The Bluestocking, vol 316: Toxic mega Gmail
You’ve read one poem, haven’t you
Happy Friday!
This week I recorded a couple of episodes of David Runciman’s new podcast, The History of Bad Ideas. I picked mesmerism and anti-suffrage campaigns. The episodes should be out in a couple of weeks, once they’ve finished editing out all my irrelevant anecdotes.
I’m interested to know what other bad ideas people think would merit a podcast discussion—so far the series has done eugenics, the gold standard and Facebook friends. I picked Mesmerism because, although it’s a bad idea—pseudoscience—debunking it did involve one of the very first double-blind trials, and studying it did help lead to the discovery of hypnotism and the unconscious. Anti-feminism can’t boast anything as impressive.
Helen
I Felt Myself Split Into Before And After (The Guardian)
After a colonoscopy reveals my flaming insides in psychedelic detail, I am diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis. They will later conclude that my teenage Crohn’s diagnosis was erroneous. The idea is that the gastro doctors will visit me on the A&E ward, but after five days I’ve seen a consultant once. I cannot work out who to badger; it feels like all the people who can help me are elsewhere. A junior doctor mutters that the gastro ward should be renamed the Glasto ward: “That’s how impossible it is to get a ticket.” If only I could chuck on a bucket hat, scale the perimeter wall.
My confidence that I will make a Lazarine recovery falters, chipped away by the tedium of 30 toilet trips a day. I must chronicle them on a daily worksheet, a humiliation compounded by the Comic Sans font. Nevertheless, it sparks a nerdy satisfaction. I add an elaborate asterisk system to denote cramps, spasms, blood. I take it very seriously until the day I hand it in and watch the ward sister shove it straight in the bin.
I read this account of Lauren Bensted’s misdiagnosed Crohn’s, and then near-death encounter with toxic megacolon, not long after finishing Hannah Barnes’s account of her birth trauma (Times, £). I know that all of the NHS is struggling, but maybe maternity services are in the worst place, just because childbirth doesn’t respect other people’s timetables, and that makes it particularly difficult for the overstretched health service to manage.
Both of these stories also feature miscommunication, which is another feature of the NHS’s vast, under-managed bureaucracy. I finally managed to extort my blood pressure results (normal, to my shock) from a nurse practitioner on the phone last week, although she assured me they were in the NHS app and I simply had to look under the “communications” tab. Reader, there is no communications tab. There’s a “test results” tab, but they weren’t there.
As I said to someone on twitter, encountering the NHS as a patient when all the staff are used to navigating its bureaucratic machine every day is like perpetually being on your first day at work, and not knowing what the wifi code is. Except you get treated like you’re stupid.
How Gmail Became Our Diary (New York)
Twenty years ago this month, Google launched Gmail. At first, user numbers were deliberately kept low, and those with access would hoard invitations and bestow them on friends like precious gifts. Once you were on the inside, though, a whole new world opened up. It’s difficult to remember now (if you’re old enough to remember), but we used to delete our emails. The big-name providers — AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! — were so stingy with storage that users had to regularly scrub their inboxes, tossing messages into a digital burn box like diplomats abandoning an embassy. Google, however, gave everyone a full gigabyte of storage, enough in those lower-res days to keep, well, everything.
Because of that decision made in Mountain View, we now have a huge accidental archive of our collective past. Awkward flirtations, drunken rants, earnest pleas; friendships fraying or rekindled, personae tried on and discarded, good jokes and bad decisions; every dumb or brilliant or anguished thing we wrote below the subject line — we have an instantly searchable record of it all.
Thoroughly enjoyed this round-up of writers reminiscing about Gmail for its twentieth birthday. I was a Gmail early adopter, and recently it sent me a message saying I had used up 70 percent of my storage, which prompted me to go back looking for large files to delete. That was quite the time-travel adventure: I found my (now giant) nephews as babies, along with holidays with exes, the journalist networking group I ran in the 00s, and this photograph of me staring lovingly at Ed Miliband. Truly, a different era.
Quick Links
“I’m going to be pretty straight up with you, Steve. I mainly read nonfiction, to be honest. So it’s been a while since I’ve read a novel. I’m going to admit that.” A New Zealand politician suffers through a nightmare interview, which includes the interviewer saying “You’ve read one poem, haven’t you.” (Newsroom NZ).
“If Larry was thirty-five, he couldn’t get away with the watermelon stuff and Palestinian chicken . . . and HBO knows that’s what people come here for, but they’re not smart enough to figure out, How do we do this now? Do we take the heat, or just not be funny? And what they’ve decided to be is, Well, we’re not going to do comedies anymore. There were no sitcoms picked up on the fall season of all four networks. Not one. No new sitcoms.” Jerry Seinfeld is 70? Blimey (New Yorker)
Andy Mills, who made The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, has a new podcast called Reflector. In the first episode, he discusses why naltrexone is so little used in the U.S. for alcohol addiction, even though its success rate appears higher than 12-step willpower programmes. The discussion reminded me a lot of Ozempic Discourse, where people intuitively feel it’s wrong to be able to lose weight easily. His guest here is my beloved Katie Herzog, who used to drink a six-pack of beer a night and used naltrexone to quit relatively painlessly 18 months ago.
“First, while in any Chinese language each character is associated with a single way to speak it, in Japanese every kanji can be pronounced in multiple, very different ways. This part is perhaps the biggest bane of Japanese students.” Tell me about it, son (Aether Mug, via the Browser).
“Harpenden thanked the pair and said he would be in touch, when he got home he cut open the sack and poured it over his billiard table, which was quickly flooded with sparkling diamonds and rubies.” Ned Donovan on a great diamond hoax from the Wild West (Terra Nullius, Substack)
The health app Zoe just did some big layoffs. Regular readers will know I’m a Zoe sceptic—and I say that as someone who saw a professional nutritionist earlier this year and glugs down probiotics on the offchance they’re not just a placebo. I’m just not sure we understand the microbiome or blood glucose levels well enough to produce the kind of precise dietary advice for which Zoe charges £299 upfront plus £59.99 a month.
See you next time! Oh, and this newsletter just passed 20,000 subscribers—and if history taught us anything, it’s that 20,000 people can’t be wrong. So why not recommend it to a friend?
Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of women being able to get a credit card without the signature of a man (just thought I’d mention it)
I work in welfare benefits. The Kafka-esque nightmares are just as bad as in the NHS. One client came to us for help because she had unwittingly racked up £35,000 in overpayments and there’s nothing we can do.
I specifically took my current job because I was determined to tackle mal -administration in one little corner of The System