The Bluestocking 360: T-Cow and T-Hid

On a good day, he claims to read four or five books

Happy Friday!

The most moving thing I read this week was by Ben Dreyfuss, of all people. (Sorry Ben.) Kevin Drum, an old school blogger who was once Ben’s colleague at the leftwing magazine Mother Jones, died recently from cancer. Drum was forced out of Mother Jones at the height of Peak Cancel in 2021, for offences such as writing that he didn’t want to watch Parasite because it had subtitles. After a fair few twitterstorms along these lines, his junior colleagues wrote an open letter that accused him of racial insensitivity. (They also named Dreyfuss in that letter, and he also left the magazine.)

Drum took his writing independent and — as far as I can see — declined either to badmouth Mother Jones publicly or to join the lucrative “I’ve been cancelled” circuit. In his post, Dreyfuss reveals a secret that suggests why—that Drum was a fundamentally decent and collegiate man.

For years, Drum had been bringing in huge amounts of traffic for Mother Jones (something like a third of the total at times). Despite this, he refused all salary raises, preferring that the money go instead to his junior colleagues. “At any other company in America, he would have been paid fairly half a million to $750k a year,” writes Dreyfuss. “He brought in many times more revenue than that. But he never made more than $85k. He asked every single year that they take the money and put it into paying the fellows more and giving them a better stipend or lower premium for healthcare.” The same junior colleagues whose material conditions had been improved by Drum were the ones to cast him out.

Because I was raised a Christian, this story inevitably reminded me of The Good Samaritan. The point of that parable is that the priest and the Levite pass by the half-dead assault victim, while the Samaritan (from another tribe, one that Jesus’s audience would have hated) stops to help. The priest is an ostensibly holy man, with high social status, who has just come from performing rituals in the temple. But he has no compassion for the materially needy person right in front of him¹. This is basically what a lot of 2020-era social justice people reminded me of—they wanted to do moral things that were well-rewarded with status and approbation, but they had no charity for the people right in front of them. Drum appears to have been the opposite: a good Samaritan. I’m glad that Ben wrote this; it’s the best obituary anyone could hope to receive.

Lately I’ve been questioning myself. Given the re-election of Donald Trump, did I spend too much time in the last half-decade writing about the excesses of the left?

My starting position has always been that the excesses of the left helped re-elect Donald Trump; also, that you can’t expect to be taken seriously on vaccines when you are denying sexual dimorphism². But of course, the charge is frequently thrown about that anyone vaguely “anti woke” was just pandering to a rightwing moral panic. Now, that’s partially true. The Trump administration’s alleged commitment to free speech is tissue-thin—see the detention of Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil. Nonetheless, stories like Kevin Drum’s really happened, and they were abominable. I’m proud that I stood up to my political “side” when that was unpopular.

Until next time,

Helen

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Tyler Cowen needs to tidy his house

The Man Who Wants To Know Everything (The Economist, £)

[Tyler] Cowen calls himself “hyperlexic”. On a good day, he claims to read four or five books. Secretly, I timed him at 30 seconds per page reading a dense tract by Martin Luther. Later, I sat next to him while he went through an economics paper. He read it at the speed of someone checking that the pages were correctly ordered.

Family lore holds that Cowen taught himself to read aged two. He grew up in New Jersey, and was a quiet child engrossed in baseball cards and science fiction. From an early age, he seems to have been seeking outlets for his obsessive tendencies. At ten years old, he watched Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky on TV and got interested in chess. Within a few years he was working as a professional chess tutor, and at 15 he became the youngest-ever state champion.

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Sharp profile of economist Tyler Cowen, a polymathic podcaster and blogger who is basically interested in everything. Hats off to him for making this a selling point—I’ve always wondered if the fact that I write across so many domains makes people think I’m a dilettante. (Maybe the secret ingredient is a Y chromosome.) Also, no one ever mentions how much being a quick reader is a cheat code for lots of jobs, although maybe that’s less of a competitive advantage as we move from a literary culture to an oral culture.

PS. The writer John Phipps is out there doing some great long reads behind paywalls, by the way. I loved his FT piece (link, £) about the edition of Hamlet handed down from actor to actor, with each one choosing the person he thinks is the best Hamlet of his generation. Kenneth Branagh gave it to Tom Hiddleston in 2017, which is an eccentric choice given that T-Hid has only played the Ham in a tiny production seen by a few hundred people. Then again, it was directed by Kenneth Branagh.

if i were king I would ban people from putting Hamlet in a hoodie

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Self-promotion corner: Excuse the time-travelling, but Armando thinks that this might be the best Strong Message Here that we’ve done: a free-flowing exploration of the difference between private and public language in politics. Includes the question of whether political language has got more boring on average, or more spicy? Also: my belief that when reporting on people using “bad words”, we should use the bad words.

