The Bluestocking, vol XXIX: Early emails and late abortions

Hello from lonely moated Brexit Island! A bumper crop of links this week to make up for the fact we don't have a stable government, opposition, or any real idea of what happens next. `I'm on Radio 4's Week in Westminster at 11am tomorrow, and BBC One's Sunday Politics at 10am.

Helen


How "Silicon Valley" nails Silicon Valley

Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”

Confirming my belief that Silicon Valley start-ups are this decade's Nathan Barleyesque gonzo journalists in terms of doing self-consciously "zany" things and thinking it makes them original thinkers. This New Yorker piece about the TV show Silicon Valley - which I haven't got round to seeing yet - is packed full of quotable lines.

Side note: Peter Thiel, Trump delegate and Facebook board member, is pursuing Gawker for outing him by funding third-party legal actions. Here's a good argument for why killing legitimate journalism will lead to less responsible scrutiny.


E-Mail from BIll

TECHNOLOGICAL change is not democratic, but if we did have a choice would we vote for a man who sometimes behaves like a ten-year-old boy to be the principal architect of the way we communicate with each other in the future? Or is it Gates’ gift that he isn’t socialized in a way you’d expect a corporate executive to be. When I was ten, I would sit around with my friends watching it snow, and someone would say, “I wonder what the deepest snowfall ever was,” or something like that, and someone else would say, “Yeah, it would be cool to know that.” It seemed that there should be this giant, all-knowing brain, which could answer that kind of question. One of the lessons you learn in becoming an adult is that it doesn’t always pay to be curious. Some people learn to avoid curiosity altogether. Gates appears to have completely failed to absorb this lesson. My impression is that he still has the fantasy of the giant, all-knowing brain, and that this is what the information highway means to him. It’s a place where curiosity is rewarded.

An old profile of Bill Gates from the 90s, for all your "lol they thought it would be called the information superhighway" needs.


Thinking About Hillary

What the actual fuck is going on here? What’s going on is what we all know, but mostly don’t want to admit: presidential campaigns favor men, and the men who campaign in them are rewarded for those traits perceived as being “manly” — physical size, charisma, forceful personality, assertiveness, boldness and volume. Women who evince those same traits however are usually punished rather than rewarded, and a lot of the negativity aimed at Hillary over the years, especially when she is seeking office, has been due to these underlying biases. . . In the entire history of our nation, only 6 Presidents have also served as Secretary of State. Only 3 have served both as Secretary of State and in Congress. By any objective measure Hillary Clinton is not just the most qualified candidate this season, she’s one of the most qualified people to ever seek the office.

While we're here, Hanna Rosin's 2015 piece about the obsessive "Hillary haters" on the right is interesting. So is this 1996 New Yorker piece on why everyone hated her then.


Gender - good for nothing

At 15, I changed my name from Margaret to Lionel. Were I to have grown up 50, 60 years later, it’s entirely possible that my parents would have taken me to see a therapist and put me on hormone therapy.

I’m glad they didn’t. Not because being a woman is so swell, but because being either a woman or a man doesn’t matter that much to me. I certainly experience myself as female in relation to other people. But alone in a room, falling asleep, hiking by myself in the woods, writing at my computer, thinking—I do not experience myself first and foremost as a woman. I do not walk around all day contemplating labias and breasts and ovaries, much less determining to get my nails done or to make an appointment for highlights. For me, my very self has no gender. While obviously I can only testify to my own experience of being a person—to my knowledge, I’ve only been this one—I cannot imagine that I alone enjoy such a self-perception. If selfhood is real and not a neurological illusion, it transcends gender.

Thoughtful piece by Lionel - nee Margaret - Shriver on gender. (The response is here.)


Having an abortion in America at 32 weeks

I got numb. The night that we found out that he really wasn’t going to make it, my husband and I came home and drank bourbon. We raised our glasses and my husband made a toast “to Spartacus.” And when I had a sip of bourbon, it was over. Do you know what I mean? I had been so careful. I had been a health nut throughout the entire pregnancy, and at that point, it was like, fuck it, I’m trying to keep my sanity the best I could.

Of course, I’m still having to walk around looking pregnant and people still commenting on it. And you don’t want to make people feel bad, so you’re going along with it when the guy at the grocery store congratulates you. It feels fucking terrible. I wanted it done as quickly as I could.

This is a total gut-punch. Made me very glad to live in Britain, where late-term abortions are not subject to the same violent pushback.

Quick links:

Picasso was, unsurprisingly, a bastard.
This is MAD but GENIUS: an entire parody issue of the New Yorker.
Donald Trump's press secretary has no political experience. And no one wants to be his vice-president.
The "Cyber Caliphate", an online group of hackers supposedly working for Isis, is actually a Russian operation, several intelligence agencies have concluded.
"The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video, It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period." Am I the only one who thinks: wow, Facebook's head of Europe must be a hella slow reader?
A gif of a penguin jumping over a bar.
Can someone read this 35,000-word Andrew O'Hagan piece on a guy who might be Satoshi Nakamoto and tell me whether he turns out to be Satoshi Nakamoto or not?

The Hamilton section: Here's Lin-Manuel Miranda performing a solo version of "Alexander Hamilton" at the White House in 2009. The John Adams rap that was cut from the finished version. One of the many Ham4Ham performances the cast did to entertain people queueing for tickets. (Seriously, this is the happiest thing ever.) A parody rap about foodies that features Daveed Diggs naked draped in bacon. Lin-Manuel's all-family rendition of "To Life" at his wedding reception.


That's all. See you next week . . .