The Bluestocking 368: Manosphere and Mitfords
two nearly extinct megafauna in a doomed fight to the death
Happy Friday!
This week, my big boss — Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg — was in London, talking about journalism. He is both sane and funny about the future. You can watch the session here.
Helen
The Hidden Struggle of John Fetterman (NY Mag, £)
In May 2024, [Adam] Jentleson decided it would be best to lay everything out there. “I wanted to do what I could think of to try and get him help,” he said. “That’s why I sent the letter.” He also said he worried that Fetterman could end up inadvertently hurting someone else. “He engages in risky behavior,” he wrote in the letter. “He drives recklessly: he FaceTimes, texts and reads entire news articles while driving — and I don’t mean while stopped at a light or something, he reads and FaceTimes while driving at high speeds.”
Less than a month later, Fetterman caught a red-eye flight back from Los Angeles after taping an episode of Bill Maher’s show. His staff urged him to have someone pick him up from the airport and drive him home, but he refused. Just before 8 a.m., according to a police report, Fetterman was traveling at “well over” the 70-mph speed limit on I-70 when he smashed his Chevy Traverse into the back of a 62-year-old woman’s Impala, totaling both cars. Gisele, who had been in the back seat, suffered a pulmonary contusion and spinal fractures. Fetterman, calling from the side of the road, told a staffer he had fallen asleep at the wheel and handed the phone to a police officer.
“It’s a miracle no one died,” the officer said.
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I saw John Fetterman—one of the two senators for Pennsylvania—speak at a Kamala rally in Erie last year, and I was impressed. I had read so much about the after-effects of his stroke that I had expected him to be visibly struggling with his speech. But as this piece reveals, he is clearly not over the stroke, nor his mental-health challenges, to the extent that he should absolutely not be contemplating a run for president in 2028. (I presume that his former chief aide went on the record here precisely to stop this possibility.)
The ethics of writing a piece like this are knotty. This is someone’s private, personal life, and their medical records. But the Democrats’ experience with Joe Biden means they cannot afford to connive in concealing a politician’s issues from the public. Added to that, Ben Terris is brave (I think) to confront his own participation in the creation of the plain-spoken-renegade-Fetterman story. Like many others, he wanted to burnish the mythology of this 6ft 7ins ogre in cargo shorts, who seemed so unlike all the other cookie-cutter Dem politicians.
Quick Links
“For the Conservatives, it’s existential. It’s just really, really bad. I compared Labour and the Conservatives the other day to two other big clubs fallen on hard times: Manchester United and Tottenham. Their meeting in the Europa League final has some of the pathos of current Prime Ministers Questions — two nearly extinct megafauna in a doomed fight to the death while teethy new predators smile on at the sidelines. And Kemi Badenoch has a touch of the Ange Postecoglus — clearly a dead leader walking, keeping to the same lines, because ‘it’s just who we are, mate’.” Ben Ansell on Labour taking the wrong lessons from the Reform surge at the local elections (Substack).
The New Yorker has photographed LUMINARIES at home for its something or other issue. Why are there only two types of living room in New York? Big with wood, or off-white and tiny (New Yorker).
“The manosphere is all about the blame game: identifying those who are responsible for your suffering, and punishing them. There’s no need to change, because everything is someone else’s fault. And as a corollary if you do change for someone, they owe you recognition. This quid-pro-quo attitude doesn’t really fly in Japan, where the need to take personal responsibility is so ingrained that “I’m sorry” (sumimasen) is often used as a synonym for “thank you.”” Why doesn’t Japan have a manosphere? Maybe because there is still so much overt discrimination against women there, suggests Matt Alt (Substack).
“Not necessarily the cleverest of them – that was Diana – but by some measure the most intelligent, Nancy took an overview of her upbringing, gathered it up between her pretty little hands and remoulded it as art.” Laura Thompson on the mythology of the Mitfords (Substack, £)
“Gatsby’s physical description in the text only provides further grist for the theory that the novel’s title character was not actually white, just attempting to appear so. “His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face,” Carraway says in describing Gatsby. “And his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day.”” Thanks to Caroline Crampton’s excellent newsletter for this link to Wesley Lowery arguing that perhaps the secret at the heart of The Great Gatsby is that Gatsby is a black man passing as white. Read this in conjunction with Adam Rutherford on the role of eugenics in the book.
See you next time! My launch event for The Genius Myth is close to sold out, so if you were wavering, buy tickets now. Use GENIUS25 for a chunky discount.
Also—next weekend I’m doing a Substack Live with the fab historian Lucy Worsley, which I’m telling you about as an excuse to post this, the most flattering photo of me ever taken:
That New Yorker article is very Graydon Carter era Vanity Fair.
Interesting result in the Australian federal election this week: flight to the centre, with liberal Leader Peter Dutton perceived as too far right and The Greens as too far left. Big wins for Labor, proving perhaps that down under, boring is still en vogue. Compulsory voting and proportional representation, anyone?
I'm not sure about the Matt Alt quote. A lot of the teenage boys that I work with, I think, are drawn to the manosphere because of the context and direction it gives their efforts to reinvent themselves.