The Bluestocking, Vol II: Hard Truths, Mega Quakes and Gay Voices
Hello, it's week 2, and in between sparring with Nicola Sturgeon on Twitter and pushing my luck by writing another piece that's critical of Reddit, I've collected some great pieces.
READ:
The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates
"Chaos is what we have,” he said. “That is what I believe. If to the end of its existence America harbors white supremacy, I don’t know how remarkable that would be. France has dealt with anti-Semitism since its inception.” America was built by humans, he said. “These things tend to have flaws.”
What a strange, dark, beguiling place America is. It killed Prince Jones. It reveres Ta-Nehisi Coates.
A New York Magazine profile of the Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, who recently made the case that America owed its black population reparations for slavery. Coates is a challenging writer (in both senses of the word), which this piece captures. Since its publication, there has been a mini-internet-brouhaha about whether TNC is popular with guilty white liberals as a form of virtue signalling, or whether that idea is being used to belittle his achievements.
OH GOD EVERYONE IS GOING TO DIE IN AN EARTHQUAKE
"These lax safety policies guarantee that many people inside the inundation zone will not get out. Twenty-two per cent of Oregon’s coastal population is sixty-five or older. Twenty-nine per cent of the state’s population is disabled, and that figure rises in many coastal counties. “We can’t save them,” Kevin Cupples says. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll go around and check on the elderly.’ No. We won’t.”
This New Yorker piece on the huge tectonic plate that is overdue to drop six feet in a couple of seconds and trigger a tsunami that will wipe out Seattle and a number of other cities is really something. Seismologists and FEMA people really don't mince their words.
Reddit Can't Be Fixed
"Whoever takes this on can expect to be hit by a massive backlash online, and it’ll probably leak out into the real world. Expect to be doxxed. Expect to be swatted. Expect to have dead (or live) rats mailed to your house. Expect to move your family to a safe house, or some other country, for a while for their protection. Expect to have many late nights where you stare at your email inbox and wonder why you took that job and that you’re not being paid enough."
I enjoyed this unremittingly bleak look at Reddit's problems. Probably because I agree with it. If you build a community that is based around "this is a safe place to be a total ass", then you can't really complain if your community is soured by the presence of many, many total asses.
Reddit was the seedbed for a lot of the worst internet harassment we've seen in the last few years (Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn's tormentors often gathered there) and frankly any woman or ethnic minority that agrees to be the public face of that company now needs their head examined. Ellen Pao was subject to the most incredible level of hate - including an image of a swastika that got upvoted to the front page with the legend "Ellen Pao's family crest" - which was entirely predictable given this is a site which let people post mocking photos and captions of mangled corpses, fat people, trans people, and upskirt pictures of potentially underage girls. It was also run as a business, with a board and profit targets, owned by a serious media company, but relied on hundreds of thousands of hours of unpaid labour by moderators. And yet no one seemed to consult them about its future: they were treated like the lowest of the low casual labourers WITHOUT EVEN GETTING PAID. But look, I'm ranting.
The Courthouse Ring
"Given the situation, Finch designs his defense, Lubet says, “to exploit a virtual catalog of misconceptions and fallacies about rape, each one calculated to heighten mistrust of the female complainant.”"
Malcolm Gladwell's 2009 essay on To Kill A Mockingbird prefigures everyone's discovery this week that the book might be #problematic. I don't agree with it all (and it annoyed a lot of people at the time), and it does have those trademark Gladwellian leaps. . . but it will make you see the book in a different way, particularly the way Atticus Finch "breaks" Mayella Ewell - who is still a rape victim, after all - to win his case.
What was Aragorn's tax policy?
I'm finally getting round to watching Game of Thrones series five (I've given up on the books), and I remembered this interview with George R R Martin, in which he outlines his irritation with the way fantasy books aren't interested in obvious questions about power, and how hard it is to wield. At its best, particularly in the story of Daenerys, GoT has that Mantel-like quality of making you feel the full weight of how fine a decision is, and how making one lazily or cravenly or because you don't want to hurt someone's feelings can rebound on you later.
LOOK: Google's DeepDream is a neural network that looks for patterns and puts them through a feedback loop. The results are trippy. (If you like this, there's a whole sub-reddit devoted to it. Also, Vice did an eye-opening piece on what happens if you put, er... erotica through it. The answer is BAD THINGS. Horrible dogs! People with eyes in their genitals!)
WATCH: Do I Sound Gay? The trailer for this film looks fascinating - asking if there is a "gay voice" and whether embracing it is empowering or marginalising? (Yes, I am reading a lot about voices at the moment. Send me more links if you have them!)
Actually, while we're here, listen to the only extant recording of a castrato (an adult male with soprano range due to castration before puberty). I've always thought the poor man involved, Alessandro Moreschi, was doubly unlucky in that he doesn't seem to have been that great a singer, but Wikipedia suggests that the overwrought style was very popular at the time and just sounds weird to modern ears. Bonus: a BBC documentary on castrati.
AND FINALLY. . . someone convince me not to get this hair. (Yes, I'm watching America's Next Top Model again...)
Questions? Complaints? Haikus about otters? I'm at Helenlewisbook@gmail.com