The Bluestocking, vol 327: Court reporters and other mythical creatures
"snarge", a mash-up of the words “snot” and “garbage”
Happy Friday!
The US economist Tyler Cowen thinks the US political vibe has shifted in the last week, and he has offered a list of reasons why, from Biden’s age to Trump’s humour to the emergent gender divide in American politics (Trump is most popular with divorced men, Biden with unmarried women).
I enjoyed wrestling with his breakdown, although I’m not sure about his premise: another way to look at the situation is that the Democrats are running an unpopular incumbent, who regularly stumbles through speeches, who’s clearly considered by his own party to be over-the-hill, with an equally unpopular vice-president who would take over if he couldn’t complete his term, who has not publicly rejected many of the ultra-progressive positions of 2020 that are clearly at odds with the median American voter . . . Donald Trump is still only leading by a few points.
And then I go back on myself: Trump recently became the first presidential candidate convicted of a felony, following a court finding him liable for sexual assault, and he hasn’t dropped off the electoral map because of that. In fact, his New York conviction drove a huge fundraising surge.
Where the vibe has shifted is on X. In buying the platform and turning it into a more popular Truth Social, Elon Musk has done something equivalent to Roger Ailes’s 1990s success at turning Fox News into a rightwing meme factory, talent incubator and narrative amplifier. Every time I log on now, my feed is full of previously banned rightwing influencers, and the “For You” tab reflects whatever the populist right talking point of the day is. (This week: DEI killed the Secret Service, the left cheers on political violence and is responsible for the degradation in American public life, people laughing at Matt Gaetz’s eyebrows).
Musk has himself fully come out as a Trump supporter, alongside a cadre of Silicon Valley guys who have formed a pro-Trump Super PAC (these are fundraising vehicles outside the official campaign, and they often push at the edict that they shouldn’t co-ordinate with candidates). This week Musk also announced he was moving X headquarters to Austin, Texas—most of his other businesses are either already in the Lone Star State or in the process of moving there. Musk is presenting this as a principled move in opposition to California governor Gavin Newsom’s new law, which bans districts from requiring that schools notify parents if their children change their name or pronouns.
I’m sure that is part of the story: Musk has a transgender child, who has cut off contact with him. But it’s also a fact that Texas is a more “business friendly” state than California, both in terms of taxes and things like planning permission. Musk already announced he was moving Tesla out of Delaware—a traditional place for US companies to incorporate because of its privacy protections—because a Delaware judge blocked the board awarding him a yuge £44bn pay deal. (Incidentally: on the Tesla board? James Murdoch.)
So really, Elon Musk may be the one-man vibe shift. But his now overt support of Trump has emboldened other tech elites, such as a16z’s Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreeeeeeesen, to express their views publicly. (Kara Swisher reported at the weekend that Horowitz, too, has a transgender child.) Meanwhile, JD Vance, who is now Trump’s vice-presidential pick, is a protege of Peter Thiel, who has long been an outspoken libertarian. I think it’s fair to say that leftwing cultural campaigns (see also: Me Too) have irritated a lot of Silicon Valley’s top men, plus Trump lines up with their desire for tax cuts and less regulation, and they don’t believe that a Trump government would be so chaotic and unstable it would threaten their business interests.
As for me, I’m left with a dilemma: should I stop looking at X? I just wrote a piece about my annoyance with the current state of the platform. Even looking at it these days makes me dispirited. Then again, it always did. Twitter was always the forum of choice for leftwing bullies to impose their values on everyone else—for example, by getting random normal people fired from their jobs. Now X is the forum of rightwing bullies to impose their values on everyone—for example, by getting random normal people fired from their jobs. But both of those phenomena are real, and they matter to coverage of American politics. So I think I have to keeping lifting the drain cover and taking a deep huff of the fumes.
Oh well.
Helen
Chortle chortle, scribble scribble: inside the Old Bailey with Britain’s last court reporters (The Guardian)
Toyn’s shorthand was still pretty good as far as I could tell, looping and decorous on his notepad as he made notes in the shotgun case. When I admitted to Toyn that I’d never learned how to do it, he looked disapproving. Shorthand was essential. The old skills were the best skills. He is generally a man for whom things were better before. Murders were better. Judges were better: fiercer, more impressive. Barristers were better – more flamboyant and fun to watch. Before, you could make jokes about anything, say what you liked. A couple of years ago, Toyn lost his media lecturing job in part, he thought, because he’d described a suicide as someone “topping themselves”.
More than anything, though, things were better before the internet. In his professional lifetime, Toyn felt he had seen not just the collapse of court reporting but the entire news industry. When he and Wilford started out in the 1980s as junior reporters at the Central News agency, the Old Bailey press room was packed with journalists from four different specialist court-reporting agencies, who used to race to file their copy first. Back then, Central was at the bottom of an established hierarchy, selling stories to the local and regional press. Toyn and Wilford were expected to do the grunt work of the court-reporting, then share their notes, free, with the grander reporters from the other agencies who supplied the nationals and spent the afternoon in the pub. (Toyn remembered one who kept a bottle of whiskey in his drawer from which he’d take sips while writing his copy, before calling his mother in tears.)