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Margaret Fuller

Against (Bad) Historical Novels (New York Times, gift link)

And what of more trivial yet telling gaffes? At dinner with the Emersons, [the 19th century feminist Margaret] Fuller takes “quick, appreciative spoonfuls” of a fish stew spiced with garlic and lemon, when no New Englander cooked with garlic then — few Yankees did until Julia Child’s “The French Chef” aired on WGBH in 1963. I could have continued: Working on her first book in Harvard’s Gore Hall library in 1843, [Allison] Pataki’s Fuller marvels at the “dust that lines the thousands of bookshelves.” Oops! Gore Hall was brand-new, just completed in 1841. Fuller accepts a job as literary editor for The New-York Tribune after Horace Greeley, her future boss, coaxes, “I’m looking for new content.”

Garlic, dust and “content”? Of such details worlds are made, whether fictional or non-. Part of the thrill in visiting the past through books comes from learning about its physical makeup, its inhabitants’ customs and ways of expressing themselves — feeling as if you are there. Do we really want to draw back the curtain on history and find people talking and acting the way we do? In Pataki’s novel, Emerson urges Fuller to “share” her feelings; in childhood, Margaret can’t “relate” to her peers; numerous characters pause for “a beat” before reacting, and “throw” smirks or sideways glances at one another. Is this the past?

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I’ve taken the liberty of reheadlining this essay on the ethics of biography and historical fiction, because the NYT one was so boring. It begins with a magnificently unselfconscious scene of the author getting annoyed that people are reading some schlocky novel about Margaret Fuller, when her perfectly good biography is still in print. This is worsened when she realises that the novel is written in purest 21st century-speak. Eating garlic and sharing your feelings! Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?

To me, it’s the anachronistic psychology rather than the minor seasoning errors that is the mark of a bad historical novel—modern characters and narratives jammed into periwigs and wimples. For the alternative, listen to Hilary Mantel’s Reith lectures, where she talks about inhabiting the strangeness of Tudor society, particularly its intense religiosity.

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Quick Links

1. “The academic critics could not resist the opportunity to kick Joyce’s corpse. The Times gave him a mean, cagey little obituary, and then—though The Times has never lacked space for letters about batting averages or the first cuckoo—refused to print the letter of protest that T. S. Eliot wrote. This was in accordance with the grand old English tradition that the dead must always be flattered unless they happen to be artists.” (Orwell Daily, Substack)

2. “During that time, Mangione continued to interact with the “spondy” back-pain community on Reddit, encouraging members to stand up for themselves if they wanted spinal surgery. “Tell them you are ‘unable to work’/do your job,” he wrote. “We live in a capitalist society. I’ve found that the medical industry responds to these key words far more urgently than you describing unbearable pain and how it’s impacting your quality of life.”’ Deep dive on the life and potential motivations of Luigi Mangione, who is charged with killing a US health-care CEO (Rolling Stone).

3. “Miles, a retired 60-year-old banker, married with three children, received his diagnosis at 54. Like Poppy, autism is part of his identity. He doesn’t see it as a disability and doesn’t accept the label “autism spectrum disorder” either. He sees “the words ‘spectrum’ and ‘disorder’ as pejorative”. He doesn’t accept that “some people with autism are much more disabled than others” or that for them the diagnosis isn’t a positive, but rather, required to receive help.” Hmm. I am giving Miles, one of the case studies from Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Age of Diagnosis, the hardest of hard stares. Good for you, Miles, but there are kids out there who are doubly incontinent and non-verbal because of their autism, and I don’t see why their diagnosis should be undermined to make you feel better. From Hannah Barnes’s excellent review of Sullivan’s book in the New Statesman (registration required).

4. “As ever with arguments about porn and sex work, on the one hand you have people — me — who think the market for porn and sex work springs from punters dehumanising sex workers; and on the other you have people — Sean Baker — who think you cannot ‘believe’ in the humanity of sex workers until you learn to enjoy the products of sex work. There’s no reconciling these two things.” Rowan Davies will not be watching Anora (The Metropolitan, Substack).

5. I’m doing a live event with Jesse Singal, Sarah Ditum and Hadley Freeman on May 3. Join us for the SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP.

See you next time! If you were forwarded this email and would like to subscribe, click below:

1. We might also note that this parable totally owns JD Vance’s waffle about “ordo amoris”, because the whole point is that the Samaritan is the audience’s “neighbour”, despite being from a different ethnicity. It’s why Martin Luther King used the parable in the Mountaintop speech. Then again, the Pope already owned JD Vance on this one. It may turn out to be his last significant theological intervention. Again, a great legacy.

2. Please update your handbooks: the line-to-take on female athletes has now become “this is a non-issue”. Very few people are sticking to the line that there is no biological difference between men and women, because it’s so obviously nuts. Whoopi Goldberg is one of the last soldiers in the jungle on this, though. Even Dylan Mulvaney looked at her like, really?