The Bluestocking, vol 88: Tom Wamsgans, boiling cities and the intellectual dark web
Happy weekend!
This week, I published a long essay in the New Statesman on how politics turned toxic - a mixture of polarisation, personalisation and the architecture of social media and the internet itself. The most hostile responses I got can be boiled down to "it's austerity, duh". I'm not sure I buy that, however, because the Conservatives are still on 40-ish per cent in the polls, and actually very few of the people convicted of sending death threats to MPs have been on their uppers. (The man who offered £5,000 to someone to run over Gina Miller was a viscount.)
I think that argument is more convincing in terms of increasing polarisation - if you think the Tories are "killing the disabled", then suddenly calling Anna Soubry a c*** on Twitter doesn't seem so bad by comparison. I'm just always wary of the argument that the ends justify the means, because I'm sure the EDL think they have some pretty solid grievances too, and therefore should be allowed to march through my hometown, Worcester, as they did this weekend, shouting about the Islamisation of Europe.
Anyway, apart from that I managed to squeeze in doing the News Quiz and Saturday Review. For the latter, I read Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls, a retelling of the Iliad from the point of view of Briseis (whose transfer as a slave from Achilles and Agamemnon prompts the former's epic sulk in his tent, which in turn leads to the death of his soulmate Patroclus). I recommend it highly, along with this week's film, a beautiful black and white Polish love story called Cold War. The director is known for making all his films under 90 minutes, ie THE CORRECT LENGTH.
Last night I also knocked off the last three episodes of Sky Atlantic's Succession (also available on Now TV if you have freeview). What a series: from King Lear to Macbeth in ten episodes; funny, disturbing, sharp. I knew I would love it when someone vomited through the eyeholes of a bunny rabbit costume in a theme park in the first episode.
Helen
Penn Jillette In Conversation
I know you’ll use it properly and if you don’t, I don’t give a fuck anyway. This year on Fool Us we had six women magicians working solo. And out of those six, five fooled us. Now the average rate we have for being fooled is 12 percent. But solo women fool us almost 100 percent of the time. The reason for the difference is that there is a way of thinking about magic that doesn’t have anything to do with the boys’ club. And as much as I’ve railed against that boys’ club, I’m 63 years old and every book I’ve read, every magician I’ve seen, is based on the boys’-club way of thinking about magic. Women who were excluded from that club have rhythms and styles and nuance to the way they do magic that I don’t understand. And that’s great! I’ve been wanting to see that for 50 years.
Tip of the hat to Ian Leslie for spotting this quote and by extension, this interview with Penn Jillette. Smart people who are good at what they do and have thought about why? Always good interviewees. Particularly when you disagree with them about politics.
Halfway to boiling: the city at 50 degrees C
At 50C – halfway to water’s boiling point and more than 10C above a healthy body temperature – heat becomes toxic. Human cells start to cook, blood thickens, muscles lock around the lungs and the brain is choked of oxygen. In dry conditions, sweat – the body’s in-built cooling system – can lessen the impact. But this protection weakens if there is already moisture in the air.
A so-called “wet-bulb temperature” (which factors in humidity) of just 35C can be fatal after a few hours to even the fittest person, and scientists warn climate change will make such conditions increasingly common in India, Pakistan, south-east Asia and parts of China. Even under the most optimistic predictions for emissions reductions, experts say almost half the world’s population will be exposed to potentially deadly heat for 20 days a year by 2100.
Just in case you had forgotten that WE ARE ALL DOOMED.
My Affair with the Intellectual Dark Web
The parlance of wokeness was being used online so frequently that it began to strike me as disingenuous, even a little desperate. After all, these weren’t just meme-crazed youngsters flouting their newly minted critical studies degrees. Many were in their forties and fifties, posting photos from their kids’ middle school graduations along with rage-filled jeremiads about toxic masculinity. One minute they were asking for recommendations for gastroenterologists in their area. The next, they were adopting the vocabulary of Tumblr, typing things like I.Just.Cant.With.This., and This is some fucked, patriarchal bullshit, amiright?
When I tweeted this piece, I said that I sympathised with it - as I have found out by writing (very soberly, and hopefully humanely) about gender, the online left orthodoxy can be absolutely suffocating, and transgression from the agreed line is treated as nothing less than betrayal, and heresy, "the wrong side of history", and putting people's lives in danger. I've been told I am "denying people's right to exist".
One of the most alarming things has been watching how people (often men) have stayed silent on the subject because it's too fraught to discuss it online, even while privately telling me that they agree with me that, say, we should ask why there's been a huge spike in young female patients referred to gender clinics in the last five years. In that kind of climate, no wonder "rebel intellectuals" find an audience.
Much like the early days of watching Jeremy Corbyn just say what he thought when asked a question (rather than watching Ed Miliband desperately triangulate), it's strangely relaxing to watch Jordan Peterson just... say what he believes. The doctrinaire online left is giving the "intellectual dark web" a frisson of outlaw glamour they really don't deserve.
Quick links
"From that moment on, whenever I needed to cheer myself up by counting my blessings, I used to tell myself: ‘At least I’m not married to Vidia.’" Diana Athill on editing VS Naipaul.
Hugh Grant reviews his own films. Particularly joyous riff about how Richard Curtis kept telling him the parts in each new film were completely different . . . and then he just played them the same.
Rebecca Mead on becoming an American citizen - and then leaving America.
The end of Titanic rescored to Cher's Super Trouper.
Chris Addison on the two ways into a theatre. Very helpful if you're stuck in the middle of a creative project and other people's success is making you feel like you'll never be that good.
What Homer Simpson would look like in real life. Haunting.
Guest gif: yes, it's more Tom Wamsgans.
See you next time!