The Bluestocking, vol 168
You Boys Are About To See Something Really Special.
Happy Friday!
Just a quickie today, because I’ve been in the library all week, and reading The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle at night (I have been wading through so many nutritious non-fiction books recently that I had forgotten the page-turning joy of a genre novel).
With any luck, though, a bonus Bluestocking is heading your way this weekend—and maybe even one on Christmas Day, as both sets of our parents have now concluded they would like to up their chances of living until January, so it’ll just be me, Jonathan and a 6-person turkey crown with all the trimmings.
Still, a chance to re-enact one of my favourite scenes in Friends:
Until next time,
Helen
I Helped Create the Milo Trolling Playbook (Observer, 2017)
In 2009, I helped sketch out a marketing campaign for an internet personality and blogger named Tucker Max. With a very limited advertising budget available for the independent movie he had written and produced, we had few options for getting the word out.
Maybe it was crazy but my thinking was that one of the best ways to get young men to go see a movie was to tell them they should not be allowed to see it. What ensued was several months of chaos and controversy that ultimately drove Tucker’s book to No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list, sold out a multi-college bus tour and ultimately sold millions of dollars worth of tickets, dvds and books.
[..]
Look at Tucker—and he’s still a friend, so I don’t mean to conflate him with anyone mentioned here—but when the controversy and outrage about his books dissipated, largely so did the sales. When he published a book of positive advice for guys—which was loved by the mostly female publishing industry and got all sorts of friendly press—it didn’t translate into success. He wasn’t an outlaw anymore. There wasn’t anything to get excited about. And now he’s moved on to other projects.
The alternative headline here is “stop quote tweeting idiots, no matter how many likes it brings you”.
Products of Gestational Labour (The Lamp)
The call for the abolition of the family is not a fringe demand, but something that is widely discussed in media, in academia and other elite institutions, and in activist organizations. Anarchists are only its vanguard. The official Black Lives Matter organization, which has received vast sums in corporate funding, has listed the abolition of the family among its demands. Left-wing publications like the slickly produced anarchist Commune magazine have explicitly advocated for it.
My longlost cousin Sophie gets a rebuttal from Angela Nagle (whose book on the online culture wars, Kill All Normies, is highly recommened).
Look at this absolute bastard’s amazing Lego “Great Wave”, which effortlessly outclasses the cross stitch version I’ve been working on all year and still haven’t finished.
Quick Links
The former head of the CIA seems to be giving a pretty big hint that he believes in aliens visiting earth.
My $200,000 Sushi Dinner (New York Times).
Facebook is a Doomsday Machine (Atlantic).
My boss had a conversation with Mel Gibson about circumcision that I still cannot quite believe happened (Atlantic, 2011).
Christmas Day, 12.55pm
