The Bluestocking, vol 220

one of her two full-time chefs

Happy Friday!

Just a quickie this week as I’ve been travelling I landed in a bitterly cold New York on Sunday and have spent my free time since taking photographs of the Most American Things I can find (so far, a brussels sprout burrito is the winner.)

I went on Morning Joe—filmed in 30 Rock!—which was hilarious, because you are with other guests in the studio but also get questions from the main hosts through an earpiece, so you have no idea where your eyeline is supposed to be. I stared balefully right down the camera in a way that I’m pretty sure made me look like a terrorist issuing a ransom demand.

a ransom paid in pies, presumably (Covid has not been kind to my waistline)

I’m now on the Amtrak to DC, a journey which takes you through New Jersey (Sopranos country), Delaware (home to Joe Biden, a million tax-efficient shell companies and not much else), Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Also, I just found out that the Smithsonian Zoo has a BABY PANDA, so that’s my Saturday morning sorted.

this is also the only way to get me to eat fruit

Until next time,

Helen

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Joe Rogan’s Covid Claims Are Dumb. But Are They Dangerous? (The Atlantic)

Vaccine refusal, in its broadest sense, has taken a catastrophic toll in the United States, on the order of hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. But the claim that pandemic falsehoods aired on Rogan’s show are substantially responsible ignores the sticky facts of our predicament. Surveys now suggest that roughly one in six American adults says they won’t get vaccinated for COVID-19. That’s roughly what the surveys showed over the summer; it’s also roughly what the surveys showed in the summer of 2020, when the pandemic was still young. One in six adults, some 45 million Americans in all, is seemingly immune to any change of context or information. One in six adults—a solid tumor on our public health that doesn’t grow or shrink.

Further support for my theory that people get super angry about culture wars because they have given up on politics. The real problem in the US is the Republican indulgence of vaccine-refusal, and the echo chamber of OANN/Fox News/the Bonginosphere. But liberals can’t have any effect on any of that, so they get angry with Rogan instead.

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Quick Links

1. “In 2016, two psychiatry researchers collected together all the published case studies of adults with factitious disorder. They tried to draw out some broad patterns from the 455 cases they found. The first thing they noted was that 66% of patients were female — strange, since a previous edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, psychiatry’s Bible, claimed on the basis of no stated evidence that the disorder was more common in men.

   The second interesting observation was that the factitious patients often claimed to have previously worked in healthcare — as a lab assistant in a hospital, say.” Stuart Ritchie in Unherd.

2. When you think of the kind of places that people who want to become eunuchs live, somehow you don’t think of Finsbury Park. (Daily Mail)

3. Brutal retrospective on the TED talk.

4. “Later that evening, freshly showered, free of makeup, and wrapped in a fuzzy white robe, Kim tucks into her breakfast banquette for a plant-based stir-fry prepared by one of her two full-time chefs. . . A plate of tempura green beans is delivered to the Vervoordt-designed walnut table by her chef Gabe. Kim thanks him and asks how he’s feeling, as he’s just recovered from COVID. Better, but still tired, he replies, as she nods sympathetically. Throughout our time today, I find myself struck less by Kim’s obvious glamour than by her kindness.” Kim Kardashian profiled in Vogue.

5. “She’s brimful of the world, and the image in my mind’s eye is of her walking away towards the sun carrying a rucksack, my mother sitting by the fire, dozing to the crackle, and me, standing in the doorway, held between the two states of departure.” Emma Thompson on her mother, her daughter and the ageing process.

6. “A modern-day Jack might be a Trump-supporting social untouchable, while Rose would write about social justice and white privilege for an online magazine. . . [Billy Zane’s character] would be busy addressing his company’s annual Black History Month Diversity awards where he insincerely talked about structural racism and how his company welcomed people of all genders.” Provocative Ed West piece about the “Titanic hierarchy” and the social changes of the last century (Substack).

7. Riker Manoeuvre by difficulty (TikTok).

See you next time!