The Bluestocking, vol 305

my little pet mold friend

Happy Friday!

This week, my downtime has been mostly devoted to watching the second season of the Australian Traitors. I won’t spoiler it, but—this series does validate the critiques of the show as a bad game (it’s undeniably great telly).

Also, one of the contestants is so reminiscent of a British newspaper columnist that you may, like me, start to blur the two in your head, which adds an extra layer of emotional turmoil.

I am desperate to discuss this show, so if you have an opinion, please leave in the comments. Everyone else, avoid that thread if you don’t want spoilers.

Helen

prepare to have strong opinions on this man

To Stop A Shooter (The Atlantic)

“[Defense lawyer] Eiglarsh also argued that if Peterson was a coward, then lots of people were: He worked hard to interrogate the proposition that any person had behaved heroically during the massacre. Prosecutors called to the witness stand one cop after another who told jurors how they had run toward the building, broken windows, rescued students, while Peterson stood idly beside a wall. But the more heroically officers portrayed themselves on the stand, the harder Eiglarsh went after them during cross-examinations, highlighting every act of hesitation, ineptitude, or futility.

As prosecutors tried to build up a series of heroes and Eiglarsh poked holes in their putative valor, the narrative that had congealed around the Coward of Broward began to soften a little, and was replaced by something probably closer to the truth: At Stoneman Douglas that day, some people did better than others, but no one present had been hero enough to stop the lethal power of a psychopath armed with a semiautomatic rifle, bent on slaughtering innocent people.”

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This is the Atlantic’s latest cover story, about the middle-aged cop who was on campus at Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Parkland, Florida, when a young man with a rifle started shooting. Instead of rushing headlong to confront the shooter, sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson hung back, taking cover and waiting. He was put on trial for child endangerment, on the basis that he had minors under his protection. But as Jamie Thompson notes, he was essentially on trial for cowardice.

This piece reminds me of the very fine Washington Post article on parents whose children die, forgotten, in car seats. There is the same sense that the prosecution of Scot Peterson is an exorcism, an attempt by everyone else to say: I would never act like that. But most of us would. Paralysing fear is a natural response to danger.

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DAN KENNEDY FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE. STYLING: HANNAH SKELLEY

Kemi Badenoch: “I Will Not Be Tripped Up” (Times, paywall)

Those surprised to hear tough, small state views from a black woman — and Badenoch has been mistaken in parliament for a Labour MP — conflate Britain’s African diaspora with Caribbean immigrants. “Until recently, Africans came here from middle-class homes to go to university and, if we stayed around, we worked in banks,” she says. “Whereas the Windrush generation came to do working-class jobs: driving buses, nursing.”

The two groups also have a historically different relationship with British imperialism. “In Nigeria, there are more than 300 different languages,” says Badenoch, who spoke Yoruba before English, “and our history goes back thousands of years. And yes, there was a period of colonialism: some people came, they did some things and they left. But that is not our story. In the Caribbean, that is a profound part of their history, which creates a different mindset towards this country. And what is really sloppy and lazy is anyone assuming all black people have the same issues, the same experiences of discrimination. It is very, very complex.”

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Great interview of possible next Tory leader Kemi Badenoch by Janice Turner.¹ I’ve seen Badenoch speak a few times—most recently at NatCon—and what strikes me is her extremely strong ideological principles and her high tolerance for disagreeability. The Thatcher comparison is overdone with female politicians, but there is something familiar about the combination of crispness, lack of self-doubt and work ethic.

Watching Badenoch clash with fellow Tory Caroline Nokes (who seems untroubled by the need to research) at the Women and Equalities Select Committee has become one of my guilty pleasures. Here, Badenoch dispatches Nadine Dorries’s The Plot with equal vigour: “She [Dorries] thinks she’s just writing stuff, but people who have that kind of mindset latch on to it. If you get the unhelpful coalition of mental health issues and propensity to violence, then you read the Nadine Dorries conspiracy theory and decide you want to kill someone, it’s very, very nasty.”

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Quick Links

1. Interesting thread on how becoming good at “working an audience” can send you one of two ways: you can either have contempt for how easy people are to manipulate, or begin to loathe yourself as a performing seal. Doing panel shows has definitely taught me that 37% of comedy is being confident enough to pause after the joke and trust that people will laugh. You can say something objectively vey amusing, but if you don’t cue the audience—give them permission, even encouragement—they won’t respond.

2. “In recalling an experience where she had to take a long drive, P4 explained, ‘oh, I gotta bring my little pet mold friend, during the drive.’” Researchers made a heartbeat monitor powered by slime mould and so people got emotionally attached to the mould. (Research paper, PDF)

3. “It is hard to remember now, but there was once a time when the insights of Thomas Friedman read fresh and strikingly original. That his ideas seem so banal and obvious today is in many ways a measure of how successful he was at popularizing them in the early 2000s”. A discussion of why public intellectuals go off the boil (Substack).

4. “Podcasts are businesses.” Good video interrogation of how interview podcasts work: controversy, brutal a/b testings of thumbnails, loads of contradictory “expert” advice without any attempt to work out what’s true. Andrew Huberman nods along to a guy totally misrepresenting a study. Steven Bartlett promotes Huel without mentioning that he’s a non-executive director. Also, it’s all just the same half dozen men (yep, men) circulating around each other’s podcast. (James Smith, YouTube).

See you next time!

1. Personally, I would swerve the next Tory leadership race—well, technically I would swerve all Tory leadership races, for the obvious reason that the winning prize is leading the Tory party. But the next one looks like being “would you like to be as miserable as Ed Miliband was, 2010-2015?”