The Bluestocking vol 367: Group chats and Gump
a new one just with smart people
Happy Friday!
The Special Relationship, my event with Jesse Singal, Hadley Freeman and Sarah Ditum, is on tomorrow, and there are still a handful of tickets left. If you need any further convincing, consider that last night I put the finishing touches to a PowerPoint that features images of jellied eels and Meghan Markle.
Helen
The Group Chats That Changed America (Semafor)
The chats are occasionally marked by the sort of thing that would have gotten you scolded on Twitter in 2020, and which would pass unremarked-on on X in 2025.
They have rarely been discussed in public, though you can catch the occasional mention in, for instance, a podcast debate between Cuban and the Republican entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, which started in a chat.
But they are made visible through a group consensus on social media. Their effects have ranged from the mainstreaming of the monarchist pundit Curtis Yarvin to a particularly focused and developed dislike of the former Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz.
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Ben Smith reports on how the most annoying men on Twitter are, improbably, also talking to each other all day on group chats. Another blow to the idea that women are the gossipy sex.
PS. If you enjoyed that, the New Republic had a piece last year about another group chat, called Off Leash, set up by Blackwater’s Erik Prince:
‘Among the group’s hottest topics [… is] The shortcomings of democracy that invariably resulted from extending the franchise to ordinary citizens, who are easily manipulated by Marxists and populists. “The West is at best a beautiful cemetery,” lamented Sven von Storch, whose aristocratic German family fled the country after World War II to Chile, where their son was raised before returning to the land of his ancestors, where he married the granddaughter of the Third Reich’s last de facto head of state, who was convicted at Nuremberg.’
You know how much I love a spicy European aristocrat. Here is Max Read on the entire phenomenon, which he thinks is BAD for democracy.
Quick Links
“Talese began on his portrait of a marriage in the mid-2000s, wanting to figure out why an ‘intelligent, accomplished, financially independent woman’, as he put it in a 2008 interview, chose to stay with him after she had been ‘humiliated in print, embarrassed like Hillary Clinton was embarrassed’.” Harry Lambert tracks down 91-year-old Gay Talese, the absolute don of New Journalism (New Statesman)
“I wanted them to keep in the astronaut stuff. Forrest goes up in a spaceflight, and he comes back and meets Raquel Welch, and they cavort nude around Hollywood. I was wondering who was going to play Raquel Welch.” An interview with Winston Groom, now in his 70s, who wrote the original book of Forrest Gump (Garden and Gun)
“‘Construction traffic’ can conjure all sorts of images in one’s mind, so let’s be clear: we’re talking about a single truck per day during the 12 week construction period, outside peak traffic hours. I wanted to understand the impact that this truck would have for myself, so in true Partridge style I parked the Jag and spent a happy 15 minutes eating a pork pie from the local farm shop while listening to The Rest is History and counting cars. I think I saw about three vehicles and two pedestrians the entire time.” How the people trying to build HS2 haven’t gone stark raving mad I do not know (Martin Robbins, Substack).
“We live in what Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy call an ‘ordinal society’ — a world in which the market, the government, and increasingly our peers, understand us as datapoints.” (Political Calculus, Substack)
Duncan Weldon and Rob Hutton had me on their podcast about war movies to talk about a war movie: CIVIL WAR.
You have entered the Plug Zone. Use the code GENIUS25 for 25 percent off tickets to my London launch event on June 19.
Armando Iannucci has perfected the look of someone thinking "is that your THUMB you have just inserted between my buttocks?". Or maybe his next project is "Zoolander - The Twilight years".
Just listened to the Civil War chat - loved it.
It is *such* an interesting film.
Knowing nothing about it and assuming it was a sort of blockbustery thing, I decided to watch it on a flight for want of anything better to do.
I’ve been boring on about it ever since - I think it’s up there with all the great conflict films.