The Bluestocking, vol 271
Read the room Paddington
Happy Friday!
First off, thank you to Laura for sending me this perfect intersection of the Venn diagram of my interests:
And apologies in advance to Caroline for referencing The Bad P&P.
Helen
Why Britain Doesn’t Build (Works in Progress)
The 1947 consensus didn’t just fail to reduce political opposition to new housing, it made the problem worse. If a neighboring area enacts strict planning restrictions, like expanding its green belt, then you are threatened with their overspill as well, creating a chain reaction of NIMBYism. After communities on the immediate urban fringe secured the right to veto new development, communities further afield also demanded it. When that was granted, and development was pushed back into the urban core, people there too obtained the right to block development.
The few new houses that snuck past the new political constraints fell under two options. Some were in the middle of nowhere – similar to the Mark II New Towns, but on a smaller scale. One example is the settlement of Northstowe, a development eight kilometers outside Cambridge, which is one of the largest current residential projects in England. It was started in 2003 and completion is expected by 2030, with 10,000 homes planned for. Yet this is not near any rail networks, and has to be content with a guided busway.15
The other option was to build on euphemistically named ‘brownfield sites’, which are primarily former industrial wasteland.
An extremely long but very compelling history of house-building (and the lack thereof) in England.
Beware of the Food That Isn’t Food (The Atlantic)
Before reading [Chris] van Tulleken’s work, I felt pretty confident that junk food was bad. That didn’t stop me from eating it, however. Learning about Ultra Processed Food is a different experience—you begin to realize that some of this stuff is barely food at all. I had a revelation at a railway-station snack shop the day before meeting van Tulleken, when I looked at shelves of candy bars that filled my entire field of vision. Suddenly, I thought: Hang on, this chocolate can survive at room temperature. For a year. He told me he had previously experienced a similar moment of unease, which led him to think: “How would a normal human try and figure out what they should eat in this station?”
I talked to Chris Van Tulleken about his new book, Ultra-Processed People, which makes a convincing argument that food filled with weird shit is bad for you.
The Tortured Bond of Alice Sebold and the Man Wrongfully Convicted of Her Rape (New Yorker)
A year after his release, one of his cousins set him up with a woman named Elizabeth, who worked as a roofer. On their first night together, he told her that he wanted to be in a relationship with her but that she had to read his trial documents first. He slept on the couch while she spent the night in his bedroom with the transcripts. In the morning, she came into the living room where he was sleeping and said, crying, that she believed him.
They found jobs that they could do together, like roofing, janitorial, and factory work. They requested night shifts, because Broadwater wanted a potential alibi during what he called the “witching hours”—the time when most violent crimes occur. He was continually stunned that Elizabeth never left him for being a sex offender and never doubted his innocence. “That’s basically how I kept my face up,” he told me. But they decided not to have children, because they didn’t want their child to grow up with the stigma of the crime.
I’m so glad the New Yorker assigned this story to Rachel Aviv, who has written previously about the fallibility of memory. The facts of the story here are stark: as a college student, Alice Sebold, who is white, was violently raped in an underpass by a black man. She thought she saw the man some time later and reported it to police, who arrested that man; later, she didn’t correctly identify him in a police line-up but the prosecutor explained it away; the man was convicted in a judge-only trial on the basis of a (now debunked) hair analysis.
The man, Anthony Broadwater, went to prison, where he was repeatedly denied parole because he maintained his innocence. Sebold wrote a memoir about the experience, and then The Lovely Bones, a novel from the perspective of a girl who is raped and murdered. After 16 years and 7 months, Broadwater was freed. People began to question the basis of the conviction, and it has since been vacated. He has received $5 million in compensation for wrongful imprisonment.
The racial dynamics of this story are unavoidable: Sebold’s virginity was repeatedly stressed at the trial, for instance, placing her in a tradition of pure white womanhood defiled by a black savage. Broadwater was advised not to have a jury trial because the jury would be likely all-white, and thus unsympathetic. America’s racial history meant that when the conviction was vacated, some headlines painted Sebold in the tradition of Carolyn Bryant, the accuser of Emmett Till; Mayella Ewell from To Kill A Mockingbird; and the Central Park Karen — icons of racist white ladydom who invoked white male authority against black men. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that all three of those stories are more complicated than they first appear.) When Sebold wrote an apology to Broadwater, which she also published on Medium, Bitch Media’s headline was “The Infuriating Failure of Alice Sebold’s Apology.”
