The Bluestocking, vol 49: Emojis, polygamy and Aaron Burr
Happy Friday!
An early newsletter this week, because - weirdly - after a bit of a longreads drought earlier in the summer, this week I found loads of interesting stuff to read.
Helen
The polygynous town facing genetic disaster
In the end, the link to fumarase deficiency is a numbers game. Take Brigham Young. In all, his children begat 204 grandchildren, who, in turn, begat 745 great-grandchildren. By 1982, it was reported that he had at least 5,000 direct descendants.
Well, I hope we've all learned a valuable lesson here. Don't marry your cousin.
Death of a F***ing Salesman
These guys don’t want to see Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. What they want is to be Blake. They want to swagger, to curse, to insult, and to exercise power over men, exercising power over men being the classical means to the end of exercising power over women, which is of course what this, and nine-tenths of everything else in human affairs, is about. Blake is a specimen of that famous creature, the “alpha male,” and establishing and advertising one’s alpha creds is an obsession for some sexually unhappy contemporary men. There is a whole weird little ecosystem of websites (some of them very amusing) and pickup-artist manuals offering men tips on how to be more alpha, more dominant, more commanding, a literature that performs roughly the same function in the lives of these men that Cosmopolitan sex tips play in the lives of insecure women. Of course this advice ends up producing cartoonish, ridiculous behavior.
Regular readers of the newsletter will know (maybe too much) about my fascination with internet masculintiy subcultures, full of men who feel that life has dealt them a bad hand alternating between talking about how alpha they are and asking for tips on whether they shower enough. So I thoroughly enjoyed this piece from a Conservative writer about the link between Donald Trump's persona and Glengarry Glen Ross.
Chaser: John Herrman, who wrote that great mega-piece on Facebook fake news last year, has written another sizeable dispatch on the YouTube Right, who he sees as being comparable in influence to conservative talk radio.
How to make a movie out of a game where you chop up fruit
When they were approached by Vinson, the first thing they did was download Fruit Ninja. Lavin called Damiani after playing for a while. They agreed: There was nothing there. Just fruit. Their work on projects like ‘‘Flat Stanley,’’ though, had shown them that having less to work with provided a greater degree of creative freedom. Lavin and Damiani spent hours discussing the essence of Fruit Ninja. ‘‘For me, it is the messiness, the immediate release of destroying fruit,’’ Damiani told me. For Lavin, the soul of the game is the feeling of ‘‘frenzy.’’ ‘‘There’s like a 60-second version of it where you can see how fast you can kill fruit,’’ he says, which ‘‘puts your brain in this weird, bizarre focused place.’’ As he sees it: ‘‘This would be the movie to go see stoned. I can imagine going in and seeing it in 3-D — just imagine a 20-foot-high pineapple monster. That shot of yellow and orange. I’d go see this movie a dozen times.’’
Jesus wept.
Evergreen gif.
Our Minds Have Been Hijacked by Tech
We have to have a big conversation about advertising. I think we’re going to look at the advertising model—which has an unbounded interest in getting more of people’s time on a screen—and see it as being as archaic as the era when we got all our power from coal. Advertising is the new coal. It was wonderful for propping up the internet economy. It got us to a certain level of economic prosperity, and that’s fantastic. And it also polluted the inner environment and the cultural environment and the political environment because it enabled anyone to basically pay to get access to your mind.
Tristan Harris is an interesting thinker on how tech companies massage you into doing what's best for their profits, not for your life. This interview is a good starting point, but to really get him, read his Medium piece on notifications and decision trees. Seeing actual examples is more powerful than reading about the concepts.
Those who work, and those who don't
“There is a critical divide in the minds of low-income whites, between people who work, even if they struggle, and what has historically been called ‘white trash,’ ” said Lisa Pruitt, a professor at the University of California at Davis who researches rural poverty and grew up in Newton County, Ark., which has one of the nation’s highest disability rates. “The worst thing you can do in rural America among low-income whites is not work.” There’s a mentality, she said, that “only lazy white trash” accept what’s derided as “handouts.”
This piece does a lot to explain why attitudes to benefits are so much more hostile among the groups most likely to need them.
Quick links
"What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old and subsequently goes on to eat herself to over 40 stone?" Julie Burchill, that's who.
An interview with Angela Rayner. I can't wait until we get to the second round of interviews with Rayner, that can move past her backstory. Labour has a small problem at the moment of alighting on people who aren't Jeremy Corbyn and getting very excited about their "story" but not asking what their analysis of Britain's problems is or how they would try to solve them. I want to hear more about what Angela Rayner thinks, not who she is.
Why do fewer young men care about working? Because we've made videogames too good, argue a group of scientists.
Kathy Acker interviews the Spice Girls in 1997.
'In an 1801 letter to a prominent congressman that was meant to be shared with his allies, Hamilton called Burr (along with a slew of other insults) a proponent of “Godwinism.”' Nancy Isenberg makes the case that Aaron Burr was the real progressive hero, not Alexander Hamilton.
On which note, here's that Moriaty/Hamilton mash-up you didn't ask for:
That's all for this week. I'm currently working on a piece about theatre, so I'm interested to hear what your favourite plays are... hit reply or tweet me: @helenlewis. I'll start off: Constellations is a beautiful little play, abotu love and loss and coincidence.