The Bluestocking 357: Stuck Inside
any movement devoid of hope will quickly be devoid of members
Happy Friday!
And hello this week from Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria (and 40 BA tier points each way in Club World, status-chasers). Please enjoy this photo of me looking like a Michigan realtor on a roadside billboard trying to flog you an Orthodox basilica:
My main Bulgaria factoid is that it has one of the best European royalty stories I’ve heard. In 1879, they sent for Alexander of Battenberg to be their prince, but he . . . just didn’t work out? The Russians coup-ed him after seven years. And so Bulgaria got in another German prince, Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, instead.
Ferdinand worked out OK, upgraded himself to Tsar, and his son Boris inherited the throne, followed (very briefly) by Boris’s son Simeon at the age of six in 1943. But Bulgaria became a Soviet republic in 1946, and Simeon went off to do ex-king stuff in Egypt and Greece, before returning to the country after the fall of communism and becoming Bulgaria’s prime minister between 2001 and 2005. Making him one of the few people to have been both an unelected and elected leader of the same country.
Simeon’s children, incidentally, are named Kardam, Kiril, Kubrat, Konstantin-Assen and Kalina, making them proto-Kardashians.
But here’s the real killer trivia fact. Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is one of two men currently alive who were heads of state during World War Two. Who is the other? Answer at the bottom of the newsletter.
Helen
America’s Moving Crisis (The Atlantic)
Not far from where I live, in Washington, D.C., two lawn signs sit side by side on a neatly manicured lawn. One proclaims NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE FROM, WE’RE GLAD YOU’RE OUR NEIGHBOR, in Spanish, English, and Arabic. The other reads SAY NO, urging residents to oppose the construction of an apartment building that would house the new neighbors the other sign purports to welcome. Whatever its theoretical aspirations, in practice, progressivism has produced a potent strain of NIMBYism, a defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish.
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Yoni Applebaum on the simple and startling fact that Americans move house far, far less than they used to: “In the 1960s, about one out of every five Americans moved in any given year—down from one in three in the 19th century, but a frenetic rate nonetheless. In 2023, however, only one in 13 Americans moved.”
What has this done to politics? Above all, it’s created the situation where the good jobs are in places that younger and less wealthy people can’t afford to live. (On the NS podcast, Stephen used to say “the housing crisis in London is a jobs crisis everywhere else”, i.e. it’s all very well telling people who complain about London rents that housing is much cheaper in Northumberland, but that’s not actually very helpful if they are, say, a lawyer or advertising executive).
In Which I Declare War on Beloved Entertainer Bo Burnham (Substack)
I have repeatedly referenced Burnham’s “subculture” and future historians will have a name for the college-educated, extremely-online, left-leaning influencers that bubbled up on the internet starting around 2012 or so. […] This subculture’s influence hit its apex in 2020 and entered its death throes with the 2024 election and the slow degradation of the platform previously known as Twitter. I think Inside, in ways both intentional and unintentional, perfectly demonstrated why.
“Here I am,” says the charismatic, empathetic male on the screen, “someone who has achieved everything our side says is good in life. I have all the correct opinions and praise from all the right people. I have acquired my wealth ethically. I have demonstrated empathic awareness of others’ suffering and an unflinching perception of my own shortcomings and culpability in the world’s injustices. And it fucking sucks so much that I literally am rooting for the world to end just to make it stop.”
I’m obviously not implying that this special put Trump back in office, I’m saying that Inside lives on as a beautifully-crafted expression of how not to build a popular, durable Resistance. The lesson should be that any movement devoid of hope will quickly be devoid of members.
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Interesting argument against a certain style of online leftism — the “hellscape” approach to politics. I know I am prone to this myself.
Bluestocking recommends: The Years (Harold Pinter). I’m a sucker for compressed time in art—don’t even mention the early sequence in Up or I will sniffling—so I was predisposed to love The Years, which charts the life of a single woman (played by five actors) across the decades.
It’s short (yay), beautifully staged—with tablecloths representing every phase of her life hung around the backdrop—and undoubtedly powerful. Men fainting as Romola Garai describes the aftermath of having an abortion has become a nightly occurence: it happened the night we went. Poor Romola had to retire to the side of the stage, covered in blood, to allow a young man to be dragged out of the stalls, limp and pale.
