The Bluestocking, vol 212
an oyster loaf that tasted like Newark airport
Happy Friday!
I’ve been confined to barracks with covid this week. The worst symptom has been losing my sense of smell and taste, because it’s just so eerie. Your mouth isn’t numb—you can sense temperature, and texture—but overlaid on that is a kind of suffocating blankness. I assumed that having no sense of smell would be passive, but it’s not. There’s a pulsing awareness that something is missing.
Fingers crossed it abates in time for Christmas. In the meantime, I did record this episode of Free Thinking from my sickbed/living room: Me, Alex Massie and James Graham discuss TV debates.
Last week’s Spark with Julia Galef, on “scout mindset” is now online, and today’s episode, at 11am on Radio 4, is Mark Williams on decarbonising shipping and the future of trade. It’s a nerdy delight: what is the most transported raw material in the world? Answer at the bottom of the newsletter.
Helen
Loving Lies (Airmail)
Hilden was adamant that not only would she not discuss the disease, she wanted to pretend everything was normal and didn’t want friends to know. That put Glass in a predicament. For more than 15 years, he had worked hard to lead a truthful life. And now he was being forced to lie.
But this approach of “therapeutic fibbing” can be a helpful technique for Alzheimer’s patients because it allows them to avoid painful truths. Patients often don’t want or need to discuss the realities of their diagnosis, so it’s often better for caregivers to avoid the topic or redirect the conversation.
The practice can take a toll on caregivers, who have to keep lying to a loved one. For Glass it was excruciating. “Here I am lying again on some level, which I promised I wouldn’t do—and I’m lying in some ways to the person I love most,” he says. “But it was also an agreement that we had, which was that I would honor her desire to enjoy her life.” And so he lied—pretending with her that she didn’t have the degenerative disease and lying to friends about her condition as well.
Stephen Glass is one of journalism’s most notorious fantasists. When he was caught, he vowed never to lie again… and then his partner developed early onset Alzheimers.
Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke (New Yorker)
When I asked Brian Cox, who plays Logan, the patriarch, to describe Strong’s process, he struck a note of fatherly concern. “The result that Jeremy gets is always pretty tremendous,” he said. “I just worry about what he does to himself. I worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare.” Cox, a classically trained British stage actor, has a “turn it on, turn it off” approach to acting, and his relationship with Strong recalls a famous story about Laurence Olivier working with Dustin Hoffman on the 1976 film “Marathon Man.” On learning that Hoffman had stayed up partying for three nights before a scene in which he had to appear sleep-deprived, Olivier said, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?” Cox told me, “Actors are funny creatures. I’ve worked with intense actors before. It’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job.”
So many arresting lines in this profile of Succession’s Jeremy Strong (Kendall Roy), but my favourite is: “Strong remembered the nut story differently, but, out of fealty to Day-Lewis, who is fiercely private, he would not elaborate.”
The piece has provoked strong debate among friends, with some finding it delicious and others finding it needlessly mean, exploitative of the journalist’s previous acquaintance with Strong, maybe even a touch classist—who is this guy who wants it all a bit too much?
My main interest is professional: here is how you write a profile when the subject’s own quotes cannot hold the piece.
January 6 Was A Rehearsal (The Atlantic)
Watching how the Great Replacement message was resonating with Trump supporters, Pape and his colleagues suspected that the bloodshed on January 6 might augur something more than an aberrant moment in American politics. The prevailing framework for analyzing extremist violence in the U.S., they thought, might not be adequate to explain what was happening.
When the Biden administration published a new homeland-security strategy in June, it described the assault on the Capitol as a product of “domestic violent extremists,” and invoked an intelligence assessment that said attacks by such extremists come primarily from lone wolves or small cells. Pape and his colleagues doubted that this captured what had happened on January 6. They set about seeking systematic answers to two basic questions: Who were the insurgents, in demographic terms? And what political beliefs animated them and their sympathizers?
[…]
“The thing that got our attention first was the age,” Pape said. He had been studying violent political extremists in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East for decades. Consistently, around the world, they tended to be in their 20s and early 30s. Among the January 6 insurgents, the median age was 41.8. That was wildly atypical.
This is the latest Atlantic cover story—by Barton Gellman, who wrote a prescient piece last year about the likelihood that Trump would reject an election loss (a hypothesis then considered quite wacky, but now obviously vindicated).
