The Bluestocking, vol XXIV: Pigs, voyeurs and regretful jihadis
So yes, here's why there was no newsletter last week:
That's Catherine Palace in Pushkin (also known as Tsarskoe Selo), just outside St Petersburg. The weather there last week was very odd, but brilliant: glorious sunshine, then snowstorms on Thursday, then back to glorious sunshine. It certainly made for great photos.
If you fancy a new podcast, my Hidden Histories series is now online, talking about the rise of the novel and women writers before Jane Austen.
Helen
Jade Goody obituary
Jade Goody's main function, as she put it herself, was to be an "escape goat". She was the modern equivalent of Barnum and Bailey's "bearded lady" – a pressure valve for the vindictive rage of the mob and their tribunes in the Red Tops. Polls suggested that she was more unpopular even than Saddam Hussein (a boxer, said Jade). Such was the public venom it was feared that things might get dangerously out of hand. Some people actually travelled across England to the BB house, where they waved placards and greeted her emergence, spilling out of a pink dress several sizes too small, with chants of "burn the pig". Channel 4 was even reported to be considering smuggling her out of the country for her own safety.
Well, this was a bloody weird period in public life, wasn't it? I randomly came across this earlier today. It feels as though our ideas of celebrity were particularly cruel at the time of the early Big Brother series.
The Voyeur's Motel
Years after being discharged, after building the viewing platform in his motel, he felt at times as if he were still in the Navy, adrift on the sea, peering down through the vents the way he used to squint through binoculars on deck duty, keeping a lookout for objects of interest. Life in the attic was humdrum. His motel was a drydocked boat whose guests endlessly watched television, exchanged banalities, had sex mainly under the covers if they had sex at all—and gave him so little to write about that sometimes he wrote nothing at all.
In case you missed this when it came out - Gay Talese finally writes a story he'd been sitting on for decades.
The White Death
Surrounded in a social bubble of the university-educated, the typical executive easily forgets that most people were not born with IQs at least one standard deviation above the mean. Given the high heritability of intelligence, personality, and educational achievement, it makes no more sense to blame the average marginally useful worker for his lack of workplace productivity than it does to blame the cystic fibrosis sufferer for his poor lung productivity. The one is barely more at fault than the other.
Provocative piece by Andrew Sabisky, which chimed with something else I was going to put in the newsletter already: why the Gig economy is spluttering (hurrah). Here's the killer quote, on a start-up that tried to be the "Uber of personal assistants" paying people $20 an hour - which might sound like a lot, but turned out not to be worthwhile to workers once you factored in travel, expenses and gaps in demand: 'Justin Kan says the company also acquired a false sense that the quality of service for our customers was better than it was” because the quality of the “average recruitable errand runner” — at the low pay and on-call demands that Exec wanted — did not result in hiring the self-motivated personality types like those that start Silicon Valley companies. (Surprise, surprise.)'
The Masters of the Brave New Flexitime Universe don't seem to twig that, actually, not everyone is a 20 or 30something graduate with few personal responsibilities who derives their entire self-worth from the status of their job. Quite a lot of people don't have that level of burning ambition; others prize stability and predictability over the lottery ticket of entrepreneur culture.
Quick links: Why Reddit and 4Chan back Trump. Elephants versus giant trees. Monica Lewinsky on shame. The problem with having men and "non-men". Paul Krugman on why he's not Feeling The Bern. Can an outsider ever truly become Amish? Been waiting to read something like this for ages: what happens when you turn up for jihad in Syria then realise you actually don't fancy it? Calm down, Bernie Bros: this isn't the beginning of a new movement: Sanders has scraped together the same electoral coalition as previous (white, male) left-wing Democrats. There's a better way to board planes.
Have a good weekend.