That seems staggeringly unfair to me: no one is claiming that Sebold invented the rape. It has undoubtedly blighted her entire life. But so has Broadwater’s wrongful conviction—years of prison violence have terrorised him; he is petrified that some other rape will be pinned on him, to the extent of taking night-time jobs so he has a perpetual alibi; and he has had to live with the shame and stigma of the world believing he’s a sex offender. If you’re Sebold, how do you deal with the fact that you rebuilt yourself after the worst thing in your life happened, when Broadwater didn’t?
In my post on writing, I mentioned that stories live in the details, and here is one that contains a world. The trial took only two days; Sebold didn’t attend the day when Broadwater testified, “because the trial had been scheduled for the same day as her sister’s college graduation. The trial date couldn’t be changed, and her parents said she couldn’t miss the ceremony.”
Quick Links
“The truth is, the Oxford scholarship exam of those days was designed to reward people of exactly my background and journalistic state of mind.” Polly Toynbee reflects on her privileged life, and reveals that she was put off teenage motherhood by seeing Boris Johnson naked (Guardian).
Big Wambsgans Energy from Ron DeSantis here (twitter).
Interesting polls which show much more more liberal British conservatives are than US Republicans across multiple issues (abortion, faith in public life, homosexuality, etc).
Academic paper attempting to map “anti woke” networks in the UK. Bit overwrought—in the red string on the corkboard sense—in places, but lots of interesting stuff too, particularly in outlining the disparate themes which characterise that space.
The Succession cast murdering “Say It Ain’t So” by Weezer (twitter).
‘Unsurprisingly, the coronation – a highly symbolic event that, in economic terms, is relatively insignificant – was catnip. The barrister Charlotte Proudman posted a photo of crowds in London for the event alongside a rally in North Korea, with the caption: “Spot the difference.” And when, on the day, the official Twitter account of Paddington Bear asked everyone “to be kind and polite”, the author James Felton replied: “Read the room Paddington you marmalade c***.”’ The New Statesman addresses a vital question: why is the centre-left is so cringe?
Perfect joke delivery by Jeff Bridges here (twitter).
As you know, I carry no torch for Kellie-Jay Keen, but a moment’s reporting would have established that her Australian rally was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis. She didn’t organise a neo-Nazi rally. The i paper’s Patrick Strudwick might have made a very expensive mistake.
“Armstrong’s original writing team for Succession consisted for the most part of British comedy writers. There was doubt felt in some quarters as to whether this group of scruffy Brits could pull off a glossy, high-end New York drama. And in many ways we couldn’t. After we handed in the scripts for the first few episodes of season one, HBO hastily employed a super-rich consultant, whose job was to explain what it was like to be a billionaire to a group of people who were thrilled that someone was paying for their Pret sandwich.” Georgia Pritchett on the Succession writing room, which has hosted some of my favourite playwrights (The Guardian).
“Toward the end of that second conversation, [Damon] Lindelof began speculating about what would happen to his career as a result of this book. He sounded as demoralized as I felt. ‘It’s not for me to say what kind of person I am,’ he said. ‘But I will say this—I would trade every person who told you that I was talented—I would rather they said I was untalented but decent, rather than a talented monster.’” An extract from a new book which chronicles the deeply unhappy atmosphere behind the scenes on Lost (Vanity Fair).
“I also think that lesbian feminism should take some weight for detransitioning young women not getting the memo earlier that you don’t have to be a boy to love girls. If that movement has undertaken that challenge in this context, I have missed it.” Catharine Mackinnon is an often interesting thinker, but she’s tripping balls throughout this article (Signs Journal). How can she not know that it’s lesbians like Katie Herzog who have been making exactly the points Mackinnon thinks no one is making—and have been hounded for it?
“The fag-end of any period of dominance often ends decadently and this is what is happening to British conservatism now. The party has been in power since 2010 and the electorate knows this is long enough. Deep down, a chunk of the conservative movement knows this too. Hence the ever more strident, even apocalyptic, terms in which conservative discourse now takes place.” (Alex Massie, Substack)
“I won’t bother with analysing the posthumous use of the Anglo Irish imperialist Edmund Burke (Burke believed, for example, that India should be governed by commissioners based in London) as a figurehead for an international nationalist outfit. It’s an affectation, of course, but no worse than many.” David Aaronovitch on who’s funding the NatCons (Substack).
Jesse Armstrong is giving a lecture in London on politics and drama on June 15.
A week later, very much the yin to the yang of the previous event, Russell Brand is hosting an event in London on CENSORSHIP.
See you next time!
That MM meme is just perfection. So good I had to immediately share it before reading another word.
Also, 😫 missing link to the Gdn piece about the Succession writers?
Tripping balls - really the perfect summary.