The Bluestocking, vol XIX: sharing economies, broken democracies and upgrading your kids

Happy Friday!

It's been a good week for reading - I FINISHED A Place Of Greater Safety. *party emoji*. In fact, I thought the ending was kind-of rushed . . . if you're going to spend 600 pages on arguments between people at the Convention, at least give us Robespierre's death, surely? Anyway, I have now treated myself to several (short) books, as I'm not ready to commit to another doorstop: Jan Morris's Conundrum; Sarah Waters's The Paying Guests, and Emma Donoghue's Life Mask.

I was on such a high from finishing APoGS that I also banged through Louise O'Neill's Only Ever Yours at the weekend. It's an enjoyable page-turner (clearly pitched as The Handmaid's Tale for the Instagram Generation) but - spoiler alert - the insane bleakness of the ending does rather smack of an author who realised there was no way out of the narrative prison she'd constructed for herself except going AND THEN EVERYBODY DIED. (I call this Enemy Of The State Syndrome.)

Until next time -

H



Living and Dying on Air BnB

The rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied to broke in half and fell on his head, immediately ending most of his brain activity.

Required reading for anyone who (like me) suspects that the "sharing economy" is a buzzword-driven bag of balls. Surprise! You can undercut established businesses if you don't have to comply with regulations!

Bonus: Enjoy Medium's Ev give the most tone-deaf comment of the week on the story. (OK, probably second most tone-deaf after Caitlyn Jenner saying that choosing her clothes every morning was the hardest part of being a woman.)

PS. This week I wrote about laundry ninjas and kitten pimping, and what the problem with Silicon Valley culture is.

Are Polls Ruining Democracy?

Using methods designed for knocking on doors to measure public opinion on the Internet is like trying to shoe a horse with your operating system. Internet pollsters can’t call you; they have to wait for you to come to them. Not everyone uses the Internet, and, at the moment, the people who do, and who complete online surveys, are younger and leftier than people who don’t, while people who have landlines, and who answer the phone, are older and more conservative than people who don’t. Some pollsters, both here and around the world, rely on a combination of telephone and Internet polling; the trick is to figure out just the right mix. So far, it isn’t working. In Israel this March, polls failed to predict Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory. In May in the U.K., every major national poll failed to forecast the Conservative Party’s win.

Bonus: contains surprise Shoeless Steve Hilton halfway through.

Aziz Ansari on race and Hollywood

Even though I’ve sold out Madison Square Garden as a standup comedian and have appeared in several films and a TV series, when my phone rings, the roles I’m offered are often defined by ethnicity and often require accents.

Sure, things are moving in the right direction with “Empire” and “Fresh Off the Boat.” But, as far as I know, black people and Asian people were around before the last TV season. And whatever progress toward diversity we are making, the percentage of minorities playing lead roles is still painfully low. (The numbers for women are depressing as well.)

Ansari is a thoughtful guy, and this is a great piece, and lots of people I know love his new Netflix show Master Of None, but I have to get this off my chest. His book (Modern Romance) got optioned at the same time as Lena Dunham's, for a similar eye-watering multi-million pound sum, and was similarly amusing but lightweight and a bit too self-absorbed. But NOWHERE did I see him getting shouted at like she has been for the last three or four years.

Look at the reaction to this piece: lots of applause for his bravery. No one is demanding that he address how things are different for non-white women in Hollywood, and the double discrimination they face. Now imagine Dunham had written about the gender pay gap. We'd be drowning in thinkpieces about how she can't speak for anyone except rich white women. God, it's infuriating. [rant over]


Quick links: The San Francisco tech scene means it's boom time for dominatrixes. if you only know Charles Addams through the Addams Family, rectify that. Has there ever been a Noel Gallagher interview that wasn't worth reading? Damn it all, I want to write like Nora Ephron - this story is beautifully controlled in the way it plays with your anticipation. Jon Ronson meets The Fat Jew: "Writing a book is indeed a daunting task, and I don’t think Ostrovsky ultimately meets the challenge, given much of it consists of stories about his penis." If I ever need a band name, I'm taking it from this amazing list of suggested English names for fungi (Goatcheese Webcap is the current favourite.) Acting "like a man" raises your testosterone levels. I defy you not to get a little teary from this Oatmeal comic. It's getting slightly embarrassing how desperate American leftie bros are to find a candidate that they can back instead of Hillary (NOT THAT IT'S ANYTHING TO DO WITH SEXISM).

Quote of the week: Elon Musk talks like no one else. For example, this on having children reducing your fear of death: "Kids sort of are a bit you. At least they’re half you. They’re half you at the hardware level, and depending on how much time you have with them, they’re that percentage of you at the software level."

Guest gif: Nope.

And finally: a Magic Eye version of Goatse. (If you don't know what Goatse is, DO NOT GOOGLE IT)

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