Wake up, babe, it’s New Sophie Elmhirst Longread O’Clock! There is so much to appreciate in this portrait of the two men behind Court News, the only agency that still covers all the big trials at the Old Bailey, London’s big criminal court. This is a story about a dying profession: it’s hard to see how anyone will replace Sophie’s two subjects, in all their argumentative, diligent, uncouth glory.
And as they point out, court reporting is dying at the exact same time as Netflix and the Daily Mail are getting yuge numbers out of true crime documentaries. There needs to be a word for the process where big, seemingly efficient and successful players prosper thanks to underfunded grunt work that no one appreciates until it’s gone. (There’s a similar dynamic with blue-checks on New Twitter who complain about the MSM, while spending all their time analysing its contents.) The spade-work of reporting has been hollowed out in journalism, but it’s what everything else depends on.
Impossible Creatures (The Common Reader, Substack)
The charm and high-accomplishment of Rundell’s work is that she often writes like classic authors, not modern ones. In The Explorer, Fred’s father cannot look after him properly because “the firm needs me” and Fred has a “headmaster”, both curiously old-fashioned ways of speaking in 2017. This father character is so out of date he might as well be in a J.M. Barrie novel. In The Good Thieves Rundell writes inclusively about children from a range of social backgrounds, but her heroine is appalled at the idea of spitting. Equality is one thing, vulgarity quite another. When Charles says, in Rooftoppers, that people who care too much about money have “flimsy brains” it is impossible to forget that Charles inherited his nice, large house.
Being an independently minded child in Rundell means being forthright, but never vulgar. Being a feminist character means wearing trousers or learning geography, but not talking about science. […] Rundell’s radical ideas are well disguised in her establishment trappings.
Henry Oliver takes Katherine Rundell’s writing for children seriously, in both its merits and shortcomings. I particularly enjoyed the above section on how she is locked in mortal struggle with her inner Blyton. Go on, Katherine! Let yourself be rude about children with dirty fingernails! Get excited about boarding schools!
Department of Recommendations
This week, I succumbed to Derry Girls on Netflix, which is set in Northern Ireland during the 1990s. As someone who also went to a Catholic girls school in the 1990s, I probably shouldn’t be allowed to watch it in company because I spent so much time going “Velour!” or “Step aerobics!” or “Curtains!” I nearly cried when a whole scene was acted while the girls did the dance to Whigfield’s Saturday Night. One of the characters was wearing those tiny crocodile clips to hold her hair back.
Anyway, that’s my (late) recommendation for weekend viewing, and an expression of mild annoyance that I didn’t watch it in time to write about it properly.
Department of Feedback
Power corrupts, the saying goes, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. At his coronation, Napoleon Bonaparte notoriously took the crown out of the pope’s hands and placed it on his own head, recognizing no authority higher than his own. Power went to his head, in the most literal sense possible. Elon Musk is in a similar situation today, although his vanity makes Napoleon look like a humble soldier from Corsica. Musk loves posting so much, he spent billions to ensure unimpeded access to the ability to reply “lol” to terrible memes and “!!” under the kind of grim stuff that used to be confined to Breitbart’s Black Crime vertical.
This week, I wrote about Elon Musk’s apparent desire to make himself stupider by huffing the fumes of X. (The Atlantic, gift link)
Not everyone was a fan:
If you would like to know WTF I’m talking about on a regular basis, Atlantic subscriptions are very reasonably priced.
Quick Links
“On a Friday afternoon in March, I’m standing at a workspace in the Feather ID Lab. In front of us is a goose corpse—wings tucked in, beak tightly closed, its plump belly facing the ceiling. There are also several bags of what Dove and company call “snarge,” a mash-up of the words “snot” and “garbage,” used to describe the viscid leftovers of birds that have collided with planes.” You had me at “bird detectives.” How a team analyses the birds that get sucked into jet engines, in order to stop plane crashes (Washingtonian)
“The Beckhams learned at the school of Princess Diana how to present as both fabulous and vulnerable, and in their marriage they formed the same push-me-pull-you battle with fakery that typifies the lives of the British royals today, whether at Windsor or the spiritual estates of Montecito.” Andrew O’Hagan reviews a new biography of the Beckhams (London Review of Books).
“As the furore died down Owen Jones entered stage far left to give the embers a little poke.” David Aaronovitch did a satirical tweet a few weeks ago about the possibilities of presidential immunity (as decided by the Supreme Court). Unsurprisingly, dozens of rightwing influencers performatively misunderstood it for their own political ends (Substack).
“The role of MPs has changed dramatically over the past thirty years. It is now a proper profession, not something people do part-time alongside another career, and, as such, MPs are increasingly unwilling to be mere lobby fodder. The number of rebellions has increased in every Parliament.” Sam Freedman looks at the backgrounds of new MPs (Substack, £)
What’s up with Wales? David Collins explains what went wrong for Vaughan Gething, Labour’s short-lived first minister (Hard Thinking on the Soft Left). This blog has alerted me to the fact that the Welsh for first minister is “Prif Weinidog”, which I urgently need help how to pronounce, because in my head I’m making it sound like a sausage.
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Post updated on 19 July to fix Ben Horowitz’s name and a couple of spelling errors.
Envy you not having seen Derry Girls, which means you get to experience ALL of it as quickly as you like. One of the best series ever made. It never denies anything yet always comes out positive.
Small edit: "Ben Anderson" (lines 2 and 4 of the a16z par) should be "Ben Horowitz"