The Bluestocking, vol 255
retreating underground to its porky lair
Happy Friday!
As lightly promised in previous editions, this newsletter brings Some Personal News. In December, the BBC will release my 8-part podcast, The New Gurus. Here is the blurb:
Almost everywhere on the internet, people are giving — and receiving — advice. Advice that promises to transform our lives. How to eat. How to think. How to get rich. How to get a date. But who are these self-appointed gurus? Where did they come from, and how much power do these charismatic individuals wield?
Across eight episodes, Helen Lewis travels through the often strange and sometimes hidden digital spaces created by these new icons. She asks if Steve Jobs, the man who gave the world the iPhone, also gave birth to the concept of the internet guru. Her journey leads her to a variety of digital worlds: from intellectual provocateurs like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, to the murky world of pick up artistry and the gamification of romantic encounters.
The episodes are running from December 19 every weekday at noon on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
I’ve made audio documentaries before—and hosted a very fun, if slightly homespun, weekly podcast during my time at the New Statesman—but this has been far more ambitious than anything I’ve done before. We have original music, two dozen interviewees, and I even travelled to exotic locales like the home ground of Real Bedford, a football team built on Bitcoin.
Helen Lewis said: “I’ve been fascinated by internet culture since my teens, and how big, dynamic, influential communities can exist which are often invisible to outsiders. Whether it’s wellness influencers, Bitcoin evangelists or the self-styled “anti woke” warriors, today’s internet gurus have enormous power to shape our shared culture, whether we know their names or not.
“With this series, the BBC has given me the opportunity to go spelunking through some of the most interesting corners of the internet. There is a huge market online for spiritual, ethical and practical guidance, and so sorting the wise teachers from the false prophets is one of the biggest challenges of the modern world.”
We’ll drop an audio trailer soon, but in the meantime, here are the episode topics: the birth of the guru; wellness; productivity; the Intellectual Dark Web, diversity, dating, cryptocurrency and future-gazing.
Ron DeSantis’s Covid Gamble Paid Off (The Atlantic)
DeSantis takes every chance to hammer home the idea of Florida as the “nation’s citadel of freedom,” as he put it in a campaign stump speech in Melbourne last week. That allows him to champion his own state against a range of opponents defined by geography and referenced by name: crime-ridden blue cities such as San Francisco, the piously pro-immigration liberals of Martha’s Vineyard, the “elites” in Washington, D.C.
In the governor’s narrative of the coronavirus, the people of Florida did not cower at home or tentatively venture outside in masks, nor did they labor under vaccine mandates as new variants spread across the country. No, they were free. Free to support their family. Free to attend school. Free to run a business. Free from the constraints of fogged glasses and not being able to unlock their iPhone.
To that, a liberal might add: free to get sick or even die from a respiratory disease for which safe, effective vaccines are available. Which is exactly the point.
The biggest winner of the midterms was Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who won re-election by nearly 20 points (and 1.5 million votes). I’ve been following him for a while, and finally got to see him in action at a pre-election rally. Here’s a short piece on his Covid gamble, and I’ll be writing about him more broadly later. But one thing I will say now is that I kept thinking throughout of how trippy it would be to transplant a British politician into the setting of his rally—a muscle car museum—and then stand among people saying a prayer to start and putting their hand on their heart for the Pledge of Allegiance. Instead we get Boris Johnson on a child’s digger crashing through styrofoam blocks—self-consciously bathetic. American politics has an earnestness, and a grandeur, and a willingness to take itself seriously that Britain simply cannot match. Imagine Ed Miliband in front of a load of muscle cars! Hilarious.
Once you understand that, you understand more about Donald Trump’s success—like the British satire boom of the 1960s, he has something to kick against. His mean nicknames work much better in a context where political seriousness verges on pomposity. In Britain, politicians are desperate to be “good sports”—think of Johnson on the zipline or Tony Blair in that Catherine Tate sketch—which means they come pre-mocked. There’s less balloon to puncture.
As I say in the piece, Trump has already road-tested a mean nickname for the Florida governor—Ron de Sanctimonious. It’s a jab at his well-camouflaged elite background and family man presentation. But it hasn’t really wounded The Ronald, because . . . well, he just won Florida by 1.5 million votes. If the big winner of the midterms was DeSantis, the biggest loser was Donald Trump.
How Peter Jackson Broke Up The Beatles (Vulture)
For decades, retrospective analysis of the Beatles favored John, especially after his death when he became not just the band’s founder, leader, and sole genius but something like a saint, too. Any attempts by Paul to bend that narrative — pointing out that he’d contributed the melody of “In My Life,” or flipping the writing credit for “Yesterday” on his live albums to “McCartney/Lennon” instead of the usual “Lennon/McCartney” — were blasted by critics as tantamount to grave robbery. But now there’s an eight-hour docuseries that argues Paul’s case better and less humbly than he ever could himself.
Of course, cynics might also notice how well Jackson’s Paul-centric reboot of the Beatles franchise serves the band’s business interests in 2022. Gen-Xers and older millennials may have identified best with John, a rock-and-roll antihero and Cobain-esque martyr. But Paul — the earnest, type A poptimist who can never be canceled because he’s never done anything wrong — is hard to beat as an ambassador to Gen Z.
Great piece on the AI wizardry used to remix Revolver—which was previously rendered so badly in stereo that “Taxman” made people using headphones feel ill. But then it strays into something I’ve been writing about in the book: the mythology of John vs Paul, and what that says about our changing ideas of genius.
Quick Links
“It all helps lay the foundation for the jittery first lines, in which Eminem embodies B-Rabbit’s turbulent inner mind—and upset stomach—as he prepares to take the stage with the vomited remnants of his “mom’s spaghetti” on his hoodie. “How many songs start with a person puking and people keep listening?” Jenkins says. “That’s an incredible achievement in and of itself.”’ A deep dive into the creation of “Lose Yourself” (The Ringer).
Thanks to everyone who wrote in to say the ominous McRib message was because McDonalds pretends to withdraw the McRib permanently all the time to make it seem scarce and exciting. Bonus marks to Robert Cottrell of the Browser, who sent this 2011 Awl classic on McRib Arbitrage: “For three decades, the sandwich has come in and out of existence, popping up in certain regional markets for short promotions, then retreating underground to its porky lair — only to be revived once again for reasons never made entirely clear.”
“Daniel Smith encountered vicious racism as well. When he was working at a Y.M.C.A. camp in Connecticut in the mid-1950s, he saw a white woman being pulled from a flooded quarry, unconscious but alive. He began to apply CPR, but a white police officer ordered him to stop. While Mr. Smith stared back, incredulously, the woman died.” The last surviving child of an enslaved person in the US has just died, aged 90 (NYT).
“About a decade ago, I went to a U2 concert. As I drove home, one of Bono’s people called me and asked if I wanted to hang out with him at his hotel. This is my dream: hanging out with a rock star after a concert. I got to the hotel bar and there was Bono, an archbishop, some World Bank economists, and a West African government official. We ended up talking about developing-world debt obligations until early in the morning.” David Brooks profiles Bono (The Atlantic).
Gabriel Gatehouse’s podcast examines how the word “groomer” became a weapon in the US culture war over LGBTQ issues (BBC).
See you next time!
Ooh- can't wait! Very timely.