The Bluestocking, vol 136: The Only Good Tweet
Happy Friday!
And welcome to the culture war phase of the coronavirus, as people line up to be FURIOUSLY CERTAIN about what should happen next to lockdown, mysteriously based on their voting record in the EU referendum. This week I was on the News Quiz (broadcast tonight) and to be honest, I was dreading talking about Neil Ferguson. Yes, he broke the lockdown rules, yes, you especially can't do that if you're involved in making the lockdown rules. But I also feel uneasy about the idea that by sitting on a scientific committee you are opening yourself to pages of coverage of your private life (now you can see why scientists didn't want to have their names made public). And I don't like the fact that there are quite a lot of people who are getting too into Lockdown Policing, feeling the electric thrill of moral condemnation.
I took a policy decision early on that I wouldn't write or tweet anything about What We Should Do Next, on the basis that I have no idea, the best scientists are themselves simply presenting their best estimate, and something unexpected - like Sweden doing incredibly well, or conversely a second peak shattering South Korea's awe-inspiring record - could make any confident pronouncements sound very dumb indeed.
On that note, The Spark returns next week and my first guest is Margaret Heffernan, whose latest book Uncharted is about the prediction industry and its fake certainties. Having lived through several general elections, I'm receptive to this message. I would love to cover the next GE never seeing a poll during the campaign, because it's hard to tune out that noise. (The most interesting poll results during elections are not the wild outliers that get the coverage, anyway, but the ones showing change: as in 2017, when Labour picked up momentum during the campaign. That's also how exit polls work.)
The Spark will be here after broadcast on Monday. You can also read my piece on how women leaders aren't better at dealing with coronavirus, it's just that strongmen are worse. It has very much upset some men who haven't read it, who keep tweeting "WHAT ABOUT BELGIUM?" at me. So if you had "the existence of Belgium" on your culture war bingo card, please mark it off now.
Helen
Belgium. Just looking at this photo, I can almost taste the wheat beer.
Behind a blue door in the heart of Canggu, 25-year-old Filipino-American Mike Vestil is teaching his dog Cinta [Indonesian for "love"] to roll in the garden of his luxury villa. “Cinta! Cinta!” extorts Vestil, who is dressed in flowing white trousers and a peach t-shirt with a complicated neckline. Cinta rolls towards Vestil, and he rewards her with chicken from the outdoor kitchen facing the swimming pool. After an uncomfortable interlude in which Vestil berates his Balinese cleaner for leaving the villa door open, we make our way into his plant-filled office. A wooden bench is covered with recording equipment. A lettered lightbox spells out the WiFi network (SIT ON MY FACE) and the password (YOLOYOLOYOLO). Vestil catches me looking. “Um, someone is literally coming around to change that later today.”
A self-described “entrepreneur, author and YouTuber”, Vestil has 230k YouTube followers and 56k Instagram followers. In brash videos with titles like “How To Make $1000 PER DAY From ANYWHERE In The World!!” Vestil encourages his followers, whom he calls “freedom fighters”, to live their best lives by becoming fabulously rich. He is often topless in these videos.
The world's only unlimited resource: unbearable young men in tech start-ups.
Decided to break up today's newsletter with places I wish I could be right now. Fuji.
Paris Review Interview: Janet Malcolm
INTERVIEWER
Tell me more about this attention-getting habit. It’s not a hundred percent clear to me what you mean.
MALCOLM
It’s not a hundred percent clear to me, either. In that piece about Vanessa Bell you mentioned earlier, I quote a young Virginia Woolf on the subject of her gay friends. What she called “the society of buggers” has “many advantages—if you are a woman,” she wrote in a memoir called Old Bloomsbury. “It is simple, it is honest, it makes one feel . . . in some respects at one’s ease.” But “it has this drawback—with buggers one cannot, as nurses say, show off. Something is always suppressed, held down. Yet this showing off, which is not copulating, necessarily, nor altogether being in love, is one of the great delights, one of the chief necessities of life.” Showing off to straight men remained a delight and necessity to women of my generation. Those of us who wrote, wrote for men and showed off to them. Our writing had a certain note. I’m not sure I can describe it, but I can hear it. You have led us into deep waters. This is a complex and murky subject. Perhaps we can cut through the haze together.
Probably just as well Virginia Woolf lived before Twitter, otherwise she would have been called out for this, like Leopold of Belgium was that time. (That linked piece is one of my favourite pieces of internet snark, ever. "Things being what they are, I would have thought that a thread that began like “LISTEN UP DICKHOLES: TIME FOR A RANT ABOUT HOW LAVRENTIY BERIA WAS A TOTAL JERK AND A REAL PERV” would end with an apology and a promise never to do it again, but why would you apologize when you are met with joy and delight?")