Fergus Morgan has written well about how this epidemic of fainting suggests that trigger warnings aren’t having the intended effect, because the theatre is plastered in signs alerting you to the scene. I would go further: I think that the Years-fainting has achieved the status of a social contagion. People are so hyped up for the fainting—the ushers spring out of the shadows into the side aisles in anticipation of the scene—that some people are probably passing out through sheer peer pressure.
That said, I think it’s a huge badge of honour for the writer, translator, director and actors to be able, through words and a bit of stage blood alone, to generate such strong physical reactions in the audience. (Even if I did also this: good lord, lads, you should try dealing with a period every month.)
Quick Links
After watching this video, I am 27% less worried about the Freemasons secretly controlling the world (Instagram)
“I write my books to help people become bilingual.” I’m a big fan of the anthropologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, a Berkeley professor who really tries to understand white American rural communities (Substack)
Can men and women be friends? Alice Evans on a new study of Facebook connections which shows that “where men’s honour depends on women’s seclusion, cross-gender friendships are rare, female employment is low, and patriarchy is widely supported.” Stuff like this makes me very glad to live here; it would be rubbish not to have any male friends to whom I can explain the concept of emotions and fabrics (Substack).
“This is an examination of one of [Frasier’s] strangest moments, an episode that for about four total minutes abandons comedy in favor of an entirely unexpected, brooding meditation on long-lasting pain, the limits of compassion, and the meaning of justice. Which is quite the left turn from dinner party antics and exploding cans of shaving cream.” Every time I think I couldn’t love Frasier more, I read something about Frasier (Worthless Trash, Substack).
Run, don’t walk, to pre-order my colleague Sophie Gilbert’s book Girl on Girl, about pop culture and the backlash to feminism, which is out in May (Amazon UK, Bookshop).
“It wasn’t until his father’s texts and emails came out in the trust litigation that James realized just how many insidious stories over the years—the ones that portrayed Kathryn as a meddling “former model” and James as a liberal dilettante—had been planted by Rupert’s camp. The revelation was liberating.” I inhaled this piece by my Atlantic colleague McKay Coppins, who has been secretly talking to James Murdoch for the past year, as he and three of his siblings battle their father (and their brother Lachlan) for control of the family trust after his death. Come for Rupert cheating at Monopoly, stay for the speculation over why Wendy Deng might have found herself attracted to so many powerful men (The Atlantic, gift link).
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“We’ve gotten to the point where the right-wing hegemony on X is just as—if not more—entrenched than the left’s was. . . When I pointed this out on Twitter last week, a lot of people called me a faggot. Be that as it may, I’m a faggot who knows to get out of the way when a pendulum is about to swing right into him.” River Page writes about the New Online Right’s echo chamber. Fresh from winning an election, online MAGA stans are becoming quickly and obviously divorced from normie opinion without realising it, because they’re simply too online.
The other notable FP piece this week was founder Bari Weiss suggesting in a speech to the ARC conference that the right is heading for dangerous over-reach—after, admittedly, she did quite a lot of pro-forma throat-clearing about the evils of Hamas and wokery. However, her speech did have one line that suggests she has herself spent a little too much time online: “Here in England the real contest of power, the real debate, is between Reform and the Tories.” Is it????? As far as I can see, they are mostly agree on stuff while Labour is getting on with governing, thanks to its 158-seat majority.
See you next time! If you were forwarded this email, click the link below to subscribe. If you would like to pre-order my book THE GENIUS MYTH, out in June, click here for Amazon UK and here for Amazon US (Bookshop links coming soon).
Trivia answer: the other WWII-era head of state still alive is . . . the Dalai Lama, who was formally recognised in his position in 1939, when he was still a toddler. I asked Armando this question on the latest Strong Message Here, in which he and I dissected JD Vance’s speech to the Munich Security conference, and Kemi Badenoch’s address to the ARC Conference in London.
Thank you for another brief lift in the gloom of a depressing week. In the spirit of your end recommendations, I cannot praise James Marriott's newsletters enough - for his efforts in restoring the idea of being cultured as more than an affectation. His latest explores a concept (from Walter Ong) that we're moving away from a literate culture and back to an oral one - driven by the move to videos and social media memes - where simpler, clichéd and repeated pronouncements are the ones that gain traction. Fascinating and chilling. https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/are-we-returning-to-an-oral-culture/comments
« The other notable FP piece this week… »
Despite distancing itself from the ‘legacy’ media, The Free Press seems determined to carry on the proud tradition of terrible commentary on the UK by American journalists!