The Bluestocking, vol XXV: Tudors, earthquakes and expectation management

Evening all,

Just finished reading this, er, brisk piece by Press Gazette's editor on the future of the Guardian (uncertain) and staff briefing against former editor Alan Rusbridger (plentiful). If anyone can see how the paper can cut costs without compulsory redundancies I think they should make themselves known immediately.

Anyway. . . back to poring over the election results. I'm doing Week in Westminster on Radio 4 tomorrow at 11am, but for my money the most interesting result for Labour is not the small losses in councils, but the continued shellacking in Scotland. To get an overall majority again at Westminster, the party either needs to win back some of those Scottish MPs it lost in 2015 (going from 40 to 1), or win English seats that even Blair didn't manage in 1997. Or hope that the Tory party splits in two, or that frogs rain from the sky or something.

Until next week,

Helen


Tudormania

The same tidiness of identity works for the wives of Henry VIII, if you want it to. Worsley’s forthcoming BBC1 programme takes as its premise, she told me, that they represent “archetypes of femininity”, though, when she explained, they sounded more like stereotypes harvested from the pages of the Daily Mail. “We have Katherine of Aragon, the angry older dumped woman, Anne Boleyn, the Angelina Jolie character; Jane Seymour, the good woman who stays at home; Anne of Cleves, the one defined by her looks; Catherine Howard, the sexy teenager; and Katherine Parr, the career girl who gets through the marriage, survives, marries for love, then dies in childbirth because she’s left it too late.” If the most characteristic cultural achievement of our time is branding, then it would seem that we have done a very effective job on our Tudor past.

A lovely longread about our current obsession with the Tudors. A book a month about them? No wonder the 17th century feels so neglected. Come on historians, where's that biography of Minette I've been waiting to read for 20 years?

An Imperfect Victim

Gravens believed that by omitting key facts about his record Baughman left himself open to charges of embellishment or dishonesty—a risk he could not afford to take given how central his personal credibility was to his advocacy. But something else was weighing on Gravens after the New York trip: For the first time since meeting Baughman, he had developed the queasy suspicion that his friend was still pursuing inappropriate relationships with minors.

This piece is about a spokesman for sex offenders with feet of clay, but it's also an interesting reflection on how to campaign on difficult causes. A personal story is more affecting than statistics; but what happens when your poster child lets you down?

Enjoy these photos from 1890s Japan.

NSFW, kinda: enjoy these photos by Lucy Hilmer, who started photographing herself in underwear when she was 29. That was four decades ago.

Pulitzers: in light of their wins, enjoy Kathryn Schulz's piece on the earthquake that is overdue screwing the west coast of the US; and Emily Nussbaum on Sex and The City.

Quick links: One of the barriers to diverse casting in Hollywood? China. A sweet story of a senator who's getting married at 90 to a man, having previously been married, in 1948, to a woman. How Uber took over London. Mother Jones is right about the economics of digital media: I'm really interested to see if pledge drives work. For those of you who remember my Sue Black interview, further evidence of her suggestion that forensic science is in crisis - the FBI wildly overstated the degree of matches in 100s of cases using hair and bite marks. Body hackers are all around you - they're called women. An introduction to Warsan Shire, the Somali-British poet made famous by Lemonade. Hillary Clinton' first attack ad on Trump is ***fire*** (who knew Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush could be so sassy?)

Person recommendation: Theo Bertram, who used to work for Labour and now works for Google, is well worth a follow on Twitter for his occasional bursts of anecdotes about life in politics. (The Chameleon costume story was a highlight.) He's written an interesting Medium post about expectation management in elections.

Guest gif: DON'T CALL US, WE'LL CALL YOU

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