The Bluestocking, vol 308: F1 and Enron

The US government had a Grindr problem

Happy Friday!

On this week’s Page 94 podcast, you can be reminded of all of George Galloway’s greatest hits, plus we talk about Kate Middleton conspiracies and suspicious pub fires (not connected).

Plus, there are a few tickets left for me talking to Armando Iannucci about satire on Monday, 25 March. You can get 20% off by entering the code HELEN20.

Helen

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Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain (Road and Track, archive)

“I think if you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. No need for corny art singing tribute to the worker or even for the Manifesto. Never before had I seen so many wealthy people gathered all in one place. If a tornado came through and wiped the whole thing out, the stock market would plummet and the net worth of a country the size of Slovenia would vanish from the ledgers in a day. I used to live in Baltimore and remembered the kind of people who would go to the Preakness in their stupid hats and Sunday best while the whole swath of the city it was situated in starved and languished for lack of funds. This was like that, but without the hats. I saw $30,000 Birkin bags and $10,000 Off-White Nikes. I saw people with the kind of Rolexes that make strangers cry on Antiques Roadshow. I saw Ozempic-riddled influencers and fleshy, T-shirt-clad tech bros and people who still talked with Great Gatsby accents as they sweated profusely in Yves Saint Laurent under the unforgiving Texas sun. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. People clinked glasses of free champagne in outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body. I stood there among them in a thrift-store blouse and shorts from Target.”

This article disappeared from Road and Track’s website shortly after publication. (I expect a screaming PR was involved.) I liked it because it’s a good illustration of George Orwell’s commentary on journalism: to see what is front of your nose is a constant struggle. I take that to mean that, when you’re out reporting, you need to make yourself forget all your preconceptions and pre-cooked narratives, and go: what would a normal person think if they saw this for the first time?

The backdrop to this article by Kate Wagner is that Formula 1’s popularity has exploded in America since there was a Netflix documentary about it. However, the sport now has a problem: Max Verstappen utterly dominates the grid at the moment, so there isn’t much drama on that front. Added to which, Verstappen himself is not that compelling a figure, nor does he have a great backstory (he is a quiet Dutchman, and the son of a driver). So F1 has lots of money and attention, but a severe drama deficit.

What the piece reveals is how much Big Sport needs journalists, to create characters and spin out plotlines and rivalries. But it also wants to control those plotlines and limit access to those characters, and so it hoses down those same journalists—who earn a fraction of top professional athletes—with gold, in the form of freebie trips and press dinners. Everyone kinda knows this, but it’s considered gauche to talk about it.

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Respect to the Japanese here for having data that goes back to the ninth century. (This excellent record-keeping is also how we know about a megaquake that devastated the American west coast before written records began there; it caused a tsunami in Japan.)

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Quick Links

1. David Sedaris talking about his new children’s book is a delight (YouTube).

2. “Enron closed less than two weeks later, at a loss of millions of dollars. Prebble was devastated, particularly on behalf of the cast and crew, who were suddenly unemployed. ‘Now I look back at it—I wouldn’t say that it’s a cold show, but it basically says that the way we are all living is unsustainable bullshit, especially in New York,’ Prebble said. ‘In retrospect, that’s quite a foolish thing to charge people hundreds of dollars to hear.’” The New Yorker profiles playwright and Succession screenwriter Lucy Prebble.

3. “Being fast, being reliable, being dependable are all valued attributes in a screenwriter. And enough writers don't possess them that it's possible to stand out on those metrics alone. The problem arises when being fast becomes the whole ball game, when the pride you feel at delivering on the impossible deadline, at being the go-to guy in a tight spot, becomes enough. I'm there now. And I don't want to be. It's no fun and the work is no good.” Julian Simpson on Cal Newport’s new book on “slow productivity” (Development Hell).

4. “Every commitment that you make brings with it some amount of administrative overhead, such as emails or meetings. I call this the “overhead tax.” The problem with taking on too much work at once is that all of the resulting overhead tax begins to pile up.” David Epstein has also been reading that book. I liked this concept from Newport, although it will never not be funny to me that he wrote a book about giving up email just as the pandemic happened (Bluestockings passim).

5. “In 2019, a government contractor and technologist named Mike Yeagley began making the rounds in Washington, DC. He had a blunt warning for anyone in the country’s national security establishment who would listen: The US government had a Grindr problem.” Absolutely wild story from Wired about how invasive ad tracking is, and how widely available its capabilities are—who needs wiretaps when governments can just . . . buy the data. “What can I do with this—hypothetically?” the reporter asks at the end. “In theory, could you help me draw geofences around mental hospitals? Abortion clinics? Could you look at phones that checked into a motel midday and stayed for less than two hours?” The answer is Yes.

6. Jonn Elledge on the strange reluctance to take the doomsday scenario for Tories seriously, despite the evidence that exists for it.