The Bluestocking, vol 289

Ask a hoplite pikeman, if you have one handy

Happy Friday!

A truncated newsletter today as I’ve just finished a month of travelling—Kenya and then the U.S.—and I don’t really know what my name is or where I put my toothbrush. But I did get to see a leopard in the wild, so let’s call it even.

Also our guide asked if I wanted a picture with an elephant so obviously I said YES and then did this face:

Anyway, let me just say that if you were considering a safari, I recommend it wholeheartedly. Did you know that there are lions just running around out there?

Until next week,

Helen

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Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

A Satanic Rebellion (The Atlantic)

“Who becomes a Satanist? The Temple’s membership leans white, according to an informal survey conducted by Laycock; although its founders are straight men, it appears to be gender-balanced, and it has high levels of LGBTQ representation. To understand what attracts members, you need to know that the organization offers fellowship and camaraderie—at Black Masses, “unbaptisms,” Satanic picnics, and the occasional orgy—in addition to its legal and campaign work.

Some people come to the Temple through an existing interest in “alternative” lifestyles; these members’ hair, clothes, and tattoos proclaim them to be punks, goths, bikers, or heavy-metal fans. Others, though, have different reasons for sticking their middle finger up at organized religion. Some of the members I interviewed were raised in fundamentalist communities and joined the Temple to introduce structure and ritual back into their life—just without the supernatural beliefs. That dynamic helps explain the hero worship—and, on the flip side, intense sense of betrayal—that [Lucien] Greaves can inspire. He is an authority figure over people who claim to disdain authority.”

Here’s something I’ve been working on for a couple of months: in June, the Satanic Temple—an atheist group who don’t really believe in Satan but enjoy trolling fundamentalists—had a schism over (what else) gender.

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Quick Links

1. “After all, there is a world of difference between “Call me” and “Call me 💗”.” How the heart symbol dictated the future of emoji (One From Nippon)

2. “I think Einstein’s IQ was therefore probably more around 120 or 130 than 160. Indeed very high! But maybe not even ‘genius level.’ He would have scored similarly to [Richard] Feynman, one of the few geniuses we for sure have a modern IQ for, which was ‘merely’ 125.” Feynman, eh, what a dumbass (The Intrinsic Perspective).

3. “‘I do hear it in the air—around Walter Isaacson’s book [on Elon Musk] and probably around mine—this kind of suspicion-slash-hostility towards the journalist who really gets to know their subject, that it’s access journalism, or you got too close or whatever,’ Lewis told me. But that was the price of immersive reporting, he argued. Besides, he said, ‘I could never see this story as anything but comic. Maybe it’s a moral failing in some way, but that’s what it is.’” A good profile of the megastar journalist Michael Lewis, which explores the perils of being as big a celebrity as your subjects (Guardian).

4. “In every line of Homer, a feast of choices is laid before the translator. But every dish chosen means a dozen others left uneaten. Ask a hoplite pikeman, if you have one handy: When you impale a man, and your spear doesn’t come out clean, is it your victim’s “diaphragm” (as Fitzgerald has it), heart sac (as some have suggested), or lung that’s likely to be clinging to your weapon?” My colleague Graeme—who wrote a book on Isis—wishes that Emily Wilson’s Iliad translation was more violent and uncaring (The Atlantic).

5. David Beckham, investigative journalist (twitter).

6. “[Dorothy] Sayers’s enchanted world of Bright Young Things and Bloomsbury Bohemians, a world in which a successful author could afford to take a six-month holiday, is now steeped in nostalgia. But she was also commenting on Britain in the 1930s; she sharply observes the poverty of the era, and the rise of both Communism and Fascism. ‘What we need,’ one man observes chillingly in Gaudy Night (1930), ‘is an ‘Itler.’” Amanda Craig’s lecture on the centenary of Lord Peter Wimsey (Telegraph).

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my eternal respect to the nightmarish chaos generated by DALL-E in response to the prompt “90s supermodels”

Bluestocking recommends: All my travelling has given me time to catch up on some reading and watching, including the new Cormoran Strike novel (long, good); the new Mick Herron novel (sorely missing the presence of Jackson Lamb); Apple TV’s series on 90s supermodels (pure nostalgia crack, if crack can be heavily sanitised); the Baz Luhrmann Elvis movie (long, not good) and the new Richard Osman novel (short, made me cry).

See you next time!