But I think the basic point is valid: there is nothing hotter than having someone you fancy praise your work.
Basically, Janet Malcolm has more elegantly expressed the sentiment of The Only Good Tweet*:
My one quibble would be that it's perfectly possible to create because of horniness AND revenge, aka unrequited love.
I like big peaks and I cannot lie. Annapurna.
I opened the door. It was bright in there; all the lights were on. Dad was in his underpants, sitting on the double bed, his arms outstretched. You were running, one way and then the next, as though you were being hunted and you didn’t know the way to safety. You were choking as you ran. A trickle of phlegmy blood dribbled down the side of your mouth, making a zigzagging trail of red spots on the carpet. Dad was trying to grab you, but you kept slipping from his fingers, as if you knew that if you stopped it would be over.
I was standing in the doorway. I didn’t want to move, but I felt Mum’s hand on my back, pressing me into the room.
“I’m going to get help,” she whispered.
This extract from Gavanndra Hodge's memoir is all the more moving for being written with so little self-pity. It reminded me of Anne Glenconner's memoir, which was extraordinary: a bisexual, philandering, narcissistic husband, two dead children (and one close shave), all faced with incredible stoicism, bleeding into aristocratic numbness. Hodge isn't an aristocrat, but she grew up around high society junkies, and I can imagine the child version of her stumbling around a party that Patrick Melrose was passed out at.
Bhaktapur, Nepal. God, next week I'm going to make everyone look at my holiday photos.
The Rest of the World Is Laughing At Trump (And Looking To China)
Quotations from the president’s astonishing April 23 press conference have appeared on every continent, via countless television channels, radio stations, magazines, and websites, in hundreds of thousands of variations and dozens of languages—often accompanied by warnings, in case someone was fooled, not to drink disinfectant or bleach. In years past, many of these outlets presumably published articles critical of this or that aspect of U.S. foreign policy, blaming one U.S. president or another. But the kind of coverage we see now is something new. This time, people are not attacking the president of the United States. They are laughing at him. Beppe Severgnini, one of Italy’s best-known columnists, told me that while Italians feel enormous empathy for Americans who have suffered as they have, they feel differently about Trump: “In this time of darkness and depression, he keeps us entertained.”
But if Trump is ridiculous, his administration is invisible. Carl Bildt—a Swedish prime minister in the 1990s, a United Nations envoy during the Bosnian wars, and a foreign minister for many years after that—told me that, looking back on his 30-year career, he cannot remember a single international crisis in which the United States had no global presence at all. “Normally, when something happens”—a war, an earthquake—“everybody waits to see what the Americans are doing, for better or for worse, and then they calibrate their own response based on that.”
My Atlantic colleague Anne Applebaum on how the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated American decline. As it has gone AWOL on the world stage, China has moved in.
Oh dear. (Source.)
Quick Links
The UK government is not going to use an off-the-shelf coronavirus tracker built by Google or Apple. Instead, it has done its own app, with a heavily centralised system. One problem: its data use might be illegal. Another problem: the app only seems to work when it's open and running in the foreground. If you're playing Candy Crush or scrolling Twitter, you're invisible to it.
Aware this sort of thing makes this feel even more like a parish newsletter or Christmas round-robin than usual, but for any of my university contemporaries, here's the obituary of the man known to us as "the Union vicar".
A historical(ish) drama recommendation from a Bluestocking reader: El Ministerio del Tiempo (The Ministry of Time) on Netflix. Spanish squad prevents people nipping through a time-travel door in Madrid, changing history. Sounds intriguing.
Someone flushed their loo during a remote session of the US Supreme Court.
This Taffy Brodesser-Akner profile of Val Kilmer is trippy, much like Val Kilmer. It also stays juuuuust about on the right side of disintegrating into chaos.
"This situation has come about due to rampant credentialism and I’m tired of it. As the widespread dismay by programmers demonstrates, if anyone in SAGE or the Government had shown the code to a working software engineer they happened to know, alarm bells would have been rung immediately. Instead, the Government is dominated by academics who apparently felt unable to question anything done by a fellow professor. Meanwhile, average citizens like myself are told we should never question “expertise”." Brutal criticism of the Imperial epidemiological model, which I confess I don't understand at a technical level, and am therefore looking to find statisticians and coders to interpret.
Guest gif: Why wasn't light like this available when I was 20?
* Having mentioned this to a group of friends, I was reminded there is one other Good Tweet.
