12 Comments
Mar 8Liked by Helen Lewis

FWIW, just wanted to say that, measured by the number of articles I save to Pocket every time I read The Bluestocking, this must be my absolute favourite Substack. Thank you for the wonderful curation.

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“Kate Middleton conspiracies and suspicious pub fires (not connected)”

OR ARE THEY

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Someone will find a way to link them! It’s like she’s become the new Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

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To quote veteran F1 journalist Mark Hughes on The Race F1 Show earlier this week, "it's never a dull day in F1, unless there's a race on."

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I love this idea of overhead tax. It names something I've found myself being very annoyed by, and it goes along with the idea of emotional/mental labor. Once I was in a group at my school whose task was to bring a meal for the monthly birthday celebration. We chose a baked potato bar and it felt like we needed one million emails to figure it all out. After that I was the "I'll bring chips or paper supplies" person. Never again am I spending that amount of time on something that has no effect on my job and doesn't matter at all.

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What's the connection between F1 and cherry blossom in Japan I hear you ask? Maybe I misheard, but anyway, the new scheduled slot for the Japanese Grand Prix in Suzuka, now in April means this year it will coincide with cherry blossom season for the first time.

I have been thinking of late couldn't one of these rich team owners pay Max to take early retirement maybe. At the moment none of the other teams can even conceive of beating him, which probably doesn't help.

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Fortunately if he moves to Mercedes as is suggested, he'll never win a race again.

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Stranger things have happened. Despite his comments it must get pretty dull dominating race after race, so a move would provide him with a fresh challenge. Christian Horner's apoplectic reaction would just be an added bonus for the fans.

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Mar 8·edited Mar 8

He spends a surprising amount of his spare time on iRacing, possibly because he gets more competition there. Which feels a bit like discovering that Alex Ferguson or Jose Mourinho spend their downtime playing Football Manager...

(fwiw, I once raced Fernando Alonso on it, he obliterated the rest of us, suggesting it's an at least passable simulation...)

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Maybe I'm neurotic but that article on Grindr ad tech makes me tempted to once and for all delete that awful app. Doubt anyone would ever want to know my whereabouts, but it still feels wrong how very personal identifying information could be sold like that.

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Scott Alexander's latest, on the unmasking of not-actually-Native-American professor of Native American studies Elizabeth Hoover, seems relevant to your interests: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-race-and

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The F1 article is excellent. Also: man, the megaquake... sobering to think that a mind-bendingly huge earthquake is almost certain to wipe out huge swathes of the US West Coast in the relatively near future, and yet as a society we're unwilling/unable to do much to prepare for it (with the notable exception of indigenous communities who've eg moved settlements to higher ground).

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