The Bluestocking 362: Houthis and Heroes

We are currently clean on OPSEC

Before we start, some breaking news. I’m ready to announce the first book event: it’s only me and Armando Iannucci talking about genius in Conway Hall on Thursday June 19. The venue is quite bijou, and Armando is quite famous, so this one might sell out quickly. My newsletter subscribers get 25 percent off the ticket price with the code GENIUS25. Details of more events are at the end of the newsletter.

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Happy Friday!

I’ve been travelling for the last week and—wow. I thought East Coast jetlag was bad, but it’s nothing compared to switching between London and California. That said, I did have one sublime moment.

I find reporting trips very stressful, because I’m a conscientious person and I want to justify the expense of sending me somewhere. But after doing a few of them, I have come to the zen realisation that you have to set up as many opportunities as possible, and then to some extent just surrender to the universe. The best material often comes from unexpected moments: the person you meet in line, or the offhand comment you overhear.

On Thursdays, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opens late, so I headed down after work. I nearly didn’t go to the video installation tucked away on the fifth floor, because—well, video art is almost always synonymous with bad art. (Why am I watching something less well conceived and executed than a TikTok video by the average fourteen-year-old content creator?) But then I turned the corner and saw this:

That’s the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, and he’s in the bath at a house in upstate New York, playing his guitar. All around him, in separate rooms with different instruments, were his friends. Each one faced a camera and had their own audio feed, which are all piped into the museum. The piece is called “The Visitors” and you can watch it on YouTube.

The feed is in real time, over an hour, as the musicians play together, repeating a couple of hypnotic phrases over and over again. Every so often a cannon goes off outside the house, where a group of people are gathered. Watching the musicians synchronise while physically apart is an act of virtuosity, and the entire piece made me think how wonderful it must be to have a dozen talented friends and the ability to just hang out with them and make music.

I spent 20 minutes in the room, just listening and looking. For someone with the attention span of a mosquito, that’s insane. There are so many little details, like the person in bed with the guitar player, or the piano guy smoking every so often.

Apparently, The Visitors became a big hit at the museum after Covid, when everyone was thinking about isolation, and was so popular they brought it back. I loved it—I can’t think of an artwork that has been so pleasurably immersive since the last time I saw a James Turrell skyspace.

“Space That Sees,” (1992), Jerusalem

I was probably jetlagged, then, too. Maybe it’s the best way to experience art.

Helen

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The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans (The Atlantic)

After receiving the Waltz text related to the “Houthi PC small group,” I consulted a number of colleagues. We discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds. I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

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You’ve probably read the coverage of this, but I have included a gift link so that you can read the original. One of the things that I appreciate most about Jeff (my boss and the author of this scoop) is that he takes journalism very seriously, but also is incredibly funny. The dryness of his recounting of this whole saga is exquisite. (Something about the use of emojis lifts this to the level of art.)

This is a colossal intelligence failure, and in any previous administration, it would have led to enormous consequences for those involved. Here’s the final line of the piece: ‘In his text detailing aspects of the forthcoming attack on Houthi targets, [Pete] Hegseth wrote to the group—which, at the time, included me—“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”’

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Photo by Jean-Philippe Delberghe on Unsplash

Most Men Don’t Want to Be Heroes—And That’s Okay (Liberal Currents)

Today, virtually anyone can become a soldier, or police officer, or firefighter (and be well compensated in pay and social status). Liberalism's critics are forever claiming it's ‘taken away’ things there’s never been more universal access to. ‘Traditional marriage’ is not being taken from you. Anyone can still do that. You want to be a ‘trad’ with a stay at home wife and lots of kids? Millions of people do, plenty of women still want that role, and broad economic prosperity makes it easier, not harder. Want masculine hobbies? No one is stopping you. Just want to grill? Meat has never been more accessible for the common man!

The revealed preference however is that most men don’t want these vocations. The Army aggressively recruits; really any young man at any point can join. The vast majority don't. Men fantasise about being in combat scenarios but, by and large, don’t seek them out. This is one reason why conservatives (and fellow travelers like [Chris] Arnade) hate liberalism so much: free choice disproves their biological essentialism. Rather than abandon the narrative (all men gravitate towards certain roles), they abandon reality. Men aren’t choosing non- ‘heroic’ roles, liberalism is (somehow) stopping them.

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I had mostly forgotten Chris Arnade existed until I read this piece by Toby Buckle pushing back against Arnade’s entry into the very popular “men can’t be manly any more” canon. “When we hear about how ‘disrespected’ men feel, is it that feminists are stopping men being firefighters?” Buckle asks. “Or is it that men in office jobs are being told what to do by a woman?”

Chaser: Loved this New Yorker profile(ish) of Hasan Piker, the leftwing streamer who is bringing the same kind of anarchic energy that, say, the Nelk Boys or Logan Paul does on the right. Apart from anything else, the structure of the intro—where the writer literally walks into the scene with Hasan, mid-stream—is so beautifully done.

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Quick Links

1. Thanks to Matt Muir for the most fun I have had with my webcam for some time. In “Smile Like Zuck”, you use your webcam to try to match the precise dead-eyed smile of various Mark Zuckerbergs.

2. “Waugh is never purple in the gaudy manner of, say, Laurence Durrell. He writes in the purple not of amethyst and lilac, not the plush, insistent purple of fizzy wigs and velvet cushions, but the great grand purple of crown jewels and Bishop’s robes. His style is not an indulgent deviation from the canonical norm of the good hearty plain style. (Had it been the purple of modernism, the semi-colons of Orlando, for instance, fewer would disapprove.) No: Waugh’s is a High purple.” Henry Oliver goes out to bat for the Catholic bits of Brideshead Revisited (Liberties).

3. “The story of this election is that people who follow the news closely, get their information from traditional media and see politics as an important part of their identity became more Democratic in absolute terms. Meanwhile, those who don’t follow politics closely became much more Republican.” Ezra Klein talks to Democratic pollster and strategist David Shor about why Trump won (NYT, gift link)

4. Alice Sullivan’s independent review of statistics on sex and gender, commissioned by the government, is well worth reading (gov.uk)

5. “For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene.” Fellow journalists, have some tissues ready to mop up your salty tears as you read about what it used to be like writing for Vanity Fair before the internet (Yale Review).

But wait—there’s more. On June 26 I’ll be in Blackwells Oxford, talking about the book with Shakespeare scholar Judith Buchanan. So far there are plans to be in Cambridge, Bath, Brighton and Edinburgh too, so expect to hear more soon.

Tickets for my London event with Jesse Singal, Sarah Ditum and Hadley Freeman in May are also available.