The Bluestocking, vol 52: Social climbing and Simon Ferocious
Happy Friday!
This week was quite a grind, and I notice that the longread selection is even more my obsessions - angry white people, angry internet people, men being awful - than usual. In recompense, I have inserted happy gifs of Freddie Mercury throughout. This week, I reviewed Against at the Almeida (less serious review: "Ben Whishaw in his pants - *****, New Statesman") and I interviewed 90 billion people for the next profile I'm writing. It should - I hope - be a corker, and if it's not, I will be sad because it's me that let it down, not the material.
Helen
Notes From Nowhere
And yet, for all I was quietly rejecting them, they never rejected me. I was one of them, even if I increasingly gave the impression of not wanting to be. I was ‘our Mike’, and forever would be. And as time has gone by, I realise how intensely proud I am of them, and of the great fortune it is to have been raised as a working-class kid, as one of them. This background was not an obstacle to be overcome, which is what arguments for social mobility nearly always collapse into, but a fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of future success. It is only with passing years, and the challenges that come with raising your own children, that such issues find a way back to the now, to be chewed over and answered once again, ugly truths and all.
An elegiac piece about social mobility. The profile I'm writing dwells on this theme a lot - because the memoirs I've read recently, like Caitlin Moran and Robert Webb's, prod at the idea that working class success now means leaving.
I spent five years with Trump's biggest fans. Here's what they won't tell you
Louisiana is also home to vast pollution, especially along Cancer Alley, the 85-mile strip along the lower Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, with some 150 industrial plants where once there were sugar and cotton plantations. According to the American Cancer Society, Louisiana had the nation’s second-highest incidence of cancer for men and the fifth-highest rate of male deaths from cancer. “When I make a presentation, if I say, ‘How many of you know someone that has had cancer?’ every hand is going to go up. Just the other day I was in Lafayette doing my enrollments for the insurance, and I was talking to this one guy. And he said, ‘My brother-in-law just died. He was 29 or 30.’ He’s the third person working for his company that’s been in their early 30s that’s died of cancer in the last three years. I file tons and tons of cancer claims.”
If you have somehow escaped my Arlie Russell Hoschchild obsession until now, congratulations. But resist me no more! She's the best writer on the white pain and resentment which led to Trumpism.
Silicon Valley Sexism
In retrospect, there were some early warning signs, like when John declared that he’d specifically requested an Asian woman for my position. He liked the idea of a “Tiger Mom–raised” woman. He usually had two chiefs of staff at a time, one of each gender, but the male one seemed to focus mostly on investing and the female one did more of the grunt work and traveled with him. “There are certain things I am just more comfortable asking a woman to do,” John once told me matter-of-factly.
Ellen Pao basically got hounded out of her job at Reddit by angry man-babies. This is her account of her previous job, which was (impressively) worse.
The making of Dylann Roof
He found solace in the belief that he too was part of the dispossessed. The embittered white men who feel like they have no real future in the 21st century. Roof knew this fear so well that he even wrote in the manifesto that he finished in jail: “How can people blame white young people for having no ambition, when they have been given nothing, and have nothing to look forward to? Even your most brain dead white person can see that there is nothing, to look forward to? Even your most brain dead white person can see that there is nothing good on the horizon?”
This is written in an impressionistic style, which gives it a haunting beauty.
Platform Perils
A community of trolls on an internet platform is, in political terms, not totally unlike a fascist movement in a weak liberal democracy: It engages with and uses the rules and protections of the system it inhabits with the intent of subverting it and eventually remaking it in their image or, if that fails, merely destroying it.
John Herrman is consistently the smartest writer on social media and ideology. Read this on sites like Facebook and Reddit coming to terms with their harbouring of white supremacists and other hate groups.
Quick links:
Ever wondered why people are calling each other corncobs on twitter? Wonder no more.
White supremacists are better with a tuba accompaniment.
Zussman’s experiment suggests that when parents are distracted—as today’s parents are, perpetually, by our online lives—it’s the encouragement that suffers, more than the control. The result? Kids who stay inside their semi-gilded cages, because they don’t get the support they need to spread their wings.
See you next week!