The Bluestocking, vol 292
And I seek out sunsets
Happy Friday!
I’m talking to Hannah Barnes, author of Time to Think, about gender, science and scepticism in Brighton on 9 January.
Tickets are available from the Brighton Skeptics here.
Helen
How Millennials Grew Up and Got Old (Culture Study)
The pandemic was also the first time I heard managers fully switch to ‘those Gen-Zers” as a way to complain about workers being “entitled” and “coddled.” Millennials had officially aged out of our status as a cultural anxiety point. It was a relief, of course. But we’d been the punching bag for so long that yielding that bag also felt weird.
And then there’s all the cultural recycling. The songs all over Top 40 radio that interpolate or cover songs from millennials’ teenage years…but also the entire existence of “Y2K” as an aesthetic. It’s going to Target or scrolling through an online storefront and seeing the same fashions that defined us and tortured us…..and realizing our parents probably felt the same way when ‘60s and ‘70s fashions started cycling through our wardrobes in the ‘90s.
But here’s the thing: seeing these fashions, hearing these songs, it doesn’t make me mad. It just makes me shake my head in an approximation of “kids these days, someday they’ll learn how much long denim skirts suck.” Like, you know, an old person!!!!!
Anne Helen Peterson on being an elder millennial. For my latest birthday, my older sister got me a card that said: “Everyone gets to be young once. But your time is over now.”
Israel, Palestine, and the need for principled free speech (Slow Boring, Substack)
Another take I’ve seen recently, this one from a lot of moderate and right-of-center people, is that the campus left is just getting a taste of its own medicine.
I get where that comes from. But any time you find yourself prosecuting a hypocrisy case, you ought to take some time to consider what you think is actually correct. And in my view, it’s the arguments in favor of free speech. The Israel-Palestine dispute is an excellent illustration of the general principle that it’s challenging to draw a bright line between passionate arguments about public policy and bigotry, especially when you incentivize people to make claims about the latter in order to shut down the former. And we’re also already seeing swathes of American society being ripped apart by a war happening thousands of miles away because of a culture that encourages people to cultivate their own sense of subjective fragility in order to silence enemies.
That is bad when it happens on the left, and it’s bad when happens on the right.
Here’s Matt Yglesias on the temptation to be annoyed with people who declared cancel culture wasn’t real in 2020, before tweeting a spicy Israel take in 2023 and discovering that it very much was. There have been some obviously egregious cases—a guy fired from editing a scientific journal for tweeting an Onion article, for example.
Quick Links
“By this point in 2023, so many studies have found links between the Covid vaccines and the menstrual cycle that the European Medicines Agency recommended adding heavy periods to the list of side effects, at least for for mRNA vaccines. But back in May 2021 when I first started reporting on this, the tone from the medical community was very different.” Caroline Criado Perez on the vaccine data gap—she lobbied during the pandemic for researchers to ask female-specific questions, but largely they didn’t. And then women who noticed their periods had changed were told to be quiet because it was giving succour to anti-vaxxers. Not a great moment in the history of evidence-based medicine (Invisible Women, Substack).
“If [Harriet] Harman’s entire career had to be summed up in three words, they would be public unity and loyalty. Every Labour leader, from Michael Foot to Keir Starmer, has enjoyed her unwavering support.” Decca Aitkenhead meets Harriet Harman, and fails to get anything juicy out of her—an experience I have also had. But this interview made me remember how much of politics is about being a foot soldier rather than a star. It’s another reason that I think Keir Starmer was right to kick Jeremy Corbyn out of the Labour party; Corbyn never had any loyalty to the wider party or movement; in fact he thought it was corrupt and compromised. Imagine the last two weeks if he was still in the PLP! The whole conversation would be about whether Labour ministers would denounce whatever rally he’d been to or provocative thing he’d said. (The Sunday Times, £)
When Gordon Ramsay wanted to buy his first house, his father-in-law gave him some EXTREMELY RELATABLE advice (twitter).
“It helps, of course, that there is a lot to do in the game that has nothing to do with the main story, and has nothing to do with the good deeds I was obsessed with pushing upon Arthur my first time through. I fill my satchel with berries and plants that I never consume or craft anything with. I walk into the saloons and play card games for hours, winning or losing cents at a time. I drink and stumble around dirt roads with no aim. And I seek out sunsets. This is my favorite part.” The Paris Review did a series of essays on videogames. This is Hanif Abdurraqib on Red Dead Redemption, a very serious Western that I treated like a My Little Pony simulator, trying to collect all the different coloured horses.
“For long talks, make them oniony.” Paul Bloom on how to give a better-than-average talk (Small Potatoes, Substack)
Some dude has claimed for years to have 7,000 Bitcoins (currently worth $200m) on an encrypted USB stick with two password guesses left before it wipes itself. Now a company has worked out how to crack the USB stick and he’s . . . not going to let them. This story is fishier than a haddock’s armpit (Wired).
“Yes, Trump is almost as old as Biden, but he has the energy and stamina and obsessiveness of the truly mentally ill.” Andrew Sullivan on the likely 2024 US presidential election match-up and why he thinks Biden shouldn’t run. (The Weekly Dish, Substack).
“Shadowcasting, however, goes beyond ‘cosplaying’ to a sometimes bonkers degree. It’s not just wearing a costume, it is wearing a character. You step into a fantasy world and into the body of someone who lives in that world. You aren’t just dressing up as that character, you become that character. When I was shadowcasting, I wasn’t trying to perform a character like Tim Curry did, I was trying to BE Frank N Furter.” Gia Milinovich on her time in the Rocky Horror fandom. No one will ever look cooler than she does dressed as Frank alongside Anthony Head and Richard O’Brien (My Apophenic Haze, Substack).
Amanda Knox’s time in prison has led her to give out some truly shocking sleeping advice: switch sides with your partner every night (Slate).
The Hamas leadership is hiding out in Qatar, but no one wants to talk about that. Why not? Maybe because the Qataris have been splashing the cash around the US —and UK—with universities at the front of the queue (The Free Press, Substack).
I apologise in advance, but here is a game where you have to fill in every station on the Tube (and Overground and DLR). If you can do more than 50 percent without cheating you are officially a Nerd. Let me start you off: the one on the Circle Line you have forgotten is Bayswater.
Nepotism corner! Sarah Ditum’s Toxic, which tells the story of women, fame and the 00s, was published yesterday. Sophie Elmhirst’s Maurice and Maralyn, an unconventional non-fiction love story amid a shipwreck, is now available for pre-order. I have blurbed them both.
See you next time! Also, if you’re looking for Christmas present inspiration, I just drew up my Amazon gift list which is full of suggestions.
Thanks Helen, I will be working all weekend to make up for the fact that I have spent my entire Friday on that tube thing. 56.9% so far (joint effort). Aaargh.
50.2%! I left in 2014 as well. Annoyed I couldn’t reel off all the ends of lines, God knows I’ve heard them called out often enough.