The Bluestocking, vol 236
the long walk to free speech freedom
Happy Friday!
Last weekend I went up to the Hay Festival to record a live Start The Week, with the most recent winner of the Booker Prize, Damon Galgut, and Margo Jefferson and Jennifer Egan, who have a Pulitzer apiece.
Damon’s book The Promise is a short, beautiful novel about a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid and disillusionment with post-Mandela landscape.
Margo Jefferson’s first memoir Negroland was about growing up in an upper-middle class black family in the 1950s, and this one, Constructing a Nervous System, details her cultural influences, from Ella Fitzgerald to Bing Crosby. She is brilliant at writing about complexity; here she is on Michael Jackson.
Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a sibling, not a sequel, to A Visit From The Goon Squad; a tech entrepreneur invents a way to upload your consciousness to the cloud, so you can replay your memories (and everyone else can access them). It’s called The Candy House.
The secret to creating a good Start the Week vibe is finding unexpected echoes and connections between the works being discussed, and so I was delighted to cover authenticity, how to decide the scope of your work, and the importance of writing outside your own experiences. Listen here.
Helen
PS. In the Atlantic, I wrote about why the Wagatha Christie case was the most ill-advised libel trial since Oscar Wilde. Absolutely no one’s Whatsapp messages benefit from being read aloud in a courtroom, and Rebekah Vardy must understand this now.
Who Owns Einstein? (The Guardian)
In the mid-1980s, the university began to assert control over who could use Einstein’s name and likeness, and at what cost. Potential licensors were told to submit proposals, which would then be assessed by unnamed arbitrators behind closed doors. An Einstein-branded diaper? No. An Einstein-branded calculator? Yes. Anyone who did not follow this process, or defied the university’s decision, could be subject to legal action. Sellers of Einstein-themed T-shirts, Halloween costumes, coffee beans, SUV trucks and cosmetics found themselves in court. The university’s targets ranged from hawkers of market-stall novelties to multinationals such as Coca-Cola, Apple and the Walt Disney Company, which in 2005 paid $2.66m for a 50-year licence to use the name “Baby Einstein” on its line of infant toys.
Interesting longread on the post-mortem celebrity image industry. The company which owns the rights to Elvis is aggressively pursuing wedding chapels in Vegas over the use of his name and image.
Also, if you think the licensed Einstein underpants industry is weird, cop a load of the fact that students have been sucking his pickled brain.
The Bluestocking is a free, weekly guide to the best of the internet, covering history, politics, feminism and culture, plus European royal facts whenever I can’t stop myself. Know someone else who would enjoy this? Click the button below.
Bluestocking recommends: BBC Sounds has bought up some independent podcasts to give them an airing, and that includes two faves of mine: Caroline Crampton’s Shedunnit, about the golden age of detective fiction; and Xand and Chris Van Tulleken’s series on ultra-processed snacks, Addicted to Food. I interviewed the twins on how family dynamics affect your weight last year.
From the postbag: Charlotte Carew Pole gets in touch to say that Matilda Simon, second Baron Wythenshawe, does not have a gender recognition certificate, as I assumed in last week’s newsletter about Simon standing for one of the hereditary peer’s seats in the House of Lords. The barony can only be inherited by “male heirs legally begotten” and so Simon has remained legally male. She is “Matilda, Lord Simon.”
Charlotte has been working for years to scrap male primogeniture in the aristocracy, and has developed a bill which she hopes will be proposed by a friendly Lord sometime soon. Currently, all 92 seats in the House of Lords reserved for hereditary peers are held by men—so there is institutional sexism in our law-making body, with c.10% of the seats in the Lords effectively reserved for the small-gamete-people.
(You might think, as I do, that scrapping the hereditary seats altogether is the answer. But read my linked piece and you’ll see how much of a fight Charlotte and other campaigners have had to get even this smaller change anywhere near the statute book. Don’t hold your breath for the abolition of the 92 hereditaries unless Tony Blair becomes prime minister again.)
Quick Links
“Britton explained that premium economy wasn’t built to entice strivers across flight-class lines; carriers originally designed it to catch the bruised egos of former business-class members when the corporate world began to earnestly self-audit and downgrade employee travel budgets.” (The Atlantic)
The Windows 95 startup sound, by Brian Eno, slowed by 4000%. It’s eerily beautiful. I’m starting a petition to force Gia to make art from this.
“The plastics industry has waged a decades-long campaign to perpetuate the myth that the material is recyclable. This campaign is reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s efforts to convince smokers that filtered cigarettes are healthier than unfiltered cigarettes.” (The Atlantic) Jonathan has been obsessed for ages with the idea that recycling is a scam and it’s often just shipped to China and put into landfill. Looks like—as with his doom-laden inflation warnings last year—the Cassandra of SE13 is once again proved right.
Malcolm Gladwell only hires people who can drive a manual car (Bulletin). Excited to discover at the end of the month if this includes me; feels like a bad omen that I was driving back through Beckenham on Monday when A CONVOY OF DUCKLINGS walked out into the dual carriageway in front of me. (I swerved to avoid them, I am not a monster.) I am now convinced I will fail my test for killing baby wildfowl of some sort, and will return to the test centre with a front grille plastered in blood and tiny feathers, to people hissing murderer at me. Or I’ll fail by accidentally straying into 23mph in a 20 zone. One or the other.
“[Ben] Jonson’s statement concerning Shakespeare’s alleged ignorance of Greek and Latin might be the single most misunderstood and misinterpreted line of English poetry ever written: it means the opposite of what most people think it means.” (Antigone, via The Browser)
Footage of how Helen Keller learned to speak (TikTok).
How the Guardian’s Alex Hern became an unwitting crypto influencer (the Guardian).
Annals of Woke Capitalism: It’s Pride Month Everywhere Except the Middle East.
“In a press event before the launch of Uncensored, Morgan said, “I feel like Nelson Mandela when he came out of prison. It’s like the long walk to free speech freedom.” So far so Piers.” Slate on the viewer-free hellscape of Talk TV.
See you next time—happy Jubilee weekend!
So enjoyed the piece about Ben Johnson and Shakespeare. Fascinating stuff that I'd never happen upon elsewhere.
What I love about Brian Eno W95’s piece was that he made it using a Mac: “ I've never used a PC in my life; I don't like them.”