The Bluestocking, vol 293

a source of instant paleontological delight

Happy Friday!

You know you’re a political nerd when you find yourself watching the Covid inquiry in your spare time. This week, picture painted of Boris Johnson’s leadership was somehow even worse than I had remembered it, with the suggestion that he went on holiday in February 2020 to knock out his Shakespeare book for some cash, and his officials spent most of the pandemic tricking him into reading his briefings by digesting them into WhatsApps.

Then came the evidence of Helen McNamara, the former deputy cabinet secretary, which included an email about the NHS’s woeful inability to fit protective equipment to its (majority female) workforce that painfully reminded me of all my efforts over my career not to get called a demanding bitch. (“If you need more on this let me know!”) The same email written by Dominic Cummings would have read: hey wanker, sort out the PPE.

In celebration of that fact, I decided to start a small argument with Cummings on Twitter, which ended up with me suggesting that the country would be in a far better place if he’d spent all the time he devoted to Brexit on convincing the Tory party to build some bloody houses. I’m still fascinated by Cummings, who has made many undeniably correct criticisms of Whitehall and the media in the last week, alongside his frothier ravings. (Tom Whipple, science editor of the Times, did a good digest of his witness statement.) Just like Cassandra was cursed with the gift of prophecy, but also that no one would listen to her, Cummings is cursed to be very smart but constitutionally unable to stop reminding everyone of that fact, which makes them hate him. I sorely wish Sun-Tzu had slipped a chapter called “don’t call anyone who crosses you a c*** and particularly don’t fall out with your boss’s wife” into The Art of War.

Helen

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prompt: a man sitting at a computer in the style of van gogh

My Left Kidney (Scott Alexander, Substack)

I make fun of Vox journalists a lot, but I want to give them credit where credit is due: they contain valuable organs, which can be harvested and given to others.

I thought about this when reading Dylan Matthews’ Why I Gave My Kidney To A Stranger - And Why You Should Consider Doing It Too. Six years ago, Matthews donated a kidney. Not to any particular friend or family member. He just thought about it, realized he had two kidneys, realized there were thousands of people dying from kidney disease, and felt like he should help. He contacted his local hospital, who found a suitable recipient and performed the surgery. He described it as “the most rewarding experience of my life” . . .

The effective altruist Scott Alexander just took part in one of his sect’s coolest/weirdest rituals: donating a kidney to a stranger. (“Most people don’t do interesting things unless they’re in a community where those things have been normalized.”)

This account is interwoven with Alexander’s experience of effective altruism getting smeared by association with the fallen crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried, who claimed he was making billions to give them away. That makes it extra spicy, beyond the interest of describing something you know you ought to do but also that you won’t. Incidentally, Alexander is upset about the press misreporting EA activists “buying a castle” (which he thinks makes sense as an events venue). But even some people within the EA community think that spending $15m on Wytham Abbey suggests everyone involved had got a bit carried away.

Chaser: Henry Oliver thinks that Sam Bankman-Fried had, essentially, a religious experience when William MacAskill first spoke to him about effective altruism. This is what I love about belief systems: the same one can make one person do something wonderful (donate a kidney) and another lose $8bn of other people’s money through (at minimum) careless arrogance.

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Illustration by Virginia Echeverria

Big Menopause (The Atlantic)

These attempts to Make Menopause Happen are largely positive; the subject has always been taboo, because it is that lethal combination of having to do with women’s bodies (ugh) and with aging (ugh). Everyone who starts having periods will one day stop having them, and that transition involves a drastic change in hormone levels that can affect the entire body: night sweats, tinnitus, joint stiffness, hair loss, heart palpitations, brain fog. Managing these symptoms alongside unexpected—and unexpectedly heavy—periods is a huge challenge for working women. Like pregnancy, menopause is not an illness. But that doesn’t mean it is easy, so good employers should make accommodations for it.

What concerns me is the likely outcome of all the recent awareness raising: stealth marketing in lieu of actual help. Capitalism has gotten its hooks into menopause and wants to shake it until money falls out. To take one example: Is Gwyneth Paltrow selling menopause supplements that have not been evaluated by the FDA and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease? You bet your Madame Ovary pills she is!

I celebrated World Menopause Day by writing about Germaine Greer’s The Change, and the rise of menopause influencers.

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Quick Links

1. They said it would never happen! Saturday Night Live did a funny sketch (Twitter).

2. A lovely video of Leslie Caron in An American in Paris, doing ballet exercises while reading a book.

3. Here’s Carl Sagan in 1977 pointing out how weird it is that everyone on Tattooine, a desert planet, is extremely white.

4. “Searching for the elusive answer to a persistent question concerning the seeming gullibility of my fellow Americans—namely, why did 42 percent of adults surveyed this spring by Gallup say they believe that God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago?—I recently found myself in the office of Ken Ham, the born-again Barnum behind Kentucky’s $35 million Creation Museum, debating a separate but related question, one whose existence I had not previously recognized but which became for me a source of instant paleontological delight: How could dinosaurs have coexisted with other animals within the teeming confines of Noah’s Ark?” My boss Jeff Goldberg went to the Creation Museum back in 2014 (The Atlantic)

5. I feel like I have seen the whole of The Greatest Showman just from watching clips on TikTok. Can it really all be as Partridge as this?

6. “On Friday, January 12, the people waiting in the lottery line looking for a long shot would get a lucky break—a free, close-up ticket to a concert by one of the world’s most famous musicians—but only if they were of a mind to take note.

   Bell decided to begin with “Chaconne” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor.” A master violinist played his Stradivarius on the subway, to see if people would recognize the superior quality of performance that usually saw tickets go for $100. Spoiler: they did not. This story is a really fascinating reflection on how much of “genius” is about an aura—reputation, mystique, exclusivity, branding (Washington Post, 2007).

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ICYMI: I wrote an elegy for Matthew Perry, the most important man in the world to Teenage Me. After that piece, a source got in touch with the picture from the Oxford Union that I wrote about. I was expecting to be horrified by how young I looked; instead I was horrified by the fact I have Peter Beardsley’s hair. My source: “It wasn’t your best haircut, that is for sure, but arguably, by no means your worst.”

See you next time!