The Bluestocking, vol 259
one that looks kind of shocked and scared as it goes down
Happy Friday!
Welcome to new subscribers—last week’s Keir Starmer essay brought around 500 of you into the light of truth, aka this email list. Expect a weekly email every Friday with links to the best content on the internet, as chosen by someone obsessed with British politics, popular delusions and odd bits of history.
Oh and here is my verdict on Netflix’s Harry and Meghan for the Atlantic.
Helen
An Oral History Of The Time Six Doctors Swallowed Lego Heads To See How Long They’d Take To Poo (Defector)
Henry: Three days in advance, we’re like, “OK, we’re gonna start doing a stool diary now.” There’s this, like, mounting excitement. And then someone goes, “Oh make sure you record yourself swallowing the Lego as proof for each other.” I made sure that I’d done a poo beforehand, because we’d agreed that you have to check through every poo after you swallow that Lego.
We discussed at the study design phase about mitigating the risk of corn in our diets—acknowledging the risk of a false positive.
Andy: I don’t think anyone specifically went out to buy Lego heads to find which was the tastiest looking one to have. It was much more of a case of which head had the best-looking face to swallow. You want one that looks kind of shocked and scared as it goes down.
This is the frontier of science right here. A very funny story of scientists experimenting on themselves—and they learned useful stuff which could help save kids who accidentally swallow button batteries.
Billie Eilish: Same Interview, Sixth Year. This will bring home just how much people change in their late teens and early twenties. Also it’s kind of a durational art project at this point. I hope she does it until death. (Vanity Fair)
Bluestocking recommends: Tim Minchin’s musical version of Groundhog Day! It’s coming back to the Old Vic next summer. I loved it last time and am definitely going again.
Quick Links
“Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund founded by [Sam] Bankman-Fried, also owes $55,319 to the Margaritaville Beach Resort in Nassau, which was founded by US musician Jimmy Buffett, according to bankruptcy filings this week. A “Who’s To Blame” margarita at one of the resort’s bars costs $13.” Some crazy spending by the crypto lads in this piece. It’s almost like they knew it wouldn’t last. (Financial Times).
“How we get to a world of greater dynamism—whether it will merely require selective acts of troublemaking disruption, or whether, instead, it will ultimately involve smashing the political order of the United States to bits—doesn’t really concern him.” What does Peter Thiel want? (Unherd)
The Lord of the Rings Zoom reunion is a thing of chaotic beauty (Twitter).
The Bluestocking is free, but if you want to say thank you for the disturbing amount of internet madness I have beamed into your brain this year, here is my Amazon Christmas List. This also functions as a recommendations list if you’re looking for gifts for bookish friends.
“Noam Chomsky says, and he said this about the New York Times before I went to work there, that the true mechanism of censorship is not the heavy hand of industry coming in and killing a story, it’s normally cultural risk aversion in the ethos of mid-level editors, who would rather find stories that already have headwind.” Three investigative journalists reflect on their favorite stories that didn’t go off with a bang, but landed with a thud (The Fence).
“Why MAGA Republicans and Elon Musk are so adamant that people be able to post photos of Hunter’s johnson is something that should probably be explored with their respective preachers or psychiatrists, but it is certainly not a matter for constitutional scholars or litigators.” Former Republican operative Tim Miller, who worked for the Jeb Bush campaign, explains why Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi have massively overhyped their OMG EXCLUSIVE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP SUPPRESSED BY TWITER story (The Bulwark).
“[Susan] Cooper learned the power of storytelling in the air raid shelter as bombs fell around her. I first read her books by torchlight, and they helped me cope with the anxiety I felt then at the possibility of nuclear conflict. Now new-old fears – climate chaos, war, ecological collapse – menace our minds. The dark is always rising, and it is the work of the greatest stories to hold it back.” I love The Dark is Rising more than words can say—I remember carrying round the fourth book in the series, The Grey King, as I walked through school because I didn’t want to put it down. Now Robert Macfarlane and Simon McBurney have recorded it for BBC Radio over Christmas. Joy! The book is set over Christmas, in snowy Wiltshire, so it’s the perfect time of year to introduce your children to it.
From the Archive: absolutely brutal pisstake of a certain type of horserace political journalism (McSweeneys).
“He saw me and he said, with a look of surprise, “Bibi, what are you doing here?” Then he saw my face and he understood immediately. He let out a cry like a wounded animal, and then I heard my mother scream. That was actually worse than hearing about Yoni’s death; it was like a second death.” This Bari Weiss interview with Bibi Netanyahu swerves a lot of … pertinent questions, but what she did ask about was nonetheless interesting (Common Sense).
How to write like Malcolm Gladwell by Henry Oliver. For anyone interested in non-fiction, this is a must-read: helpful explanation of sentence structure, overall book structure, and the novelistic use of detail.
“You ended up with this whole cohort of discourse structured around ‘Is Bernie Sanders perfect in every way or is it problematic to vote for a white man?’” Matt Yglesias has a thesis about how Facebook incentives changed journalism in the 2010s. (Twitter)
The Roster of Men Who Believe I Hate Them welcomes a new member! Joining last year’s winner Jordan Peterson, author of this exceptionally maudlin tweet about how he had “only ever tried to be a good man”, is 2022 honoree Owen Jones, who says in response to last week’s newsletter: “It’s not just living rent free in their heads, they really really hate me—and in quieter moments I wonder if they ever ask themselves why.”
Come now, gents, have some dignity, like James Felton. Do you see him complaining about me making him a punchline in this newsletter on a six-monthly basis? No. He spends that time productively, pitching books called things like KNACKERS: 34 Times Britain Got Kicked In The Balls.
See you next time!
I was obsessed with Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising books! Other brilliant book she wrote set in London WWII about 2 boys, best friends. 40
Years later the memory of the ending still chokes me up. Think that book was her best kids novel
If Owen asks himself why people hate him, he doesn't have the curiousity to look for the answer because it's extremely easy to find out why. It's the teenage mix of absolute certitude with ignorance, fallacious argument and an unwillingness to see any complexity in the world that grates.