The Bluestocking 370: Biden enablers and cat-sitters

I call seltzer “sparkling water” and settle for bagels that taste like caulk

Happy Friday!

This week’s Strong Message Here has my favourite title so far: The Island of Strangers and the Manacled Gimp of Brussels.

Helen

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Illustration by Tomi Um

Lena Dunham: Why I Broke Up With New York (New Yorker, £)

One job bled into another. One year became the next. Wales—with woods so uncannily green I could compare them only to the computer game Myst—led to London, and London shocked me with its reassuring differences from New York. The city, which is large enough to contain all five New York boroughs twice, had a spaciousness I could not get over, streets so wide that the buildings seemed to be stepping aside for me to pass. Three decades of urban sense memory cleared, as if I had woken up to a system upgrade and damaged files had been erased in the process. Maybe it was the blank slate of it all, the fact that I’d yelped in pain on exactly zero London street corners. But it felt more mystical, like walking into a house I’d been to only in a dream. “Well, hello, London Lena,” a friend cooed when I agreed to go out for a third night in a row. My reputation back home was as a work-obsessed hermit with an inappropriate fear of the “human statue” performers in Times Square. Here, I moved with ease, whether walking on Hampstead Heath or sliding into a black cab, greeted by a gruff “Oy! Where you ’eaded?”

In New York—the fastest city in the world—days had felt like years. In London, years passed like days, which is how I ended up, five years on, realizing that London is my home now, so much so that I call seltzer “sparkling water” and settle for bagels that taste like caulk.

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I love smalltown America, but I’ve never liked New York: the press of the skyscrapers, and the narrow pavements—always obstructed with skips and steam—makes me feel panicky and breathless.

Turns out that Lena Dunham, who was born in Manhattan, has always felt the same way.

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

All The President’s Enablers (Politico)

The first time I realized that Joe Biden might not be playing with a full deck was in 2014 when he addressed an LGBTQ+ rights group. Explaining his 2012 epiphany in support of same-sex marriage, the then-vice president recalled an incident when his father drove him into Wilmington, Delaware for a job interview. “We stopped at a red light,” Biden said. “I looked over to my left, and there were two men kissing good-bye, and I looked, and it was the first time I’d seen that. And my father looked at me and said, ‘They love each other.’” In retelling this anecdote, Biden pinpointed the year as 1961.

One doesn’t need to be an historian of the gay American experience (like me) to suspect that this story was, as Biden himself might say, “malarkey.” In 1961, homosexuality was illegal in every state of the union (Delaware would not decriminalize it until 1973), diagnosed as a mental illness and categorized as a national security threat. The chance that a young Joe Biden randomly encountered two “well-dressed” men kissing in broad daylight in downtown Wilmington on their way to work in 1961 is close to zero.

This impression of Biden’s diminishing mental acuity was compounded by the fact that he had simultaneously recited a significantly different version of the story. In an interview with the New York Times published just three weeks before his speech, Biden said it was one of his sons who had seen the men kissing and that it was he who nonchalantly said, “They love each other.”

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James Kirchik on Original Sin, the new book which documents the cover-up of Biden’s mental slippage by his family and aides. As with all real life, as opposed to stories, the picture is messy and confounding: Biden really did have a stutter that made him fumble responses, and he had a habit of spinning embellished yarns for years before anyone saw it as a sign of his decline—remember, he nuked his first presidential run by plagiarising . . . Neil Kinnock. Neil Kinnock! Of all people.

But everyone pretty much now agrees that by 2023, even casual observers could notice that the president wasn’t the politician that he once was. What happened next is a classic example of a collective action problem. No one had the balls to say to the Democratic president, the only person to have beaten Trump in an election—time to step aside, son. Worse than that, huge numbers of people must have subconsciously concluded that he wasn’t fit to run again, but also that they were not prepared to nuke their careers by saying so, and so committed themselves to a course of willful blindness.

The result is . . . the 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump.

As a sidenote, one of the grimmest takeaways from Original Sin was how the Biden team smeared Robert Hur—the special counsel who interviewed the president in the stolen documents case, and advised against prosecution because Biden would present to the jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”, Hur was dismissed as a “Trump appointee.”

In fact, Hur was entirely accurately relaying the impression of Biden that anyone neutral would have gotten from interviewing him at that time. There are plenty of instances of Trump dismissing a criticism (or prosecution) of him as “politically motivated”, but here is an example of the Democrats doing it, too—to disastrous effect, since Hur’s report came in February 2024 and Biden didn’t drop out for another five months.

I honestly find it quite hard to believe that all this happened. I wrote about the Hur report when it came out, and then watched Biden’s press conference afterwards, where he stumbled through until the end, before declaring that Gaza had a border with Mexico. (He meant Egypt.) And the Democrats still refused to see what was plainly in front of their eyes! Biden should have retired as a one-term president who graciously allowed a new generation to carry on his legacy.

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Quick Links

2. “When I was a teenager, the United States and the richest large countries in Europe, such as Germany and the United Kingdom, were similarly affluent. In 1995, Germany’s nominal GDP per capita was a little higher ($32,000) than that of the United States ($29,000), with the United Kingdom lagging behind at a noticeable distance ($23,000) . . . Since then, the two continents have markedly diverged. To an extent that few people have fully internalized, an economic gulf has opened up between America and Europe. On average, Americans are now nearly twice as rich as Europeans. According to the latest available data for GDP per capita, the United States stands at $83,000, with Germany at $54,000 and the United Kingdom at $50,000.” Yascha Mounk on the '“great divergence”. Honestly, I notice this every time I go to the States, just by looking at the average car parked outside a midrange hotel in a small town (Persuasion, Substack).

3. ‘In one set of messages, [Pornhub] executives discuss whether to ban the use of the phrases “young girl,” “first anal crying” and “abused by daddy.” In the end, they decide that those terms are acceptable.’ No one wants to acknowledge the scale or popularity of the child abuse images on the internet because it’s too awful to comprehend (New York Times).

4. “He had a “Kingdom of Germany” passport that looked official enough, and had passed inspection, he said, at various borders. All of the airline documents I saw were from within the Schengen area, which means he could travel freely anyway. An airline agent had probably rolled his eyes and let him board his flight to Majorca. When I think of entities capable of conferring royal status, I do not think of Ryanair.” Graeme Wood on the extremist leader who claims to be the rightful Kaiser (The Atlantic, gift link).

5. “Again: It costs $29 per thousand to run an ad in my videos, and I get $10 per thousand. Where does the other $19 go? To YouTube, of course. That’s a 2:1 split in favor of the platform. Lord, give me strength.” The true cost of being on YouTube (Substack)

6. “Every Friday — Play classical music in the office for the cat’s relaxation.” Fevered speculation in my WhatsApp groups about whether this advert for a £45-an-hour cat sitter can possibly be real. One source suggests the “cat” will turn out to be a bloke in a collar.

See you next time! We are skating close to 30,000 subscribers so please do forward this to a friend who might enjoy a weekly digest of thoughts and links, because getting to a round number would please me enormously.

Apologies to British readers for that date being written in American. The British pre-order page is here.