The Bluestocking, vol 100: women women WOMEN
Happy Friday!
And happy publication to Caroline Criado Perez, whose Invisible Women is the best feminist book with "women" in the title not by me that I've read this year. Seriously, I just had a male friend tell me about how heart attack symptoms look different in women. It's already changing the world.
Tracy King is running a crowdfunder to send a copy to every single MP, as it will be incredibly useful for policy-makers to read it. Donate here.
Helen
uh actually it's statistics
The Most Tolerant Town in America
Most Sundays, when Reverend Garry looked out at the pews of the First Presbyterian Church in Watertown, he saw two women named Ann. They met at that same church, 45 years ago, and they have been friends ever since.
Both Anns are known in Watertown, though for different reasons. Ann Sudduth started the town’s chapter of Liferight, an anti-abortion education organization with the motto “All life is precious or none is.” For more than 20 years, she has written letters to local newspapers, handed out literature, and given talks about the perils of abortion. Each January, she helps organize a candlelight vigil in the town square to mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Ann Van Slyke, meanwhile, helped her husband start the local Planned Parenthood—just three blocks from Liferight. He worked as the medical director there for many years, determined to give women more control over their lives. Van Slyke, a trained nurse, supported his efforts from home while raising their three sons.
Loads of interesting strands in this piece about how offline communities rub along together better than online ones, and how social "sorting" by postcode is contributing to polarisation. One thing that stood out: age. As the electorates ages, will it inevitably become less open-minded? Over-65s are the biggest consumers of "fake news" on Facebook, for example. But - as David Runciman reminds us in How Democracy Ends - old people might like fascism, but they don't practice it. Political violence driven by popular uprisings is a feature of young societies. What do old, rich societies with populist movements look like? We're only just beginning to find out.
The Psychiatrist Who Believed People Could Tell The Future
Premonitions are impossible, and they come true all the time. The second law of thermodynamics says it can’t happen, but you think of your mother and then she calls. In 1773, Samuel Johnson visited the Hebrides and found that second sight was nothing unusual among the islanders. They saw their friends fall from horses when they were far away from home, and watched future bridal parties and funeral processions making their way across the fields. “It is an involuntary affection,” Johnson wrote. “Those who profess to feel it, do not boast of it as a privilege, nor are considered by others as advantageously distinguished.”
Seeing the future was more common in the past.
This story is great, and also reminds me of the apocryphal tale of how Kelvin MacKenzie sacked the Sun's astrologer. The letter began: "As you will already know..."
How I ditched my phone and unbroke my brain
Catherine encouraged me to set up mental speed bumps so that I would be forced to think for a second before engaging with my phone. I put a rubber band around the device, for example, and changed my lock screen to one that showed three questions to ask myself every time I unlocked my phone: “What for? Why now? What else?”
For the rest of the week, I became acutely aware of the bizarre phone habits I’d developed. I noticed that I reach for my phone every time I brush my teeth or step outside the front door of my apartment building, and that, for some pathological reason, I always check my email during the three-second window between when I insert my credit card into a chip reader at a store and when the card is accepted.
Mostly, I became aware of how profoundly uncomfortable I am with stillness.
A great article about giving up your phone, to read on your phone. I went out without my phone for TWO FULL HOURS last weekend and no one died. Well, not that I was responsible for killing, anyway. You know what I mean.
A Young Adult Sensitivity Reader Cancels His Own Book for Being Insensitive
The backlash seems to have begun on Feb. 22, with a long review posted to the community-review site Goodreads, a favorite site of YA agonistes. “I have to be absolutely fucking honest here, everybody,” the review opened, in the hyperbolic voice of its genre. “I’ve never been so disgusted in my life.” She objected to the book’s use of a recent genocide as a backdrop to romance, the way some early fans fetishized it as a “cute gay love story,” that it was not written by a Muslim, that it “centers” privileged Americans, and that the villain is an ethnic Albanian, among other concerns.
The online YA community is absolutely batshit McCarthyite. This latest "self-cancel" is the second by a non-white author in two months. It can't be doing much for diversity in YA publishing, and it does feel like the idea that you can't write about anything other than you own, exact, literal experience is gaining ground in the genre. These people would expect Moby-Dick to have been written by a whale.
The Making of the Fox News Presidency
To the astonishment of colleagues, the Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism. She’d share the day’s planned topics with Townsend, and then he’d e-mail her suggested content. A former colleague of Guilfoyle’s says, “It was a joke among the production assistants—they were, like, ‘Wait till you hear this!’ She actually got research from him! It was the subject of hilarity.”
[...] Given Fox’s status as a dominant source of information for Trump, some people argue that the network should be especially vigilant about outside influence. Aki Peritz, a former C.I.A. analyst who is an adjunct professor at American University, has written that Fox News has become an inviting target for foreign spy agencies, because “it’s what the President sees.” But a source who spoke to me about Guilfoyle and Townsend says, “It’s even worse than a conspiracy of the dark Web, or something trying to manipulate Fox. It was just a guy in his underwear in Georgia who had influence over Fox News! And Fox News influences the President!”
There's a really bleak sitcom in this somewhere.
Historical fiction recommendations:
Thank you to everyone who sent these in.
"If you have not read the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters you have a real treat in store (a suffragette on archaeological digs in Egypt solves crimes and falls in love late in life!)"
"Historical novel-wise I'm working my way through Nora Lofts . . . a recommendation from Lucy Mangan on the brilliant Backlisted podcast. Short on queens though."
"Lord knows it can be blokey at times, but have you tried the Neal Stephenson Baroque Cycle? Three meaty books about, sort of, the invention of modernity."
"Marie of Roumania's 'The Story of My Life' (autobiography) and 'The Ruin of a Princess' by the Duchesse d'Angoulême which gets bonus points for being 18th century."
"I absolutely loved the Phillipa Gregory series which starts in the 1300s and finishes with the Tudors. She covers all the Queens from Elizabeth Woodville and her amazing mother to Elizabeth 1st. She tends to make the most of any sexual information (and rumours) there are going and isn't always historically as careful as she could be but the books are really really readable."
For reference, the best Jean Plaidys:
Castile for Isabella (before she goes bad and founds the Inquisition)
The Haunted Sisters (Mary II and Anne)
The Road to Compiegne (later life of Louis XV, where Parisians start to hate him)
Madame Serpent (Catherine de Medici is bae)
Madonna of the Seven Hills/ Light on Lucrezia (the case for the defence of Lucrezia Borgia)
Arguments to the usual address, &c
Quick links:
"Here is the King of Pop himself reportedly promising Safechuck and Robson that their unique talents would be seen and appreciated and remunerated and loved, just as his own had been. One of the simmering horrors of the story Leaving Neverland tells is that through his alleged manipulations of them, Jackson was promising the families a version of justice." The Atlantic's Megan Garber on Leaving Neverland.
"We cast Alan Rickman and Alfred Molina as Rimmer and Lister. Rickman wanted to play Lister because he thought playing Rimmer would be too easy. We thought: “How can this fail?” But the BBC rejected it three times. So Rob and I changed our minds and decided to recast with unknown actors." I wish to peek into this Alternate Timeline so, so much.
How love is like cocaine. One important difference: love doesn't make you do this.
Never use your baby as a weight.
See you next time!