The Bluestocking, vol 297: Tayvis, LinkedIn & Witches

it’s every girl’s biggest dream to be able to text their dog

Happy Friday!

Last weekend, I went to Prague—I will spare you the photographs of me eating chimney cakes while wrapped up in a duvet coat, because that’s what Instagram is for, but I do feel compelled to spread the good word. It’s a great city! The flight is very short! The city centre is very compact! It was not filled with stag parties like I thought it would be! Hit me up for tips if you’re thinking of going (you should).

Helen

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How LinkedIn Got Weird (Business Insider)

With 950 million members as of July, LinkedIn is poised to soon have a billion users, joining a rarefied three-comma club with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Started in 2003 as little more than an online repository for résumés, the Microsoft-owned behemoth has recently transformed. Not only are there more users to post, but they're posting much more often. The number of LinkedIn posts grew 41% from 2021 to 2023. But it's the content of the posts that's shifted the most, turning LinkedIn into one of the world's strangest social networks.

Take one post from Peter Rota, an SEO specialist from Massachusetts. "I have a secret," he wrote to his thousands of followers in August 2022. "Most people are not even aware this is a real thing. Since 2015, I have struggled with peeing in public restrooms." 

LinkedIn has been a stealthy favourite social network of mine for a while, because the contrast between the format (professional bragging) and the content (unprofessional bragging, oversharing, absurd grindfluencing, gratuitous abuse of hashtags) is often so stark. It’s like walking into an office full of people in suits shouting about their latest industry award and their menopause symptoms simultaneously. This Insider piece captures a lot of that dynamic, attributing it to the decline of other networks like Facebook, and the “bring your whole self to work” culture of the early 2020s.

(h/t to The Browser for finding this one!)

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Illustration by The Atlantic

Travis Kelce Is Another Puzzle for Taylor Swift Fans to Crack (The Atlantic)

Earlier this month, a series of tweets surfaced by Taylor Swift’s new boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce. In one of them, from 2011, he offered this observation: “I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy.”

Many more Kelce tweets like this soon emerged, rife with spelling near misses, extravagant punctuation, and a charmingly retro belief in the power of hashtags. They were indeed #crazy, but also sweet, funny, and sincere. This might be the first recorded instance of “offense archeology”—the writer Freddie deBoer’s term for digging through someone’s old posts—that enhanced the subject’s reputation. Yes, Kelce had written tweets about “fat people falling over”—the kind of thing that any 20-something dude might have said online in the early 2010s, unaware that he would one day be the subject of presidential-level vetting—but the majority of Kelce’s posts were adorable in their straightforward joie de vivre. In my own personal favorite, now deleted, he celebrated Easter by giving a “shoutout” to Jesus for “takin one for the team.... haha” (not just the son of God, but the tight end of the apostles). Kelce’s tweets were so wholesome that even the inevitable “brandter” from companies he mentioned, including Olive Garden, Chipotle, and Taco Bell—“karma is a crunchwrap coming straight home to me,” shoot me now—could not ruin my enjoyment of Kelce’s existence. “i understand taylor swift now,” one X user wrote in a viral post. “it’s every girl’s biggest dream to be able to text their dog. and that’s sort of the vibe travis kelce is bringing to the table.”

I have two friends my age, living otherwise blameless lives, who are as obsessed as I am with the Taylor-Travis matchup. Two American mega-brands—the NFL and the Swiftiverse—staging the most ambitious crossover event in history? It’s just . . . too perfect. Anyway, I had to write about it.

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Bluestocking Recommends: The Witches at the National Theatre. Camp, high-velocity, quite scary for kids, with a standout song about how children are awful. The book is by Lucy Kirkwood, one of my holy trinity of female millennial playwrights (along with Lucy Prebble and Alice Birch) and the direction is by Lyndsey Turner, a very talented woman who has now successfully exorcised my memories of the terrible St George, the last thing I saw her direct in the Olivier. Clock those Wes Anderson pastels!

One of my favourite things about the production is that it captures the duality of witches—they are at the same time misogynistic nightmares, barren spinsters who hate children enough to transform them into mice, and a sort of utopian vision of what it’s like to have no responsibilities. That’s not a note that you get in the original Roald Dahl book. Plus, Kirkwood also brings out the fact that we don’t expect middle-aged women in Boden cardigans—yes, the show literally namechecks Boden—to be monsters.

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Quick Links

1. “This sexualization of a medical procedure is offensive in its own right, but if the aim is to increase the uptake of screening it also seems strategically ill-conceived.” I love Deborah Cameron’s work on language, and here she is on a bizarre advertising campaign for cervical smears—she notes that too much advertising is about winning awards for advertisers/impressing their peers, rather than selling products or raising awareness or whatever the ostensible aim is. This looks like a classic example (Debuk, Wordpress).

2. From Lesbian Avengers to Masterchef, via a dog that looks like Princess Diana . . . Katie Herzog joins Julie Bindel and Kathleen Stock as a guest for their new podcast, The Lesbian Project.

3. “Yes-Damn Effect: You enthusiastically say yes to plans in the future, but when the time actually comes, you often regret it.” Gurwinder’s updated list of 30 useful principles (Substack).

4. Tim Alberta’s dad was a pastor with a white evangelical flock—the same demographic that has become Donald Trump’s most staunch supporters. In this extract from his new book, he asks how the American church got so corrupted. The payoff line, from his dad’s (more liberal, and thus unpopular) replacement, is spectacular: ‘“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?” Winans thought for a moment. “America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”’ (The Atlantic).

5. The Bluestocking is free—I write it because I read a lot, and it’s always nice to share. If you want to say thank you, here’s my Amazon Christmas wish list.

See you next time!