The Bluestocking, vol XXVI: Headscarves, hackers and activated cashews
Evening all,
This was the week I started to get really into the US presidential race - I'm sorry, blame the West Wing - and it was interesting to re-read this 1994 New Yorker profile of Hillary Clinton and Katha Pollitt's recent piece about how she has somehow always ended up voting for male candidates.
I'm trying not to read the Sanders/Clinton fight through the prism of last year's Labour contest - young people flock to old white man as the saviour of socialism despite his lack of appeal to wider electorate - not least because Sanders is no Jeremy Corbyn. He's far more hawkish on foreign policy that JezWeCan, and in fact has voted the same way as Clinton 93% on domestic policy. Clinton is also a plausible winner, whereas it's hard to argue that under Yvette Cooper or Liz Kendall, Labour would now be set for a 1997 style landslide.
Nonetheless, there are some themes - about pragmatism vs purity, and about our ideas about what power looks like - that I will be mulling over in the next few weeks. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts - tweet me if you like!
Until next week,
Helen
The Head Scarf And Me
At that point, another thought came to me, a kind of fantasy, so foreign that I could barely articulate it even to myself: What if I really did it? What if I wore a scarf not as a disguise but somehow for real? I was thirty-four, and I’d been having a lot of doubts about the direction my life was taking. I had had an abortion the previous year, with some reluctance, and everything—every minor defeat, every sign of unfriendliness—still hurt a little extra. I had never felt so alone, and in a way that seemed suddenly to have been of my design, as if I had chosen this life without realizing it, years earlier, when I set out to become a writer. And now a glimmer appeared before me of a totally different way of being than any I had imagined, a life with clear rules and duties that you followed, in exchange for which you were respected and honored and safe. You had children—not maybe but definitely. You didn’t have to worry that your social value was irrevocably tied to your sexual value. You had less freedom, true. But what was so great about freedom? What was so great about being a journalist and going around being a pain in everyone’s ass, having people either be suspicious and mean to you or try to use you for their P.R. strategy?
Elif Batuman, the daughter of secularist Turkish parents, reflects on the country's turn back towards Islamism. I found the sections about how secularism & feminism are portrayed as "metropolitan elite" opinions particularly alarming, as the same dynamic, albeit at a lower level, is seen in the west. Feminism is constantly being portrayed as the pursuit only of ladies-who-lunch; how much of that is feminism's fault, and how much of that is people using the best available weapon against it? (Also: this piece has made me finally acknowledge that I should read Submission.)
The Queen and I
We are allowed into the ballroom. I count twelve stag heads and ten swords; an insane royal crib, exploding with pink flounces, because one can be both twee and savage; a statue of Queen Victoria “at her spinning wheel” by Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, “eager to practise a highland craft.” The modern equivalent would be the Queen sculpted while operating an articulated dump truck. A computer displays photographs of the interiors of the house. The carpets are faded tartan; the furniture, a peculiar shade of orange. We are sent out past the bins by a peeling service wing: “Charming,” says a fellow visitor. (This is British sarcasm.) There are fraying curtains in the windows. Cans of paint are piled against the glass.
Tanya Gold visits three royal palaces, and tries not to be sick.
My Food Diary
"At 9:30am, I drink 16 ounces of unsweetened, strong green juice, which is my alkalizer, hydrator, energizer, source of protein and calcium, and overall mood balancer. It's also my easy, 'lazy,' and delicious skin regime. I also take three tablespoons of bee pollen. I love Moon Juice's soft and chewy bee pollen—it's a creamy, candy-like treat that gives me my daily B-vitamin blast, and also helps feed my skin and aids hormone production. I'll also grab a handful of activated cashews. I try to get these in every day for their brain chemistry magic. I chase this with a shot of pressed turmeric root in freshly squeezed grapefruit juice."
This LA juice bar owner's food diary is a thing of majesty. Ten points for anyone who can tell me how to activate a cashew. (Also, trigger warning: will make you want to eat a Big Mac.)
Quick links: How one hacker undermined the theory of the "wisdom of crowds". Twenty years of Vanity Fair's Hollywood Issue covers are a weird insight into changing social norms. (I was surprised they were as diverse as they were; also, that aside from the lingerie special and Tom Ford's scratch-n-sniff offering, they were equal opportunity objectifiers.) The New Yorker's Bernie Sanders profile: I found the fact that his wife gave up her job to volunteer for him particularly interesting: while Hillary Clinton gets attacked for "riding on her husband's coat-tails", let's remember that pretty male politicians through history have often benefits from their spouse's sacrifices, including David Cameron and Barack Obama. Tom Bissell on David Foster Wallace. (Confession: I have read maybe three dozen pieces on Infinite Jest, and never felt the slightest temptation to read Infinite Jest. It just feels so much to me the kind of book that young men read to feel good about reading it. See also Knausgaard.) A good question about the Danish Girl: it's a film about the construction of femininity, so why doesn't Gerda have hairy legs?
Headline of the week: Wife crashes her own funeral, horrifying her husband, who had paid to have her killed
Guest gif: (is everyone else who loves Benedict Cumberbatch desperately trying to pretend this never happened?)
That's all: please forward this to a friend if you like it, or be nice about me on Twitter. Or send cash. Your call.