The Bluestocking, vol 161

Enter the bears, stage right.

Happy Friday!

Yesterday, I was at the library reading about Copernicus when my phone started lighting up. For the last few months, I had been wondering if the EHRC report into Labour anti-Semitism would be so awful that Keir Starmer would have to suspend Jeremy Corbyn. What I didn’t anticipate was that Corbyn would almost volunteer himself for the axe, with a tone-deaf statement he didn’t need to make.

From the library, I wrote about the latest twist in a largely dispiriting story, and how it gives me hope for the health of British democracy.

Helen

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The Internet Speaks American (Atlantic)

The apparent absence of anyone in Britain who was truly outraged by Adele suggested to [Sunder] Katwala that there was something synthetic about the whole debate. He said he wondered whether it was an attempt by the British right to import American culture wars—which have benefited Republican politicians looking to drum up support among working-class voters. In the U.K., provocateurs such as Piers Morgan seek out the most eye-catching opinions of not only British activists to denounce, but American ones too. Morgan’s new book, Wake Up, is a jeremiad against “the woke world view.” It expresses fury at the British government’s handling of COVID-19 and the failed police investigation into the disappearance of a British toddler, but also about Google removing the egg from its salad emoji, Rose McGowan’s tweet apologizing to Iran for the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the use of the N-word in rap music, and the opinion writer Bari Weiss’s resignation from The New York Times.

Me again, currying favour with my American colleagues by pointing out that the U.S. is currently the world leader in exports of pointless partisan shouting.

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How the Experts Messed Up on Covid (Unherd)

In a difficult-to-watch clip from Jeremy Vine’s Channel 5 show in mid-March, the model and businesswoman Caprice Bourret was upbraided by the show’s medical expert, Dr. Sarah Jarvis, after suggesting that a country-wide lockdown might be helpful. Jarvis perfectly encapsulated the expert attitude with which we’re familiar, telling Caprice that “unless you have read every scientific paper… you cannot argue with me on that. You can have an opinion, but it’s not a fact.” Undeterred, Caprice went on to note that in some East Asian countries that had enjoyed (and still enjoy) a better COVID trajectory than the UK, a large proportion of citizens wore surgical masks. “…which make no difference at all”, Jarvis snapped in rebuttal, laughing at Caprice’s attempts to respond.

Hard to disagree with this analysis.

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Ursula Le Guin: Introducing Myself (PDF)

I am a man. Now you may think I’ve made some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that I’m trying to fool you, because my first name ends in a, and I own three bras, and I’ve been pregnant five times, and other things like that that you might have noticed, little details. But details don’t matter… I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn’t get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn’t make it to the bottom line. Models like the Austen and the Brontë were too complicated, and people just laughed at the Suffragette, and the Woolf was way too far ahead of its time.

This is very funny, particularly the bits about Hemingway: “Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. . . Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence.”

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The Town That Went Feral (New Republic)

If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right.

Thanks to Bluestockinger Charles Arthur for alerting me to this review of a book about a New Hampshire town which tried to run on libertarian principles. It worked about as well as Rapture did. (Side note: a Bioshock mod where you fight angry Adam-jacked bears would be amazing.)

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Quick Links

1. “Every smell scientist I spoke to for this story echoed some version of this sentiment: that smell is under­appreciated and misunderstood, and most people fail to recognize how integral it is to our experience of pleasure, our emotional lives, and even, on a fundamental level, our identity . . . While patients who lost their vision were initially more traumatized, over time they acclimated more significantly than the patients who had lost their sense of smell—who, a year later, actually reported a more enduring decrease in their quality of life than the patients who had gone blind.” (Leslie Jamison in Vogue)

2. “The authorial persona on display in Mantel Pieces is confident to the point of arrogance. In a world where journalists write with a flinch in every sentence, that is deeply enjoyable.” I wrote about Hilary Mantel’s collected essays, which are brutal. (Me in New Statesman)

3. “[Selina Todd] and I share similar views on the subject of sex and gender; if anything, I have been more outspoken. Although I have not altogether escaped criticism, I have not faced anything like the continual campaign of harassment which she has endured, which, she tells me, has included an official complaint to St Hilda’s–dismissed as without foundation–as well as relentless defamation on social media, for over a year.” Michael Biggs presents the first serious challenge to James Kirkup’s lock on winning the Lewis Award For Escaping Denunciation Due to Having A Y Chromosome. Possibly it will go to play-offs.

4. “This, I was coming to realize, was the nature of the Presidency: sometimes your most important work involved the stuff nobody noticed.” This extract from Barack Obama’s memoir covers healthcare reform and the H1N1 pandemic, and handily explains why US healthcare coverage developed in the baffling way it has.

5. Bananarama join The Cure onstage.

6. “There have been so many of these stories, in fact, you’ll likely recognize the formula: Trump does or says something at odds with conservative principles or common sense or basic decency; Republicans in positions of power are asked to respond, and they do their best to offer the usual nonresponse responses; but Republicans whose identities remain secret tell reporters that, in private, everyone is mad at the president, they think he’s an idiot, he’s screwing up, whatever. Liberals and moderate media critics get together to roll their eyes at this grand display of cowardice, enabled by reporters like me who live for drama and are thus part of the problem, while the president’s supporters cry fabulism or conspiracy or both.” (NY Mag talks to one of those “anonymous Republican sources” you hear so much about these days).

7. CJR’s recap of four years of Trump and the media is quite something. The undoubted highlight is Anthony Scaramucci’s verdict on Steve Bannon. The lowlight is all the rest of it.

8. Let’s be honest, it is not a surprise to hear that the cast of Mamma Mia were drunk.

Talking of which, you should be watching Strictly this year:

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I mean, seriously, imagine how great it would be if you could fire angry bees at a bear.