The Bluestocking, vol 40: Computer, Call Me Ishmael
Afternoon, all - how are things? My long read on "post truth" politics - and what journalists can do about it - came out. It makes for depressing reading, but not as depressing as that stuff about the polar ice caps, eh?
Happy weekend!
Helen
Watching Rocky with Muhammad Ali
"Now he don't feel like fighting because his wife is sick," Ali said. "That's absolutely the truth. The same thing happened to me when I was in training camp during one of my divorces. You can't keep your mind on fighting when you're thinking about a woman. You can't keep your concentration. You feel like sleeping all the time. But now at this point, I'm gonna make a prediction. I haven't seen the movie, but I predict she's gonna get well, and then Rocky's gonna beat the hell out of Apollo Creed."
As recommended by Hayley Campbell - in 1979, Roger Ebert watches Rocky with Ali, who talks all the way through. As Hayley pointed out, there's one hell of a final paragraph.
How Jared Kushner won Trump the White House
The decision that won Trump the presidency started on the return trip from that Springfield rally last November aboard his private 757, dubbed Trump Force One. Chatting over McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, Trump and Kushner talked about how the campaign was underutilizing social media. The candidate, in turn, asked his son-in-law to take over his Facebook initiatives.
Despite his itchy Twitter finger, Trump is a Luddite. He reportedly gets his news from print and television, and his version of e-mail is to handwrite a note that his assistant will scan and attach. Among those in his close circle, Kushner was the natural pick to create a modern campaign.
There's a lot of meat in this Forbes interview with Jared Kushner, who might be Donald Trump's most trusted adviser: the use of data, the quotes from Rupert Murdoch, Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel. But let's linger a moment on the fact that TRUMP MAKES HIS ASSISTANT SCAN HANDWRITTEN NOTES AND SENDS THEM AS ATTACHMENTS. Really puts the whole Mexican wall in perspective.
Facebook, 2016 election edition
Facebook, of necessity, sees cultural problems as product problems. I mean what can you do? Facebook grew so huge, so fast, that it faces entirely new classes of cultural problems every day and there is literally no precedent. Plus it creates cultural problems that it must also clean up. None of this is Facebook’s fault. It’s just more that our civic and personal life is, in a real and demonstrable way, a side-effect of revenue-driving decisions made by Facebook. We let that happen! No one forced us.
Facebook must find dealing with “The News” exhausting. Everything it does is going to get professional news people angry, which is frustrating because they control the media. Plus having all that media inside of it, and reliant on it for success, forces Facebook to have a different kind of ethics—antiquated media ethics instead of cool Silicon Valley ethics. This is because once you let media in, its ethos infects everything. And everyone yells at you. As tech giants learn over and over, media is a viral industry.
As you might know, I'm a bit obsessed with how Facebook has become "the internet" for many people, and how that changes society. As a bonus, here's Jonathan Haidt on why multiculturalism and social media are profound challenges to liberal democracy.
An Oral History of Star Trek
George Takei (actor, “Hikaru Sulu”): Those early episodes were a blast, and they felt important. When Sulu helps Kirk build a spiral staircase for the alien race that’s spent centuries living on two unconnected floors of a big duplex in “As Above, So Below,” it wasn’t just a thrilling hour of television; it was showing what we can accomplish when we set aside our differences and do metaphors.
This Clickhole piece is worth it for the made-up episode names alone. "Computer, Call Me Ishmael" is so good I had to google to check it wasn't real.
Quick links: An interview with Chris Arnade, who spent a year travelling Trump country, and his diagnosis of what drove voters to the ginger gerbil is worth reading. "Believe the autocrat": Masha Gessen's rules for surviving in an autocracy. Was "gamification" a terrible lie, asks Simon Parkin. From "too soon" to "I just threw up in my mouth", a great list of banned phrases from a comedy writing room. Obama's Days Of Reckoning: David Remnick of the New Yorker gets extraordinary access to Obama just before, and after, he learns that a man who spent years trying to prove he was a secret Kenyan will follow him as president. If women wrote men the way men wrote women. The average age of actors in films from different genres.
Quote of the week, from 2008: 'Because we can’t anticipate what ideas and language will dominate the next cycle of American politics, the previous era’s key words—“élite,” “mainstream,” “real,” “values,” “patriotic,” “snob,” “liberal”—seem as potent as ever.'
Guest gif: I've been watching Wolf Hall to get me through. What about you?
