The Bluestocking, vol 224
at least it’s a five-star hotel
Happy Friday!
I’m about to take a couple of months of book leave, so apologies in advance if this makes your Bluestocking service more erratic for a while, as I will be trying to read less news and more history books.
Helen
PS. I wrote something about Vladimir Putin, Cancel Culture’s Greatest Victim.
PPS. I’m doing a couple of events in the next couple of months: Is Liberalism Obsolete? with Francis Fukuyama and John Gray on March 22; Eugenics and the Future of Humanity with Adam Rutherford on May 25 at the Charleston Festival; and Stories of Modern England with Jason Cowley at the Cambridge Literary Festival on April 23.
Absolute Power (The Atlantic)
During our Riyadh encounter, Jeff asked MBS if he was capable of handling criticism. “Thank you very much for this question,” the prince said. “If I couldn’t, I would not be sitting with you today listening to that question.”
“I’d be in the Ritz-Carlton,” Jeff suggested.
“Well,” he said, “at least it’s a five-star hotel.”
Difficult questions caused the crown prince to move about jumpily, his voice vibrating at a higher frequency. Every minute or two he performed a complex motor tic: a quick backward tilt of the head, followed by a gulp, like a pelican downing a fish. He complained that he had endured injustice, and he evinced a level of victimhood and grandiosity unusual even by the standards of Middle Eastern rulers.
When we asked if he had ordered the killing of Khashoggi, he said it was “obvious” that he had not. “It hurt me a lot,” he said. “It hurt me and it hurt Saudi Arabia, from a feelings perspective.”
“From a feelings perspective?”
“I understand the anger, especially among journalists. I respect their feelings. But we also have feelings here, pain here.”
The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood (and his wingman, my boss Jeff Goldberg) interview Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed Bin Salman. I learned so much from this piece: about MBS’s modernization project, and the incredibly ruthless means he is prepared to use to enforce it; about how the religious police have been supplanted by the regular police; about Saudi Arabia’s pioneering “deradicalization” jails, and what deradicalization even means in the context of a country that practises such an extreme form of Islam; about the country’s U-turn on Qatar, and the dissidents arrested for arguing for what is now MBS’s official policy.
There’s so much more than that: an entire new city being built in the desert! Why bottomless brunches are un-Islamic! The unlikely role of Jared Kushner, an extremely observant Jew, in bolstering US links with this theocratic Islamic state. (Including this quote: ‘“You Americans think there is something strange about a ruler who sends his unqualified son-in-law to conduct international relations,” one Saudi analyst told me. “For us this is completely normal.”’)
PS. There was some backlash to the idea of interviewing MBS at all—given the murder of Jamal Khashoggi—and Graeme wrote an interesting reflection on why it was worth doing. Personally, I was surprised that anyone could read passages like the one quoted above and conclude that the narrative was endorsing MBS’s maudlin self-pity, rather than exposing it.
I also agree with Graeme that it’s a vital task of modern journalism to expose how someone can be personally charming, charismatic or compelling, while also doing very bad things. It was something the press struggled with when reporting on Donald Trump, who was sometimes genuinely funny—in the manner of a 90s comedian picking on a heckler, sure, but funny nonetheless.
Bizarro World (Boston Globe, 2007)
I contacted Mr. Kelly R. Flewin – he always signs his correspondence this way – a 29-year-old gas station attendant in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the senior referee at twingalaxies.com, to find out how important the record was in the gaming world. During a late-night phone call after business had quieted down at the station, he told me that any record in one of the more popular classic games – like Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, or Tetris – would always set the classic gaming world on fire.
"It's funny," I told Flewin. "We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She's weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem."
What Flewin said next I will never forget.
"Oh, my!"
A very sweet story about a guy who discovers his wife might be the best Tetris player in the world.
Bluestocking recommends: Age of Rage, Barbican, London. You probably don’t think you want to see four hours of theatre in Dutch, but you’re wrong. One of my lockdown projects was reading Shakespeare’s history plays, and as part of that I watched a live-stream of Ivo Van Hove’s Kings of War, which mashes them all together. Age of Rage, his latest megamix, will get you through six Euripides plays and an Aeschylus.
I’m also looking forward to Mike Bartlett’s The 47th at the Old Vic—I am guessing it’ll be Trumpy—and Clybourne Park, which won Bruce Norris the Pulitzer for drama, which is being revived in Finsbury.
I’m in two minds about seeing Straight Line Crazy, but I’m aware that top of the list of Things Men Like is Robert Caro—seriously, when he came to a lobby lunch it was like Beatlemania for Centrist Dads—so I feel it is my duty to pass on the fact that this play is an adaptation of Caro’s biography of Robert Moses.
Quick Links
“Many of the same people who bemoan the divisive nature of the culture wars are doing absolutely nothing to make it more nuanced. Claiming that certain figures from the past who were racist were not in fact racist is an extreme view; but so is denying that some of these racist people should not be considered heroic or virtuous or praiseworthy in other respects.” (Unherd) One of the nice things about my advanced age is that I am now happy that talented young writers like James Marriott and Tomiwa Owolade (who wrote this piece) exist, rather than wanting to break their fingers in a fit of jealousy.
Rik Mayall writes to Bob Geldof (read by Ade Edmondson).
Extreme levels of media beef this week. Departing NYT staffer Taylor Lorenz vs current NYT staffer Maggie Haberman on whether it’s cringey for journalists to see themselves as brands, or merely a reflection of their value in the marketplace. Laurie Penny vs JK Rowling on whether bad book reviews can cause a PTSD relapse. The NYT’s star writer Nikole Hannah Jones vs a student activist who wrote about campus free speech in the NYT.
This bot tweeted the pay gap of firms doing self-congratulatory corporate "we celebrate all our lovely women!!!" tweets for #IWD. I particularly enjoyed the resulting shame-deletions from the worst offenders.
Suzanne Moore has an extremely long lunch with John Cooper Clarke. Contains phrases such as “in fact he does not like humanised bears in general” and “I’ve lived with a monkey. They are full of nothing but self-interest.”
“My mum lived til she was 100, so I might have another 30 years.” Harriet Harman is always interesting on women’s rights (Politics Home).
Sirin Kale on Ukrainian commercial surrogacy. A brave piece to write when there are quite a few senior journalists who have used Eastern European surrogates. (Guardian)
Steven Johnson on whether we are under-rating the risk of a nuclear attack on a big city (Adjacent Possible).
‘To return to Kyiv from separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine after the death of his family, Mr. Perebyinis traveled into Russia and flew to the city of Kaliningrad, to cross a land border into Poland. At the Russia-Poland border, he said, Russian guards questioned him, took his fingerprints and seemed ready to arrest him for unclear reasons, though he was eventually allowed to travel on.
He said he told them: “My whole family died in what you call a special operation and we call a war. You can do what you want with me. I have nothing left to lose.’’’ (New York Times)
'“I hear what sounds vaguely like a lone cry from an infant upstairs. I think I notice Grimes wince, but I say nothing and move on. Could be anything.” TFW you’re interviewing Grimes for Vanity Fair and you discover she has a secret second baby with Elon Musk because you hear the kid crying. (Vanity Fair)
Correction: In the last Bluestocking, I randomly linked to a Young Vic tweet instead of an Atlantic piece on Finnish militias. Here is the right link.
See you next time!
Isn't it "Hannah-Nikole Jones"? That's what Katie Herzog says.
Not Finsbury - Finsbury Park. Completely different place.