The Bluestocking, vol 84: Side-hustles and late-night emails
Happy Saturday!
Helen
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Comes To Terms With Global Fame
An earlier version of this article understated the prevalence of pride in Igbo identity in Nigeria and of interest in the Igbo language in the Adichie family. It also misstated the name of an Adichie family acquaintance, Mrs. Nwoga, and the time frame within which Adichie has appeared on billboards in Lagos. In addition, Adichie still goes to Mass, though rarely, and does not feel she has a hybrid national identity.
One of the things I admire about Adichie is her unwillingness to play the game of feminine compliance and docility. This excellent, formally experimental profile by the New Yorker ends with a note which suggests she got right on the phone and gave them a bollocking after it came out. I fear that; I also find it quite inspirational.
The figure of the asshole white-male intellectual has a totemic quality in culture: the cadaverous chap who bleeds tweed and gets away with being theatrically awful to everyone around him because he’s cleverer than them. He’s almost certainly English — at a pinch, Canadian will do — and he suffers fools with gritted teeth. Peterson has all of the external signifiers of this type of person without any of the inquisitive rigor.
(You know who’d play him in the BBC dramatization. Benedict Cumberbatch would play him, and would do so better than Jordan Peterson plays Jordan Peterson, because every time that Bendybatch plays this character he manages to evoke a brooding, resentful sexuality that Peterson, thankfully, never quite achieves. )
Just in case you're not bored with Jordan Peterson, this article nails a lot of what I was trying to get at when I described him as a cargo cult intellectual.
The pain and joy of the side-hustle
Julie Zauzmer, 28, has a very different attitude toward her side hustle. By day, she’s a religion reporter for The Washington Post. On nights and weekends, she twists balloons. Zauzmer—a Harvard grad and trained clown who used to go by “Zippy”—says last year she made $12,000 performing at birthday parties. The money doesn’t hurt, but she insists that she does it out of love. “If I could choose which I liked better—reporting or balloon-twisting—then I’d do just one,” she says. Zauzmer wants to stay at the Post “for the rest of my life,” but she also sees balloons as a solid Plan B. “It gives me a sense of options,” she adds. “There are so many things I’m not going to do. But I really still could be a balloon twister.”
Excuse the slight self-indulgence, but I'm fascinated by the fundamental problem of the modern knowledge economy: research suggests that the average person can only do about 4-6 hours of "brainwork" a day, but that's just not enough for most of us to live on. This piece suggests one answer: maybe we just have to stop treating journalism as a full-time occupation. Four hours of brainwork; four hours of making balloon animals.
The pace and relentlessness of modern journalism is astonishing. It really is hard to make the case for "unproductive" time - reading books, meeting people, and just . . . thinking. But being in constant broadcast mode is, first, bad for the soul - think of all the people driven mad by the Twitter megaphone; and second, it stops you building the deep expertise needed to function at a really high level.
On one level: boo hoo hoo, I know we're hardly working down a pit. But there are similar problems across a lot of sectors: teaching, for example, is now transformed by the ability of parents to get home and hit their WhatsApp groups, or to email in with questions. Medicine and law are similarly not the solid, manageable professions they were a few decades ago.
Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome became the latest person I've seen to try the experiment of stopping sending emails after 7pm. I might try it. Part of the problem with the modern world of work is that there are no hard boundaries around the workday. Anyway, I'm interested in what other "rules" people have to keep them sane; please hit "reply" if you have any tips . . .
Quick links:
"Who Goes Nazi?" Thank you to Caroline Crampton - who has an excellent newsletter - for the link to this piece. I read it just a few days after visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, and the sad answer to its question is: a lot more people than you'd hope.
The Economist has compiled a series of articles on gender (outside its paywall). If you're confused - and maybe even terrified - by the social media shouting, then this is like a long cool drink of sanity and reflection.
Guest gif: Off to see SpiceWorld tonight like . . .
See you next time!