The Bluestocking, vol 218
the 99 vaccinated guests in attendance
Happy Friday!
Still can’t drive. Went straight on today while signalling left. Also, people talk a lot about the dangerous influence of videogames but never mention that games have taught me not to brake at corners (because you’d skid) but instead merely not accelerate. Apparently that’s not how it should work on actual roads, at 11mph rather than 80.
Helen
PS. Intelligence Squared is running its first in-person event on March 22, and it’s me chairing a discussion on liberalism between John Gray and Francis Fukuyama. Is liberalism dead? Let’s arm-wrestle.
PPS. I’m guest-hosting my first Start the Week on Monday, all about “bullish masculinity”—clock this sexy minotaur.
Parenting as a public good (Works in Progress)
Despite significant public interest in how many children are born, children are typically seen as a private good. It is assumed that when individuals decide to reproduce, they are the ones who benefit, and they are the ones responsible for the costs. But this way of looking at things neglects that the private decision to have a child has an important positive externality – it benefits us all for there to be enough new people in each generation to sustain our way of life.
So what is the cost of having a child? One analysis suggests that supporting a child from birth until the age of twenty-one costs almost a quarter of a million pounds in modern Britain, with most of this going into childcare and education, followed by food, holidays, and clothing. Having children is the most expensive decision many of us make in our lifetimes.
Ellen Pasternak has written an argument for better maternity leave policies and flexible working, but framed in terms that free-marketeers might find appealing: society needs to stop free-riding on women.
Intoxicating, insidery and infuriating (Guardian)
When it comes to the people Cummings thinks we should read and follow – mostly culled from the tech/science/futurism blogosphere – they are almost exclusively men. This is men talking to men, about cryptocurrency, autonomous weapons, supply chains, space travel, nuclear fusion, existential risk. Cummings knows his way around these topics and his intolerance for blather makes him an excellent guide. A lot of it is fascinating and it’s easy to get drawn in. Still, spending an afternoon in the virtual company of these people can feel like being trapped in a world where the little people don’t count. No one has time for small talk or the usual niceties. Given what is at stake – systems collapse, tech breakthroughs, seriously big bucks – it’s all about being ahead of the curve. Sensitivity to anyone’s feelings is anathema.
David Runciman reviews Dominics Cummings’s blog, and finds him the most interesting and the most boring writer on politics today.
Is anyone else reading the Jackson Lamb books? (I’m on the sixth one already, that’s how easy they are to read.) I feel like a lot of Dominic Cummings has crept into Roderick Ho.
Boris: I’m shaking hands all round and yet I feel
Distinctly not OK. No taste or smell.
A new persistent cough is bugging me.
Folks, I’m afraid to say I am not well.
Exit Boris. Enter Whitty, a physic, and Vallance, an apothecary
Vallance: Plague sweeps the land, the Thane lies sick.
Whitty: Next slide.
Bluestocking recommends: Yellowjackets (Now TV). Psychological horror about a group of girls who survived a plane crash in the woods in the 90s, and the repercussions of that event in the present. We’re on episode 4 and I already have strong thoughts on who’s secretly a Wrong Un. Also, it’s full of 90s music: Echobelly!
Quick Links
This Keir Starmer oped on Ukraine is good, by which I don’t just mean that I agree with it. He’s actually turned from the principle—Ukraine as a sovereign country—to what Britain can do domestically, i.e. reduce dependence on Russian energy, stop money-laundering in the City, etc. I suspect the use of “imperialist” to refer to Russia is also a subtweet of the Corbyn era, too.
One for the slow-but-steady-writing files, by the way: Mick Herron wrote the first Slough Horses books while working as a sub-editor. He did 350 words a day, after coming home.
“Both Mx. Sandmel’s and Ms. Marshalek’s parents were among the 99 vaccinated guests in attendance, all of whom were asked to take PCR and rapid Covid tests ahead of the entirely outdoor event.” Peak NYT has been achieved.
“Acuña recalled how, when he was a child, his mother learned of an annual conference held by Little People of America, a support organization for people with dwarfism. She thought he might enjoy the opportunity to meet other kids like him. The hypothesis proved incorrect.” Wee Man from Jackass is an inspiration to us all: he’s found something he loves—skateboarding—and arranged his life so he can do it as much as possible. (New York Times)
Some exceptional Reddit drama this week, as r/antiwork—a forum dedicated to lobbying for better working conditions—sent an anarchist dogwalker called Doreen Ford on to Fox News to talk about how they didn’t want to work at all. You can imagine how that went. (Sample YouTube comment: “You know you’ve f***ed up when a Fox News host doesn’t interrupt you and just lets you keep talking.”)
“At this time, the Germans were merely driving these now penniless people to emigrate. The ‘Final Solution’ is in part the fault of the Western world; the Germans saw the blank casualness of the democracies and decided that no one wanted Jews; Jews were a drug on the market; it did not matter what was done to Jews.” Martha Gellhorn’s 1962 report on the Eichmann trial (Atlantic archive).
I could watch any number of hours of Ian Hislop politely insulting MPs to their faces, but here’s three minutes on the register of members’ interests. (Twitter)
A great story about a cake ambush, featuring Emma Thompson.
The latest episode of the Blocked and Reported podcast has an interview with Mike Pesca, a broadcaster forced out of Slate for arguing that there were some contexts in which the n-word might need to be used in full. This is another side to the story—the importance of Slack, which turned Slate’s “internal editorial process into a hypercharged version of social media.”
Bluestocking recommends: Absurdle. For anyone finding Wordle too easy, try this adversarial version, which changes the underlying word as you go along (but only consistent with the letters it’s already confirmed as correct).
Some very appropriate words here. See you next time!