The Bluestocking, vol 51: Diets, eggs and disrespecting the Wu Tang Clan
Afternoon all,
In this week's New Statesman, I've profiled explosives expert Sidney Alford, who knows more about defusing IEDs than probably anyone else alive. (You don't reach the age of 82 as an explosives expert without being good at it...)
The article will be online on Sunday, or you could buy a print copy now (the kids need their shoes!).
Portrait: Charlie Forgham-Bailey for the New Statesman
Losing It in the Anti-Diet Age
I went to an intuitive-eating class — intuitive eating is where you learn to feed yourself based only on internal signals and not external ones like mealtimes or diet plans. Meaning it’s just eating what you want when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full. There were six of us in there, educated, desperate fat women, doing mindful-eating exercises and discussing their pitfalls and challenges. We were given food. We would smell the food, put the food on our lips, think about the food, taste the food, roll the food around in our mouths, swallow the food. Are you still hungry? Are you sure? The first week it was a raisin.
This piece was eye-opening, because I've read stuff from Taffy Brodesser-Akner before, and therefore I was surprised to discover from this that she struggles with her weight. Clearly, I'm more judgemental than I thought, given my reaction was: but she wrote a piece where Tom Hiddleston flirted with her? (Side note: it's a great piece). Maybe the most depressing thing in her story is the idea that scientists think that once your body has reached a certain weight, it's programmed to want to get back to it. You're running uphill for the rest of your life to keep the weight off; it genuinely is more of a struggle to stay thin than it is for someone who's always been lean. I say this as someone who hasn't had a pudding in three weeks and yet has plateaued.
Should I freeze my eggs?
Some people hate the childless. They think we’re selfish. That we lack concern for other people; that our lives are big empty holes with no real purpose or meaning. Personally, I find children to be a kind of lazy path to purpose. It’s so paved. The others—art, justice, impact at scale —seem way more exciting to me; terrifying, in their unreliability, but exciting nonetheless. They require you, yourself, to actually figure out how to matter.
Probably don't freeze your eggs.
The Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House
The C.F.O. of the department at the end of the Obama administration was a mild-mannered civil-servant type named Joe Hezir. He had no particular political identity and was widely thought to have done a good job—and so he half-expected a call from the Trump people asking him to stay on, just to keep the money side of things running smoothly. The call never came. No one even let him know his services were no longer required. Not knowing what else to do, but without anyone to replace him, the C.F.O. of a $30 billion operation just up and left.
This was a loss. A lunch or two with the chief financial officer might have alerted the new administration to some of the terrifying risks they were leaving essentially unmanaged. Roughly half of the D.O.E.’s annual budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal, for instance. Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists.
If you can read this story without screaming, congratulations. Michael Lewis is brilliant at getting into the weeds of a subject which most of us consider to be too complicated, and here he's applied his talent to the superficially dull inability of the Trump administration to fund and staff the Department of Energy properly.
You can't tear down Confederate statues because they're such a stirring reminder of hi--- HOLY HELL
Quick links
- I have no idea if it's all bollocks, but I thoroughly enjoyed this piece about Angela Merkel's chill body language, including the "dance of trust".
- Is America heading for a new civil war?
- "Despite the evidence that humans are meat dolls, Google offers them opportunities over robots through unfair practices like Captcha codes."
- "The story of the most flagrant mistake in the modern history of sports journalism begins with a 21-year-old editor." This is why you don't write jokes about donkey fellatio into your copy and assume an editor will pick them up, kids.
- "And he disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan." A US court had huge trouble finding anyone to sit on the jury in a case involving Martin Skreli, because everyone thinks he's kind of a dick.
- A former editor on Evolve Politics (so take with a health warning) on why he left. The new left websites haven't solved the problems of journalism's relationship with money and control. They've just found new problems.
- The Vice Charlottesville documentary is worth a look. Such rage and inadequacy.
- Dark times in Egypt, as this investigation into the torture and murder of an Italian student reveals.
Guest gif: seriously. three weeks.
See you next week . . .