The Bluestocking, vol 107: Ghost flights and fake French ministers
Happy Friday!
I'm unemployed! My last day at the New Statesman was Wednesday this week, where my colleagues gave me an incredible (if, sadly, borderline libellous and therefore unshareable) leaving page. This is one of the best traditions in journalism; a front cover of your publication entirely dedicated to taking the piss out of you. Mine features me as a Ghostbuster, taking on the massed ranks of irritating men in public life. My final piece was about the ways in which political journalism gets it wrong.
Inevitably, I'm feeling both maudlin (about leaving) and excited (about becoming a full-time writer). In the meantime, though, I'm contemplating the very real possibility of NOT READING THE NEWS FOR TWO WEEKS. This will be the first time since I joined the Mail in 2005 that I can really get away with this.
I'm going to be so goddamn zen.
Helen
The disappearance of MH370
All sorts of theorists have made claims, amplified by social media, that ignore the satellite data, and in some cases also the radar tracks, the aircraft systems, the air-traffic-control record, the physics of flight, and the basic contours of planetary geography. For example, a British woman who blogs under the name of Saucy Sailoress and does Tarot readings for hire was vagabonding around southern Asia with her husband and dogs in an oceangoing sailboat. She says that on the night MH370 disappeared they were in the Andaman Sea, and she spotted what looked like a cruise missile coming at her. The missile morphed into a low-flying airplane with a well-lit cockpit, bathed in a strange orange glow and trailing smoke. As it flew by she concluded that it was on a suicide mission against a Chinese naval fleet farther out to sea. She did not yet know about the disappearance of MH370, but when, a few days later, she learned of it she drew what was to her the obvious connection. Implausible, perhaps, but she gained an audience.
This epic piece from William Langewiesche provides a compelling, and deeply sad, explanation for what really happened to MH370. (If you want a happier Langewiesche piece about aviation, try his 2009 read on the Miracle on the Hudson.)
The case for social infertility
“If we accept the notion that reproduction is a human right, then I think it would be inconsistent if we were to exclude gay men,” Eli Adashi, a former dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown University, and the author of numerous papers on access to A.R.T.s, told me. “Gay men are people, too.” A positive right to the treatment of social infertility, in theory, could require governments or insurance companies to facilitate surrogacy for gay men who wish to have children. And yet some evidence suggests that surrogacy and egg donation are offered mainly by women in need. In countries where commercial surrogacy is banned, altruistic surrogates are few and far between. Spain, where payment rates for eggs have crept slightly above the European Union average and donation is anonymous, has become a hub for egg donation, attracting a significant number of women from poor countries in Eastern Europe.
I am very, very uneasy about the idea that WHO guidelines or international standards might recognise the right of gay male couples to have a baby, if that legally entails a commercial market in surrogacy. Currently, Britain only allows "altruistic surrogacy", and that seems to me to be the right balance between letting people help each other, and ensuring that poor women aren't exploited as incubators for rich people, whether they are gay or straight. Take a moment to imagine a US-government-run commercial surrogacy service. No thanks.
Can Elizabeth Warren win it all?
Warren has trailed Biden and Sanders in fund-raising. She faces comparisons to Hillary Clinton, and questions of “electability”—concerns that running another brainy, older white woman against Trump would be a mistake. In reality, the resemblance between Warren and Clinton is largely superficial. Warren doesn’t hesitate to show anger and frustration, relishing her reputation as someone who “knows how to fight.” The adjectives that are often affixed to women with strong opinions—“angry,” “strident”—are labels that Warren would embrace. “Gentle and soft-spoken she isn’t, on anything,” Charles Fried, one of Warren’s former colleagues at Harvard Law School and a Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration, told me. “She either doesn’t speak or it is high voltage.”
...
When Warren talks about her early years as a working mother, she sounds like a comedian doing a bit. She jokes about bribing Amelia with M&M’s to get her potty trained in time to start day care, and about jiggling Alex on her hip while frying pork chops and fielding a job offer over the phone. She felt guilty about the patchwork of babysitters, neighbors, and subpar childcare centers that helped take care of her kids. “The new job was hard, and at home my world was stretched to the breaking point,” she writes in her memoir. “I felt as though I had this giant pile of duties balanced on my head as I rode a wobbly bicycle on a high wire stretched across a canyon.” Warren would have given up on her career if her aunt Bee hadn’t flown in from Oklahoma City to help out. (One of Warren’s most impassioned issues is universal childcare, which she connects directly to the economic well-being of women, especially women of color.) Warren split from her husband not long afterward.
I'm a total Elizabeth Warren hipster; I used to watch her appearances on the Daily Show, where she would explain the financial crisis to Jon Stewart in language that I could understand. God, she's impressive. If you think the dumb Cherokee business is worse than Joe Biden's conduct over the Anita Hill hearings, I judge you.
Quick links:
Could the Coward's Like save Twitter? Interesting idea about a system to show that you are *not* as outraged as everyone else on social media, from Jesse Singal's newsletter.
The fake French minister in a silicone mask who stole millions. Just a crazy ride of a story. This picture:
"Speagle had volunteered at animal shelters in the past, and watching the iguana die on a regular basis rattled him. “They kept reposting it again and again and again,” he said, pounding the table as he spoke. “It made me so angry. I had to listen to its screams all day.” This story about Facebook's contracted moderators, who work in grim outsourcing plants, will make you wonder why anyone would want to "connect the world" when there are so many arseholes in it.
"It was boring. I didn’t like it". Enjoyable Exeunt review of David Mamet's MeToo play, Bitter Wheat.
Guest gif:
So zen! So unbelievably zen!
I reckon I'll last until Sunday afternoon, tops.