The Bluestocking 371: A walking ovation

Things got easier when I remembered the Lib Dems

Happy Friday!

The Royal Television Society has put the full video of me interviewing James Graham about Ink, Sherlock and Brexit: The Uncivil War online. You can watch it here.

Apologies in advance but this is my new favourite outfit for public appearances and so I plan to wear it everywhere this summer.

Until next week,

Helen

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My Father Prosecuted History’s Crimes. Then He Died in One (NYT, gift link)

By the time my father started at the O.S.I., four decades had passed since the Holocaust, and not everyone saw the point of dragging old men through the American legal system, even if they were former SS guards. Walter Rockler, the O.S.I.’s first director, initially turned his nose up at the job because he thought all the “big-timers” had been tried at Nuremberg, where he was a prosecutor. What would be the point of trying mere trigger-pullers, when the masterminds had already bit down on poison pills, swung from the noose or been locked away? Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative firebrand, lambasted the O.S.I. as a band of vengeance-obsessed sectarians (many of the office’s employees were Jewish) wasting federal dollars on the prosecutions of men in their dotage. “Hairy-chested Nazi hunters,” Buchanan called the O.S.I.’s lawyers, with a characteristic whiff of antisemitism.

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Joseph Bernstein’s father was a Nazi-hunter. Then he died in the Lockerbie bombing. This question underlying this piece links the two: how much can we achieve by bringing low-level collaborators to justice for large-scale atrocities?

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The Stand-Up Round table (Hollywood Reporter)

[Roy] WOOD And when do you listen to yourself and not to the people advising you?

[Jamie] FOXX When you get old. The execution is still good, but my hunches aren’t.

How do you know?

FOXX I did this movie in Canada, and it was a mostly white production, and I think I was by myself and they were like, “Oh Jamie! We can’t breathe [we’re laughing so hard].” And I’m thinking I’m killing this shit, right? Then when we watched the movie and Chris Spencer was like, “N—a, what the fuck is this?” I was like, “It ain’t good?” He says, “N—a, no.” I got a walking ovation. People got up and conveniently went to the bathroom.

WOOD Black folks tell you the truth.

FOXX It’s a different world. Remember the movie Set It Off?

[Hasan] MINHAJ The bank heist movie with Jada Pinkett Smith?

FOXX Yeah, I watched it at the premiere, a mostly white crowd. “Oh, wow, this is amazing.” And I was with them. Then I went and saw that shit at Universal with some Black people? None of that.

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Standup comedians are some of the best people to hang out with—because they are so quick and so competitive—although they are also exhausting, because they are so quick and so competitive. That’s why I enjoyed this roundtable, but also because of this excellent exchange on the need for honest feedback.

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Quick Links

1. A quiz to name all the Cabinet ministers 2010-2024. Took me at least 3 minutes to remember the existence of the coalition, which is probably just how the Lib Dems like it.

2. Completed that? Now guess the city from the aerial photograph: Unzoomed.

3. “In 2020, according to ProPublica, at least eighteen billionaires filed tax returns so deftly assembled that they were eligible for pandemic stimulus checks. When Bezos was worth eighteen billion dollars, back in 2011, he qualified for a child tax credit.” Evan Osnos on Trump’s golden age of corruption (New Yorker, £)

4. “Then I have an in-between memory. I woke at five and stumbled to the bathroom to drink from the tap. The house was silent. Maybe the unknowable internal dominoes had already started to fall, or maybe they could still have been stopped.” Archie Bland on how his baby son’s brush with death, and subsequent disability, changed his life (The Guardian)

5. I just send stuff like this to my sister with the caption: STRAYA!

6. “You can stay for any number of hours or nights, using a different, freshly cleaned doll each day; a kitchen with snacks is provided for those staying for multiple nights.” Congratulations to this “cyberbrothel” in Germany for sounding so unbearably bleak (Independent).

7. Jordan Peterson vs 20 teenage atheists is comedy gold (YouTube). As soon as the first guy hits him with the phrase “exegetical and hermeneutic”, you know that he’s in trouble. YOUR WEAPONS WILL NOT WORK HERE, SIR.

See you next time! If you’re interested in seeing me talk about The Genius Myth, I am doing a big launch event in London with Armando Iannucci, then on to Bath, Oxford and Cambridge—really hitting the Gail’s Belt—during the first week.

Over the summer, I’ll be talking to Nathan Waddell about Orwell’s idea of “benefit of clergy”—letting artists get away with terrible behaviour—for the Orwell Festival.

Henry Oliver

and I will talk about defining genius at Dr Johnson’s House; and

James O'Malley

and I will have a relaxed pub chat about genius (or more likely, our shared obsession, YIMBYism) at the Sekforde. I’ll also be at the Buxton Festival in Derbyshire. After that, I’m having a lie-down in a darkened room for several months.