The Bluestocking, Vol XVI: A Swiftian life, losing $2.3bn and evolving into a duck
Afternoon,
I've realised these beginning bits have taken on the tone of a Christmas round robin, so I'll keep it short this week. There's a fun game, a few selected celebrity profiles and a chilling read about spree killers for the second week running.
Helen
Blank Space
It’s impossible for an artist to control how she is perceived. But an artist can anticipate those perceptions, which is almost as good. “A nuanced sense of humor does not translate on a general scale,” Swift says, “and I knew that going in. I knew some people would hear ‘Blank Space’ and say, See, we were right about her. And at that point, I just figure if you don’t get the joke, you don’t deserve to get the joke.”
This profile of Taylor Swift made me feel very old. How is she not totally mad?
Who's The Alpha Male Now, Bitches?
Someone, perhaps not a million miles from you, whose name we don’t yet know but whose face is camera-ready, whose conscience is clearing before the fact, is preparing a biography of his mentality in advance of a shooting massacre. He is almost certainly a he, and he is unhappy, and he is already fully armed. He is probably on Zoloft. He is likely to be a virgin with a history of isolation. He may be into hurting animals, or like Death Metal music, and there’s a strong chance he will have been said to have Asperger’s syndrome or ADHD. The movies he likes will tell a story about him and his displaced sense of self. There may be a girl who snubbed him. If he is older, it may be a boss who snubbed him but it’s more likely to be the whole of ‘society’. He may well be an expert in video games and have inscribed himself on a notional leaderboard, perhaps even taking up a role in life that mirrors a status he sees himself having in the game. He will write poems. He will watch porn. And there will be times when he doesn’t sleep for days, just drinking Coke, listening to music on his iPod and dreaming up scenarios based on the songs. He will hate jocks, the sometimes handsome and generally confident boys who snag the girls at school. Those he hates he hates with a vengeance. He might find girls disgusting. He believes he has a system of thought, his own, that education or company philosophy can’t get close to, and his feelings of inferiority quickly turn bombastic. He is lonely. And the biggest mistake he makes is to imagine there is nobody like him. Because quite a few are like him and some of them are already writing a long note to posterity.
Andrew O'Hagan on teen shooters and the manifestos they leave behind.
So You Want to Evolve Into A Duck?
I don't know what happened here, but it was glorious. Also, I evolved into Michael Phelps.
Quick links: "Sierra, who is two years older, looked comparatively demure in a seersucker jacket and red clown makeup." A surprisingly interesting Vogue interview with Angelina Jolie. The problem with the media covering the tech industry, when the tech industry is eating up the media's business. Hillary Clinton's lady-heavy press pack. How long did people use to sleep for? What highland sheep can tell you about the SNP's centralising instincts. Read this and be profoundly weirded out for at least four paragraphs. The FT have interviewed the trader who lost UBS $2.3bn, and he doesn't seem to think he did anything wrong.
Guest gif. There was hot competition from Drake dancing to the Frasier theme tune this week, but this won:
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