The Bluestocking, vol 45: Get Out, getting scared and getting up the duff

I'm alive!

Yes, I'm sorry that this newsletter went into hibernation over the election, but - COME ON. British politics be crazy. Anyway, last week my friend Laura told me that she was re-reading my blog from 2006, so inevitably I ended up doing the same, and I couldn't get over how unselfconscious it was. A lot of it was awful, but it was honestly awful. (I liked Top Gear a LOT.)

And it's tough to maintain that level of honesty when you're writing for a big platform, unless you have the kind of personality defect that all great columnists have, which is not caring what people think about you. I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by Twitter, starving for attention, hysterical, nakedly saying banal things for retweets, dragging themselves through the CIF comments at dawn looking for one person who isn't making a pious point about how they'd rather be reading an article about Syria.

And that reminded me why I love doing this newsletter (and the New Statesman podcast). It's antiviral. It's my safe space. And it's fun.

Also, yesterday I got to blow up a car with one of these. That was pretty fun too. (Don't send the Met round, it was for an article.)

Helen


Zadie Smith: Getting In and Getting Out

For black viewers there is the pleasure of vindication. It’s not often they have both their real and their irrational fears so thoroughly indulged. For white liberals—whom the movie purports to have in its satirical sights—there is the cringe of recognition, that queer but illuminating feeling of being suddenly “othered.” (Oh, that’s how we look to them?) And, I suppose, the satisfaction of being in on the joke.

One of those essays so good that two people IRL independently recommended it to me. Zadie Smith on race, art, Get Out and cultural appropriation.

Emmanuel Macron and the modern family

Back in February, Macron rather elegantly brushed off the whispers, saying, “If you’re told I lead a double life with Mr. Gallet, it’s because my hologram has escaped.” (One of his opponents, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, had just kicked off his campaign by beaming himself between Lyon and Paris.) But his response to Le Pen’s comment about his childlessness was something more earnest and full-throated, an impassioned rejection of the decrepit social order that limits filiation to a man and his seed.

“I sensed in our country an immense fear of the future of the family,” he told a crowd of thirty thousand supporters, as Trogneux smiled in the audience. “Would I be an enemy of the family because mine is a little different, and I claim that totally?” Once the applause died down, he continued, “I heard the National Front’s message this morning. Mr. Le Pen told me, ‘You don’t have the right to talk about the future, because you don’t have children.’ Mr. Le Pen, I have children and grandchildren of the heart. It’s a family that you have to build, it’s a family you have to conquer, a family that doesn’t owe you anything, and that you will never have!”

Muscular centrism FTW.

How online shopping makes suckers of us all

But demographics are actually a crude way of personalizing prices, the Brandeis economist Benjamin Shiller argued in a recent paper, “First-Degree Price Discrimination Using Big Data.” If Netflix were to use only demographic factors, such as people’s race, household income, and zip code, to personalize subscription prices, his model predicted, it could boost its profits by 0.3 percent. But if Netflix also used people’s web-browsing history—the percentage of web use on Tuesdays, the number of visits to RottenTomatoes.com, and some 5,000 other variables—it could boost its profits by 14.6 percent.

There was a great Talking Politics podcast about tech recently, and the standout interview was the one about online shopping, and how we're all essentially being sold to online businesses, rather than the other way round. This piece picks up some of that.

When your child is a psychopath

In particular, experts point to the amygdala—a part of the limbic system—as a physiological culprit for coldhearted or violent behavior. Someone with an undersize or underactive amygdala may not be able to feel empathy or refrain from violence. For example, many psychopathic adults and callous children do not recognize fear or distress in other people’s faces. Essi Viding, a professor of developmental psychopathology at University College London recalls showing one psychopathic prisoner a series of faces with different expressions. When the prisoner came to a fearful face, he said, “I don’t know what you call this emotion, but it’s what people look like just before you stab them.”

What a quote.

(Binge-watching Catastrophe on 4OD is the 2017 antidote YOU need right now.)

Put down the iPhone and appreciate its genius

The iPhone isn’t fundamentally a phone, even though Steve Jobs himself thought that phone service was the killer app for the product. Instead, it’s an all-purpose communications device, music player, recorder, camera, map, adviser, software distributor and dating-enabler rolled into one. When Siri gets better it will be a companion too. As iPhones and other smartphones became more widespread, the number of phone calls I received declined. No other device has done more to make the phone less necessary. I’ll get your text or email right away.

Tyler Cowen on how the really genius thing about the iPhone is its production process, and the mystery of how we are all OK with listening to crap quality audio,


Quick links:
- Emily Nussbaum says goodbye to Girls
- The Blood of the Crab: so basically, horseshoe crabs are vital to stopping superbugs, but we're bleeding them dry and then tossing them back in the sea. Another great job, humans, well played.
- Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me. Great essay on how a good writer is badly served by becoming a hero to exactly the kind of person who puts you off reading their work. (I've never got on with Wallace's fiction, but I like his non-fiction - which, it turns out, might be a bit more fictional than we were lead to believe. Here's a bootleg PDF of Big Red Son, about his trip to the Adult Video Network awards.)
- I remembered how much I enjoyed the Flight of the Conchords' Albie The Racist Dragon. "Get off my tail, you'll make it dirty."
- The Trouble With Innocence: a man gets his murder conviction overturned. So why, after getting released, does he ask for it back?
- Abandon hope, for all Twitter joke structures are catalogued here.

Guest gif: Versailles has jumped a satanic shark while dressed in exquisite brocade, but I still love it, especially the Princess Palatine:

Got suggestions for a future newsletter? Email me!