Happy Friday!
This week I started The White Lotus (favourite character so far: the Australian Basil Fawlty) which is good pre-season training in “rich people being miserable” TV before Succession starts later in the year. I also received my pass for Labour party conference: the lanyard that says Nature is Healing!
Happy 200th edition of the Bluestocking, by the way. Scroll down for Bluestocking readers’ suggestions of the best content on the internet.
Helen
The Problem With Being Cool About Sex (The Atlantic)
Relitigating the sex wars of the 1970s and ’80s is hardly where young feminists expected, or want, to be. In The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan confesses her reluctance to cover second-wave criticisms of porn in the feminist-theory course she teaches at Oxford. She is Cool About Sex, after all, and assumed that her students would be bored by the question of whether porn oppresses women. She also assumed that the reputation of “anti-porn feminists,” such as Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, had been fatally damaged by their alliance with the religious right to pass laws restricting access to pornography. What self-respecting member of Generation Z would want to line up alongside Jerry Falwell Sr. and Phyllis Schlafly, particularly when the other side is selling a fantasy of libertine pleasure?
I reviewed three books about sex, women and consent for the October issue of the Atlantic, and snuck a filthy Adam Smith joke into the magazine.
Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matter? (New Yorker)
GWAS [Whole genome study] results can accidentally reveal as much about culture or geography as they do about genes. A study of chopstick use in San Francisco would find that proficiency is genetically correlated with East Asian ancestry, which is a far cry from the discovery of an inborn dexterity with a particular utensil. One way to sidestep this pitfall is by comparing GWAS results within families, where they have been shown to reliably account for differences in life outcomes among siblings. But even this measure does not solve Christopher Jencks’s redhead problem. “A person might go far in education because they are smart and curious and hard-working, or because they are conforming and risk-averse and obsessive, or because they have features (pretty, tall, skinny, light-colored) that privilege them in an intractably biased society,” Harden writes. “A study of what is correlated with succeeding in an education system doesn’t tell you whether that system is good, or fair, or just.”
The shadow of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (and 120 years of eugenics fandom) hangs heavily over research into genes and intelligence. I enjoyed this profile of a scholar trying to write moderately about the two, and who has therefore faced “levels of sustained podcasting that were, by anyone’s standards, extreme.”
Quick Links
Five hundred years of hairstyles. Shoutout to the madness of the 1640s.
“After that, fear of celebrity fandoms began to colour what I wrote. I would decline to write certain pieces for fear of prodding the beast, while my album reviews became increasingly glowing. Meanwhile, celebrity interviews started to become evermore rigid.” Eleanor Halls on celebrity profiles in the time of clapback (Substack).
“When a review goes viral now, most of the people reading it (provided that they do actually read beyond the headline) will have no idea who the writer is, so he or she is reduced to the status of an HM Bateman caricature: The Man Who Hates Shrek, The Woman Who Hates Ted Lasso.” Dorian Lynskey on the dying art of the hatchet job (Unherd).
The Best of The Internet
I was going to kick this off by saying — wow, you are some weird people with weird taste. Then I remembered that the only thing you have in common is me, so questioning your taste is something of a self-own.
Highly Commended
Rachel M: William Buckley interviewing Jorge Luis Borges and Borges slagging off García Marquez and his Nobel (“it’s really just the one book, isn’t it?”)
Prashant: The story of how a friendship ended with this meme.
Sam: Kings Of Power 4 Billion % . . . “12 minutes and 30ish seconds of 8-bit, side-scrolling glory with an incredible soundtrack.”
Susi: xkcd 1190. “It’s a project that could never be repeated, but was utterly compelling at the time — a slow animation at one frame per hour, released over about 3 months in 2013. I joined the message board community just to keep track of the theories — every time a new frame launched we'd rush to analyse. Why is the water salty? What type of snake could that be? Every morning I'd catch up with the frames I’d missed in the night, and check back hourly through the day. And the payoff was magnificent — a great story as well as an unrepeatable experience.”
David: Turning The Place Over, Richard Wilson. (Not the Richard Wilson I expected.)
Chris: Too Many Cooks, which is what would happen if David Lynch made a heartwarming American sitcom title sequence.
Tim offers this incredibly therapeutic clip (above) of a man smack-talking a female martial arts instructor, who promptly “puts him to sleep.” The way he springs up afterwards like “I WASN’T UNCONSCIOUS” is what raises it to the level of art.
Third place: the trailer for the 2003 film Tiptoes, in which Matthew McConaughey and Gary Oldman play twins, except . . . well, you’ll see. The fact that this is not mean-spirited, but actually heartbreakingly earnest, clinches it.
Second Place, Chloe: Rappers, ranked by the number of unique words used in their lyrics.
The winner: The Infinitely Zooming Quilt. Congratulations, Kelly. Drop me a line to redeem your free copy of Difficult Women!
The "Tiptoes" trailer is divinely bananas. I recommend seeing the whole movie. If you like terrible, terrible movies, you will love it.