and Burberry hats – you know, the naughty fuckers in the pub.” So it’s been a topic of conversation among my female friends that Dyer has been the cause of a kind of sudden sexual mania among those who grew up with him in films like Human Traffic and The Football Factory – films in which he plays a babbling drug-taking hedonist, a football hooligan, an East End hardman, or all three. I feel I should explain whatever it is they’ve been sending him, in my unofficial ambassadorial role. The man is baffled. He thinks they might be taking the piss.

*

As someone who married a man who would definitely secretly palm a potato from a buffet, I enjoyed Danny Dyer in Rivals, and I enjoyed this interview with him by Hayley Campbell, too—covering his bromance with Harold Pinter (who is the screensaver on his phone), his years taking drugs, how he revitalised EastEnders and how he’s now addicted to building Lego.

---

A Mother’s Work (Prospect)

In 1973, we moved from Primrose Hill to Brussels, and in February 1974 she had another breakdown, and left, before being admitted to the Maudsley. She always told us the rupture was awful. “I hated leaving you children,” she would say, searching our faces for signs of lasting trauma and anger. Our father heroically held the fort and kept the show on the road with a motley succession of au pairs and housekeepers from many countries.

It was a difficult year for everyone, most of all for my mother and father. But I’m sure that for her it was also, secretly, a release. She used hospitalisation as a period of proper respite from being a wife and mother—and that respite unstopped a tremendous gush of creative energy.

[…] As Raymond Levy, her late professor, explained to me: “She left [the Maudsley] because she had to go back to Brussels to you.” Levy knew that her treatments hadn’t worked—and why.

“The mother’s work is never done—you complete a task and you have to do it all over again. There is no end to the work and therefore the worry,” he said.

I asked him if he ever got to the bottom of what caused it. “Four small children and feeling out of control and having a husband who was in charge of waste at the EEC,” he mused. “That is a wonderful, ironic coincidence.”

*

Rachel Johnson on her artist mother, Charlotte Johnson Wahl, whose creativity was only unlocked when she had to be committed to a psychiatric facility away from her four young children. If you want a psychological insight into Boris Johnson, this is the best one yet.

---

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

The Woman Who Slept With 100 Men In A Day (The Atlantic, gift link)

At first, it was the Airbnb owner I felt sorry for. I once had a friend who rented out her flat for a year while she was abroad, and came back to discover it had been used as a brothel in her absence. Deep cleaning doesn’t even begin to cover it. And so when the recent YouTube documentary “I Slept With 100 Men in One Day” went viral recently, I could only imagine how the landlord of the posh London apartment where Lily Phillips performed her stunt might react.

“After the day was finished, Lily, under her own name, left a review on the Airbnb listing, saying, 10 out of 10, would 100 percent recommend,” the documentary’s host, Josh Pieters, told me. Phillips was, however, less enthusiastic about her feat of endurance sex. The reason the film has become so talked-about is that one short clip—viewed 200 million times on X—shows her crying in the aftermath of the stunt. “I don’t know if I’d recommend it,” she says.

*

Here’s me ending the year with a (gang)bang. I was fascinated by Josh Pieters’ documentary about OnlyFans star Lily Phillips—particularly how he wasn’t afraid to be judgmental about her sex stunt, without being rude or demeaning to her. I also wondered if there’s a point where we become OK again with authorities stepping in to save us from ourselves.

---

This is a disturbingly professional edit of my quiz of the year for Decoding The Gurus, which incorporates some incredible clips of Tucker Carlson and Richard Dawkins.

The holiday extravaganza continues with my guest appearance on Blocked and Reported, talking about my year in journalism, the collapse of the anti-woke sphere and the appeal of tradwives. Also I got Jesse and Katie to play an internet-craziness version of Only Connect.

The latest Strong Message Here covers Kemi Badenoch’s war on bread and Keir Starmer’s tepid bath of managed decline. Next week is our Words of The Year.

There will also be a special holiday episode of Page 94 over what Adam insists on calling the “merrineum.”

---

Quick Links

1. “The Other Half’s research revealed that “at least 5 UK men per year violently kill women who are disabled, elderly or infirm, under the guise of mercy killings.” Eighty-eight per cent of the killers were male, overwhelmingly husbands and sons, and the killings were extremely violent, involving “cutting women’s throats, bludgeoning them, shooting them, or using stabbing, suffocation and strangulation.”” Caroline Criado Perez on how she came to oppose assisted dying (Invisible Women, Substack).

2. My new Atlantic colleague Jonathan Chait says that he doesn’t write about cancel culture much any more, because it’s gone away (gift link).

3. The Prawnhub year in review is always a terrifying insight into contemporary sexual mores: you will not believe the spike in searches for “Mormon threesome” (NSFW).

4. “The problem is, the brothers are not actually victims. They’re liars and murderers. And the only reason they now have widespread support is that culture and technology have turned empathy into an emotionally transmitted disease that debilitates thought. Put simply, stupidity has gone viral.: Gurwinder on “toxic empathy” and the Menendez case. Disclosure: I have not followed this case and have no opinion on it (Substack).

5. “‘I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid,’ [Thomas] Jefferson wrote, ‘and I find myself much the happier.’” Why you need a news vacation (Range Widely, Substack).

6. “Somebody once asked Marc Connelly how you could tell a Thurber man from a Thurber woman. He said, “The Thurber women have what appears to be hair on their heads.”” Unearthed this charming interview with the humorist James Thurber by Alastair Cooke, from a 1956 issue of The Atlantic (gift link). I had no idea Thurber went blind, nor that his career was thanks to the Matthew Effect—everyone said his “scrawl” was untutored and not worth considering, until he did some drawings for a book about sex, which was popular, and then everyone decided that his scrawl was actually a compelling individual style.

7. Why yes, you WILL be hearing more about the Matthew Effect in The Genius Myth, coming summer 2025.

That’s all for this year—the Bluestocking is taking a Christmas break next week as we navigate the M5 for hours on end. See you in 2025!