The Bluestocking, vol 137
Pizza arbitrage, deep sea fish and why you need a wife.
Happy Friday.
This week, I wrote about why opposition is more necessary than ever in a crisis, talked to Rachel Louise Snyder about her powerful book on domestic violence, and recorded another episode of the News Quiz, which is broadcast on Radio 4 tonight.
I can’t say that I’ve written King Lear, but I have managed to use my enforced lack of social life to read a few more books. The latest one is Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project.
It’s the story of the Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and their groundbreaking collaboration which led to “prospect theory”, one of the most cited papers in the field. The way Lewis tells it, which I think might only be a slight overstatement for narrative purposes, Tversky and Kahneman were the ones who bust open economics, killed off “Rational Man” and made the discipline acknowledge the fact that humans are wildly irrational, albeit sometimes in predictable ways.
What’s moving about it is that the pair were, together, a genius. They unlocked each other, somehow. (They tossed a coin for who went first on joint authored papers.) And yet the world couldn’t see that. When they both moved to the US, Tversky was the star. He got much better job offers. (This was odd to me, because of course, Kahneman is the one I’ve heard of, thanks to Thinking Fast And Slow and the fact Tversky didn’t live long enough to get the Nobel.) A world which couldn’t deal with the idea of equal contributors, which was hung up on “whose idea was this bit”, which gave only Tversky a MacArthur genius grant . . . that’s the world that tore them apart.
There’s something inherently sad about double acts; they don’t last, and how they pull apart leaves you wishing for one more song, one more paper, one more discovery. Inevitably, having just read One, Two, Three, Four, I thought about Lennon and McCartney and the tussle over money and credit and control. Maybe one of the reasons the “lone genius” myth persists is that we just don’t have the language, or social architecture, to reward collaboration in a sustainable way.
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Two more things: I wrote the above at the beginning of the week, before the Atlantic announced it was laying off 68 staff, including 22 in editorial. Thankfully, the London office is not closing (as happened to BuzzFeed) but it is horrible to lose so many talented colleagues, particularly into such a tough job market. If you’re worried about your job at the moment, I’m so sorry: it’s shit. I had some media stuff in this newsletter, about the Ben Smith/Ronan Farrow spat, but it doesn’t feel appropriate, so I’m shelving it for another time.
The other thing that happened this week was happier: the mum of a Bluestocking reader had a copy of Maureen Colquhoun’s memoir, and has posted it to me. I’m looking at it now. How nice is that?
Life isn’t all bad.
Helen
In March 2019 a good friend who owns a few pizza restaurants messaged me (this friend has made appearances in prior Margins' pieces). For over a decade, he resisted adding delivery as an option for his restaurants. He felt it would detract from focusing on the dine-in experience and result in trying to compete with Domino's.
But he had suddenly started getting customers calling in with complaints about their deliveries.
Customers called in saying their pizza was delivered cold. Or the wrong pizza was delivered and they wanted a new pizza.
Again, none of his restaurants delivered.
Arbitrage is one of my favourite concepts in economics. I remember writing a piece about “hat arbitrage” in the videogame Team Fortress 2, way back in 2013. (Fun fact: the economist I quoted in that piece, who was asked by Valve to study their in-game economics: this guy named Yanis Varoufakis. I revisited his game work later in a piece for the Nation when he became Syriza’s finance minister for, like, ten minutes.) Anyway, this pizza-post is both funny and reminds me that mega-unicorns be trippin’.
Since I Met Edward Snowden, I’ve Never Stopped Watching My Back (Atlantic)
Six months earlier, in June 2013, when the Snowden story was less than two weeks old, I went on Face the Nation to talk about it. Afterward, I wiped off the television makeup, unclipped my lapel microphone, and emerged into a pleasant pre-summer Sunday outside the CBS News studio in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. In the back of a cab I pulled out my iPad. The display powered on, then dissolved into static and guttered out. Huh? A few seconds passed and the screen lit up again. White text began to scroll across an all-black background. The text moved too fast for me to take it all in, but I caught a few fragments.
# root:xnu …
# dumping kernel …
# patching file system …
Wait, what? It looked like a Unix terminal window. The word root and the hashtag symbol meant that somehow the device had been placed in super-user mode. Someone had taken control of my iPad, blasting through Apple’s security restrictions and acquiring the power to rewrite anything that the operating system could touch. I dropped the tablet on the seat next to me as if it were contagious.
If you ever needed convincing that you’re simply too lazy to be a spy, this piece will do it. Opsec is tiring.
Look: he wanted a wife. Don’t we all? Someone to think ahead about our needs; someone to make our homes and our lives orderly; someone to tend to our emotions when they’re raw and sore. Someone to track and manage the infinite details of living; someone to be responsible for our moods; someone to balance the books. We all want someone who knows us so intimately they can predict what we’ll want; someone who picks up our loose ends without complaint; someone who fills in our weaknesses with her strength; someone who does what it takes to help us succeed. Someone who attends to our desires eagerly, with a smile. Someone who means it.
Even though Difficult Women has been out for less than three months, I’ve already seen a shift in responses to it. In the early days, the story which most captured readers’ attention was Erin Pizzey, the refuge pioneer turned MRA. Today, most of the messages I get about it reference the “Time” chapter, which is explicitly concerned with the subjects of the Baffler piece above: wages for housework, gendered labour, the second shift. I think that the pandemic lockdown has made clear to many women (and some men) the fragile bargain they’ve made to juggle paid and unpaid work.
The crude truth remains that if you want to have a high-flying career, in politics, science, tech or anything else, really, then you need a wife. It’s like having a secretary, but so so so much better. She’s available all the time! She knows your likes and dislikes intimately! She can anticipate your needs!
Think about it: the best AI is super-personalised, which requires a privacy trade-off. Hand over your location data, contacts and email archive to Google and you’ve saved yourself a load of time as it becomes better able to serve you. This is also true of a wife.
Imagining a wife as the ultimate privacy-invading yet efficient AI assistant also answers a question which has long perplexed me: why do selfish rich dudes get married, given the risk to their fortunes? Because that level of personalised service is worth the cost.
Just the best deep-sea fish. Look at its EYES. AAAAAAARGH.
Thirty-Six Thousand Feet Under The Sea (New Yorker)
But every age of exploration runs its course. “When Shackleton sailed for the Antarctic in 1914, he could still be a hero. When he returned in 1917 he could not,” Fergus Fleming writes, in his introduction to “South,” Ernest Shackleton’s diary. “The concept of heroism evaporated in the trenches of the First World War.” While Shackleton was missing in Antarctica, a member of his expedition cabled for help. Winston Churchill responded, “When all the sick and wounded have been tended, when all their impoverished & broken hearted homes have been restored, when every hospital is gorged with money, & every charitable subscription is closed, then & not till then wd. I concern myself with these penguins.”
There are too many quotable bits of this piece on deep-sea exploration. (That intro!) And I am judging every single interviewee of mine who has inexplicably failed to say to me: “You can only piss with the dick you’ve been given.” You are not wrong, my dude.
Quick Links
What a shaved strawberry looks like. I no longer like strawberries.
“For the first time in my life, I’d set a goal beyond getting to the bar by happy hour, and somehow I’d accomplished it. And I could not have done so without the best motivator of all: spite.” Katie Herzog’s alternative commencement address.
I think the original screenwriter’s premise of Yesterday - a guy ends up the only one who can remember the Beatles, and yet when he plays Beatles songs, no one cares - sounds more interesting than the version that got made, where he becomes a massive star. It’s two competing versions of life, isn’t? “Talent will out” versus “sometimes things don’t work out and it’s not a reflection on you”.
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