The Bluestocking, vol 223
“It’s why Foxtons is called Foxtons.”
Happy Friday!
I started my week with, well, Start the Week: if you’re interested in the echoes between the post-war period and post-Covid, have a listen to the eminent historian Peter Hennessy, the anthropologist Farhan Samanani and Jane Alison of the Barbican, which has an upcoming exhibition of post-war art and architecture. Peter was very nice as I poured several buckets of water over his optimistic outlook for Britain.
Helen
The Twitching Girls (The Atlantic)
Three years ago, the psychiatrist Kirsten Müller-Vahl began to notice something unusual about the newest patients at her clinic in Hannover, Germany. A typical Tourette’s patient is a boy who develops slow, mild motor tics—blinking or grimacing—at about age 5 to 7, followed later by simple vocalizations such as coughing. Only about one in 10 patients progress to the disorder’s most famous symptom—coprolalia, which involves shouting obscene or socially unacceptable words. Even then, most patients utter only half a dozen swear words, on repeat.
But these new patients were different. They were older, for a start—teenagers—and about half of them were girls. Their tics had arrived suddenly, explosively, and were extreme; some were shouting more than 100 different obscenities. This last symptom in particular struck Müller-Vahl as odd. “Even in extremely severely affected [Tourette’s] patients, they try to hide their coprolalia,” she told me. The teenagers she was now seeing did not. She had the impression, she said, that “they want to demonstrate that they suffer from these symptoms.” Even more strangely, many of her new patients were prone to involuntary outbursts of exactly the same phrase: Du bist hässlich. “You are ugly.”
Last summer, I wrote a—broadly positive—piece about “disability influencers” on TikTok. There was something cheering about watching normal people explain how to put on a prosthetic leg, or how burns surgery works, or what it is like to have a face transplant, or use a stoma. But there was a darker current, too, and in the piece I mentioned a study about how some teenagers appeared to be “catching” tics from watching Tourette’s influencers.
On Twitter, someone tweeted the piece with: this is interesting, but she’s buried the lede. After five minutes of grumpiness, I acknowledged this person had a point. The idea that you can “catch” tics from the internet was worth an article on its own.
Many months later, this is the result. There is broad agreement among experts (and the Tourettes Association of America) that watching tic content can sometimes lead to sudden, explosive twitches and vocalisations. These are unconscious and involuntary, but do not resemble classic Tourette’s. So what are they? This story is me finding out. As for why it matters, Tourette’s is treated with strong drugs, such as anti-psychotics, which can have equally strong side-effects. You don’t want to prescribe these unless they are absolutely medically necessary.
Regular readers will find the population discussed here notable. Those with “social tics”—or, more accurately, “functional tic-like behaviour”—are predominantly teenage girls. (Nine out of ten in the British clinic.) Many have other conditions such as autism, OCD or gender issues. Something about social media seems to affect some teenage girls—highly social, often anxious and perfectionist—more strongly than other groups.
PS. In related news, I hope that “Heather” in this Teen Vogue piece on young people with long Covid is seeing a specialist who is open to the possibility there might be some other things going on with them.
Britain’s Most Successful Estate Agent (Guardian)
The biggest sales are quietly negotiated by a small group of extremely well-connected agents concealed behind company names invented to imply upper-class British discretion. “It’s why Foxtons is called Foxtons,” said Nigel Lewis. “It’s just a name they picked because it sounds posh.”
This is Britain as brand: a commodification of a fractional way of life that required a townhouse, acreage, staff – and died between the wars. Never mind that there’s almost no one in this country who can remember or afford such an existence. Extremely rich people from other places adore it and want to recreate it, and the prime estate agents know how to sell it. You hear it in their language, the lexicon of heritage filling the Beauchamp Estates brochure: “Steeped in history”; “one of London’s finest addresses”; “the heart of old Chelsea”. A slice of fictional England, a portal to aristocracy, yours for £10,000 a square foot.
A new Sophie Elmhirst longread, featuring unbearable rich people, mad tasteless houses and loud men barking into phones. Joy!
Difficult Women is a March Kindle deal, which makes it 99p—approximately 0.1p for every cup of tea Jonathan made me while writing it.
Quick Links
David Leonhardt writes the mega-successful daily newsletter of the NYT (Biden allegedly reads it). His decision to use it to combat what he sees as American liberal hyperventilating over Covid has received pushback from those who see him as blasé and uncaring. (NYMag)
How to find stories. Love the tip about searching academic journals here.
“To his bafflement, his scrawny ward ‘Gupton’ was illiterate, couldn’t understand the idea of a war or basic training, couldn’t memorize his serial number, didn’t know who Hitler was nor what state he was from nor his grandmother’s name/address (apparently he had no parents or didn’t remember them), was terrified of injections, endlessly fascinated by the dog tags he was required to wear, and thought a nickel was worth more than a dime because it was bigger.” What happened after a “well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt” to conscript men with low IQs into the army during the Vietnam War.
“In Finland, adolescent males report for a short and intense period of military training, followed by shorter refreshers for most of their adult life. The training is not, as in the Israeli model, a few years of dedicated service. Nor does it emphasize military discipline, such as keeping one’s bunk tidy and shoes polished, or the Prussian-style transformation of citizen-recruit into fighting machine. Instead, it prepares civilians to be ready to join their unit and harass and kill invaders. A country of Finland’s size can rapidly field nearly 1 million trained soldiers.” I went to Finland a few years ago and found all the men charming, with many of them sharing the fastidious personal vibe of Niles Crane. Little did I know they were also trained killers. (The Atlantic)
See you next time!
Link at the bottom leads to Twitter comment about a Young Vic production as opposed to Finnish military!