The Bluestocking, vol 41: End of the Year Special

Goodbye, 2016 - and good riddance! But, just before the year ends, here is a super-extra-long version of the newsletter, with even more linky goodness than usual to enjoy, plus gifs from TV shows I've enjoyed watching this year.

Helen



Why You Can't Get A Ticket To Anything

Even before that sham of an on-sale happens, a big chunk of the best seats are held back from ever going directly on sale. Schneiderman’s report found that on average, less than half of all tickets go on sale to the general public. For specifically cited Katy Perry and Justin Bieber shows, no more than 15 percent of the tickets were made available to people like you.

I found this, about ticket scams, fascinating - particularly how some artists collude with scalping so that they don't get called greedy for charging $$$ face value.


World War Three, By Accident

During a recent visit to a decommissioned Minuteman site, I was curious to see the big computer still used to receive Emergency Action Messages—launch orders from the President—via landline. The computer is an I.B.M. Series/1, a state-of-the-art machine in 1976, when it was introduced. “Replacement parts for the system are difficult to find because they are now obsolete,” a report by the Government Accountability Office said last May, with some understatement, about a computer that relies on eight-inch floppy disks. You can buy a smartphone with about a thousand times the memory.

AAAAAAAAAAAAArgh. This article on the ageing computer infrastructure of America's nuclear weapons programme is horrifying, and that's before you get to the bit where it's revealed that the British Navy is running our submarines on a modified version of Windows XP.

The Lodger Who Wouldn't Leave

As Abel walked around the place she'd called home for three decades, she had the distinct feeling that her life had been erased. In the family room, a small sofa, a table, and a television had been removed. Out on the back deck, the wooden table and benches were missing. The bedrooms were emptied out, her mattresses crammed into the office. Closets were sealed with blue painter's tape. She turned to the man, who had been renting her place for the past several months—without paying. "What is going on here?" she demanded. "What are you doing?"

This story, about a serial abuser of AirBnB-style home rentals is wild, not least because Judith Butler (yes, that Judith Butler) gets enlisted halfway through to bollock him.


Tom Ford on sex, death and penetration

Tom Ford takes the first of his three to five daily power baths at 6 A.M., rising before Richard and Jack, in order to rouse himself from the sleeping pills that have made him nearly comatose. He sits in the bath with his eyes closed, sipping iced coffee through a straw like he’s in the ICU being brought back from anesthetized abyss.

This is what I want from a celebrity profile: the kind of weirdness only available to the very rich. If you need me, I'll be in my power bath.

Winning back the white working class

Mainstream parties can win these voters back. But they can’t do it by pretending that these people’s biggest problem is immigration. The populists own that topic. The segment of voters obsessed with immigration is probably lost to traditional parties.

Rather, these parties need to tell a story about a “new we” that includes both poor non-whites and poor whites. They must show concern for unglamorous, everyday working-class problems. (In the UK, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn seems more interested in Venezuela and Cuba.)

For once, a piece that doesn't just throw its hands up and say "maybe we should just accept that people want right-wing populism?"

My President Was Black

Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing “mere” about symbols. The power embedded in the word nigger is also symbolic. Burning crosses do not literally raise the black poverty rate, and the Confederate flag does not directly expand the wealth gap.

Much as the unbroken ranks of 43 white male presidents communicated that the highest office of government in the country—indeed, the most powerful political offices in the world—was off-limits to black individuals, the election of Barack Obama communicated that the prohibition had been lifted.

Ta-Nehisi Coates considers what it meant to have a black president in a country as racially divided as the US; and whether it provoked a backlash that powered the rise of Trump.

An AI to make people nicer on the internet

The common thread that binds these projects, Cohen says, is a focus on what he calls “vulnerable populations.” To that end, he gives new hires an assignment: Draw a scrap of paper from a baseball cap filled with the names of the world’s most troubled or repressive countries; track down someone under threat there and talk to them about their life online. Then present their stories to other Jigsaw employees.

A company full of tech bros, yes. But at least Jigsaw seems to be trying to correct in its inbuilt biases.

Quick links: Reading Trump's Time cover. John Herrman on how tech companies give platforms to extremists. Facebook buys huge amounts of information on its users from data brokers, covering finance and ethnic grouping, among other categories. What happens when the Queen dies. Why are escape rooms suddenly so popular? Extraordinary (if gruesome) photographs documenting what the "war on drugs" in the Philippines means - men shot from the back of mopeds, corpses left wrapped in packing tape. David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post on his year spent covering Trump. A longread with the creators of the film version of Children of Men, ten years on.

Blog recommendation: Deborah Cameron's language blog is always interesting. Here's her end of the year round-up.

See you in 2017!