There’s lots of terrifying stuff in there, but I picked out the section above because a) “The Great Replacement” is an incredibly influential theory on the modern far-right and I’m not sure it’s well-known enough (it’s also the rhetoric being employed by Eric Zemmour in his French presidential bid) and b) it undermines the political historian’s David Runciman sweet theory about Western democracies being stable because their citizens are old and rich. He notes that the demographic profile of Weimar Germany (young and poor) is today found in volatile countries such as Egypt but not in the US or UK. Older people might support revolution, but they don’t tend to do it themselves, because their knees are a bit creaky.
Put bluntly, if older people—even if they’re only “Facebook old,” i.e. 40—start getting into violent protests, that’s a bad thing for stability of the the developed world.
PS. Sticking with age, here is another of my colleagues, Derek Thompson, on America’s gerontocracy (which, he suggests, might be stifling innovation): “Joe Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history. (If he had lost, Donald Trump would have been the oldest president in U.S. history.) The average age in Congress has hovered near its all-time high for the past decade. The Democrats’ House speaker and House majority leader are over 80. The Senate majority leader and minority leader are over 70. The fears and anxieties that dominate politics represent older Americans’ fears and fixations.”
Derek’s story intersects with the story of the next US election—which could come down to a Supreme Court ruling, as it did in 2000 over the “hanging chads” in Florida. The Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg should have retired under Obama and instead clung on into the Trump presidency. She died six weeks before Trump’s election loss in 2020, and in doing so, gifted the right a sixth conservative justice on the nine-member Supreme Court.
It’s verboten to criticise RBG on the feminist left, but nonetheless I can’t help feeling she made a catastrophic misjudgement for reasons I don’t fully comprehend. It’s a catastrophic misjudgement Stephen Breyer (at 83, the oldest remaining liberal justice) appears set to repeat.
Quick Links
“For [Mel] Brooks, the real joy of The 2000 Year Old Man was spending time with [Carl] Reiner. “Any time I could surprise him and really break him up, I knew it was funny. He was the greatest audience. Ahhh, I miss him so much, Hadley. He would call me in the evenings and say ,‘Come over, come over! I got a big stuffed cabbage for us!’” (The Guardian)
Nerdy post on the trouble at the National Theatre by Salome Wagaine (Substack).
Harriet Harman is stepping down at the next election. When she joined parliament in 1982, there were 18 female MPs. Now the parliamentary Labour party is 51% female. In terms of getting her personal agenda enacted, she’s arguably the most successful politician of her generation (yes, including Tony Blair). I profiled her for the New Statesman in 2017.
“There are, Johnson announced, 300,000 problem drug users in the country, and they commit a huge number of other crimes. The solution, he said, was rehabilitation. For instance, some former cocaine users have gone on to be useful members of society. Others are in the Cabinet.” Rob Hutton’s sketch of Crime Week. (The Critic)
“Twitter behavior, undertaken by some of the most successful and celebrated writers and journalists and academics and thinkers in the world, amounts to being in a crowded room, waiting for that disfavored person to leave so they can’t defend themselves, and then communally and publicly ridiculing them from a safe distance. It’s all predicated on a kind of social bravery that stems only from the backing of a crowd and the protection of digital distance. Who would defend such a thing, on the merits? Very few. Instead, those who are called on this behavior have the only argument that anyone in our era ever musters: lol lol lol lmao lol lol lol.” (Freddie deBoer, Substack)
“What followed was a 27-course meal (note that “course” and “meal” and “27” are being used liberally here) which spanned 4.5 hours and made me feel like I was a character in a Dickensian novel. Because—I cannot impart this enough—there was nothing even close to an actual meal served. Some ‘courses’ were slivers of edible paper. Some shots were glasses of vinegar. Everything tasted like fish, even the non-fish courses. . . we got twelve kinds of foam, something that I can only describe as “an oyster loaf that tasted like Newark airport”, and a teaspoon of savory ice cream that was olive flavored.” Never go to an experimental Michelin-starred restaurant hungry, that’s my advice. (Medium)
Pirates were kinda commie. (Steven Johnson, Substack)
“The sector is now the province of private-equity vultures rather than venture-capital sharks. No one looks at digital media companies and sees unicorns anymore; they see stones that might have a little more blood in them.” Max Read on the Buzzfeed IPO. (Substack)
Tucker Carlson and Nigel Farage chatting about how Covid has “feminised” Boris Johnson. Maybe when I feel better I will pitch an essay on authoritarian camp and the obsession with masculinity.
The most transported raw material in the world, according to Mark Williams, is . . . iron ore. China is mad for steel production, and that requires iron.