The Bluestocking, vol XI: Bullying mums, multiplying ones and Frank Sinatra's cold
Hello,
I kicked off my weekend by catching up on Question Time and watching a professional Hearthstone tournament on Twitch, so I'm feeling pretty confident that I'm the geekiest person in the world right now. Watching BBCQT, I was surprised how well John McDonnell came across - I can't imagine there is a perfect way to apologise for praising the IRA, but he's giving it a good go. His appointment as shadow chancellor was hugely controversial in the party, so if he can outperform expectations, it's a big boost for Jeremy Corbyn.
The election of Corbyn has made British politics feel exciting and genuinely unpredictable. I went to PMQs on Wednesday, and the Commons galleries were packed - not just the public one, but the media section too. The result was a nil-nil draw, as the Labour leader managed not to get pummelled by Cameron, but also failed to land any significant blows on him. It will be interesting to see if he can develop a more prosecutorial style in weeks where there is a major issue or scandal and he has to hold the government to account.
In other news, this week I contributed to a feature on what the suffragettes mean today.
Helen
An Internet So Simple Your Dad Can Understand It
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde famously said, but let Clay Shirky mansplain. It “always struck me as a strange observation—even the metaphor isn’t true,” the tech consultant and bestselling author said at the New Yorker Festival last autumn in a debate with the novelist Jonathan Franzen. “Get ahold of the master’s hammer,” and you can dismantle anything. Just consider all the people “flipping on the ‘I’m gay’ light on Facebook” to signal their support for marriage equality—there, Shirky declared, is a prime example of the master’s tools put to good use.
My favourite first sentence of the week, courtesy of this piece about gender and tech companies.
No Legitimate Purpose
Talley usually posts several times a day. Her posts vacillate from being about the case—”There was no evidence of any bullying. Please follow the links to the articles in this group and read up on the case”—to targeting Rebecca’s mother, Tricia Norman, and her anti-bullying nonprofit—“Was it Becca's dream to be killed and have her mother take donations to pay herself to travel and lie about her death?”
The group, with 536 members at the time of writing, also provides a platform for others to post judgmental musings. “I also looked at mom's FB the day her body was discovered,” one wrote. “She changed her profile picture to pictures of her and Becca Ann. I then looked at all of her prior profile pictures. They were all of herself. Now as a mother I would only post a picture of my child (meaning, it's not about me it about my child) as my profile picture.”
A child was bullied, and committed suicide. Now one woman believes that the child didn't kill herself, and harasses the girl's mother online. There are strong echoes of the McCann truthers here.
Terrence Howard's Dangerous Mind
"This is the last century that our children will ever have been taught that one times one is one," he says. "They won't have to grow up in ignorance. Twenty years from now, they'll know that one times one equals two. We're about to show a new truth. The true universal math. And the proof is in these pieces. I have created the pieces that make up the motion of the universe. We work on them about 17 hours a day. She cuts and puts on the crystals. I do the main work of soldering them together. They tell the truth from within."
Actors, man. What are they like?
Quick links: My favourite Trump Vine. My colleague Caroline's lovely piece on radio comedy. Stephen Colbert's honest encounter with Joe Biden on grief. Helen Macdonald on dead and dying trees. Whatever happened to Google Books? Esquire has put its archive online, and it includes this piece about a war reporter finally coming home and Gay Talese's groundbreaking profile "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold". An oral history of Scotland's independence referendum.
Picture of the week: Suffragette Mary Sophia Allen, who preferred to be called Robert, with a friend. Her Wikipedia page gives a flavour of her life, which included passing herself off as the chief of women's police in England, until the actual police had to tell her to stop it. There's just something Miss Trunchbull-y about her expression.
That's all! Thanks for reading. Recipes for chicken soup to helenlewisbook@gmail.com