The Bluestocking, vol 257

He loves to DJ on his iPad

Happy Friday!

It’s happened again. I normally have very little interest in football—although I now realise I’ve seen a suspicious number of Spurs matches without meaning to this season—but I love a tournament.

Also, maybe the most foolproof way to annoy men is to insist that you are backing whichever team has the fittest player. NO you’re not taking it SERIOUSLY this is the BEAUTIFUL GAME we are not pieces of MEAT. Tell it to Iran’s substitute goalkeeper, guys.

Helen

PS. Self-promotion zone: Here I am talking to Jon Kay of Quillette about my Atlantic story, “The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat.”

PPS. Substack seems to be having an issue where hyperlinks don’t show up as underlined. Just try clicking in the usual places and hope I’ve made them a link, I guess?

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Renee DiResta on How To Fix Social Media (Persuasion)

I don’t think that misinformation is a particularly useful framing of the dynamics of the problem today. Most of the things that really rile people up are not demonstrably falsifiable. You're not saying that a fact about the world is untrue, and you need to be corrected on that thing through a label or a fact check. And even in those neat cases, people might not believe it. There's this fundamental problem: if you're in Tribe A, you distrust the media of Tribe B and vice versa. And so even the attempt to correct the misinformation, when it is misinformation, is read with a particular kind of partisan valence. “Is this coming from somebody in my tribe, or is this more manipulation from the bad guys?”

One of the more useful frameworks for what is happening today is rumors: people are spreading information that can maybe never be verified or falsified, within communities of people who really care about an issue. They spread it amongst themselves to inform their friends and neighbors. There is a kind of altruistic motivation. The platforms find their identity for them based on statistical similarity to other users.

Quite a few of the “misinformation” reporters and activists are overt leftwing partisans, which makes me mistrust them. But not Renee DiResta. This interview with Yascha Mounk isn’t just good on misinformation, but on San Francisco and the Democratic rebellion there.

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Toni Holt Kramer. Photograph: Giovanni Mourin

In The Court of Mar A Lago (Financial Times)

Trump is selecting songs on his iPad. “Oh yes he’s a real music lover. He selects all the music here,” one of the Trumpettes tells me. “He loves to DJ on his iPad.” At one point, the music cuts out entirely for about 20 seconds while he works out what to play next. After “Memory” from the musical Cats, which has been playing so loudly that it has been difficult to talk, Trump starts two songs and stops them abruptly, before settling on “Heroes” by David Bowie. This was also the song that had played as he had walked off stage about half an hour earlier, and I had heard it blasting from Tiffany’s wedding a few days earlier too, while I was out for a walk.

“Why is the music so loud? Is he deaf?” shouts a woman near me. It’s the first time I’ve heard anyone utter anything other than fawning praise inside Trump’s palace. By about 11pm,

[Toni Holt] Kramer is tired and says it’s time for us to leave. On our way out, Trump, who is only just starting his dinner, spots her: “Toni! Show ’em your ring. Show the ring. Show the ring. Show the ring!” The women around him ooh and ahh appropriately at the diamond. “I gotta show this ring. Wait, bring your ring, there’s a woman here,” Trump says, getting up, and taking Kramer over to a young woman in a tight black mini dress.

Jemima Kelly goes to the “Winter White House” to discover what rich people with no taste like. Come for Trump, stay for the Republican donor shooting an iguana with a gun in the middle of the interview.

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Quick Links

1. “Bono’s style of activism is very unfashionable. Today’s generation of activists believe that brokering deals between elites is irrelevant and corrupting, a diversion from the work of “systemic change”. It is better to make a lot of noise in the media, raising the collective consciousness, inciting enough anger that politicians have no choice but to give in and do something. Do what, though? The answer is often left vague.” Always enjoy a bit of heresy: Ian Leslie defends Bono and criticises Greta Thunberg (Substack).

2. Katherine Dee is my second favorite theorist on digital identities (after Gia Milinovich). Here she is talking to Jesse Singal on the Blocked and Reported podcast.

3. Missing Katie from that episode of BAR? Here’s her in full XX mode on the A Special Place in Hell podcast.

4. “It was Mr. Fierro’s first time at a drag show, and he was digging it. He had spent 15 years in the Army, and now relished his role as a civilian and a father, watching one of his daughter’s old high-school friends perform. ‘These kids want to live that way, want to have a good time, have at it,’ he said as he described the night. ‘I’m happy about it because that is what I fought for, so they can do whatever they hell they want.’” Loved these quotes by the army vet who took on the gunman in the Colorado Springs shooting, which targeted an LGBTQ club (New York Times).

5. The best George W. Bush quote? (Twitter)

6. The gender-critical activism of Kellie-Jay Keen continues to concern me. Her New York event was marked by violence, threats and spitting against the women who spoke. Terrible intimidation, and the cops did nothing. At the same time, I have to note that at her Chicago event, one of the speakers said “men should call out the deviants among them and eradicate these monsters from society”. Here Keen is defending that rhetoric—while suggesting it wasn’t about trans women, when there is no other way to to read it—and attacking a journalist who asked questions about it. This is rightwing, rabble-rousing populism in its rawest form, and I find the repeated presence of Andy Ngo at her events very striking. As BuzzFeed reported a few years ago, there is a debate about “the extent to which Ngo deliberately provokes angry and violent responses from anti-fascists.”

7. “Viewing the Salvator Mundi for the first time, included in the National Gallery’s Leonardo show at the behest of its ambitious young curator Luke Syson, was a serious let-down. For a start, you didn’t need to know much about Leonardo to wonder why the most dynamic genius of the High Renaissance would want to create such an uncharacteristically static, frontal composition. Then there was the problem of the condition. The well-preserved blessing right hand was very fine, but the heavily repainted face of Christ had a ghostly fuzziness about it that for me, at least, was hopelessly off-putting.” I enjoy stories about the top of the art market, much like I enjoy stories of crypto billionaires, because I feel no guilt about bad things happening in them. Here’s a reflection on the $430m sale of the “last Da Vinci,” the Salvator Mundi, to Saudi’s crown prince (Art Newspaper).

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The New Gurus: the artwork just dropped for my podcast series, beginning December 19, as well as the first four episode titles: The Birth of the New Guru; Taking the Urine; Fitter, Happier, More Productive; and White Women’s Tears.

You’ll be hearing more about this, don’t you worry.

See you next time!