The Bluestocking, Vol XXVIII: Class, crowds and Twitter comebacks

Hey,

I haven't written anything this week - feels weird - but last week I reviewed Kat Banyard's punchy book on prostitution. This week I have been mostly enjoying Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren whomping Donald Trump.

Helen


The squeezed upper middle

Inheritance tax, the threshold for which is £650,000 for a married couple and going up, is seen as inimical to “aspiration”, as though the receipt of a house worth three times the national average is a rite of passage for plucky families in Everytown. The 40p rate of income tax is another alleged chafe on middling citizens. Only 17 per cent of the taxpaying population pay it. When the woes of the rich are documented, school fees usually appear as a costly staple. Seven per cent of British schoolchildren are privately educated.

This Janan Ganesh column is the antidote to all those plaintive features by people with £150,000 take-home salary who complain about being the squeezed middle. It's also pretty perceptive about the new class structures, and the fissure between the true middle and the "creative London middle".


Did Hilary's campaign have to be this hard?

She told a story about the time she and a friend from Wellesley sat for the LSAT at Harvard. “We were in this huge, cavernous room,” she said. “And hundreds of people were taking this test, and there weren’t many women there. This friend and I were waiting for the test to begin, and the young men around us were like, ‘What do you think [you’re] doing? How dare you take a spot from one of us?’ It was just a relentless harangue.” Clinton and her friend were stunned. They’d spent four safe years at a women’s college, where these kinds of gender dynamics didn’t apply.

“I remember one young man said, ‘If you get into law school and I don’t, and I have to go to Vietnam and get killed, it’s your fault.’ ”

“So yeah,” Clinton continued. “That level of visceral … fear, anxiety, insecurity plays a role” in how America regards ambitious women.

There have been very few good Clinton profiles, as she is - perhaps unsurprisingly - extremely unwilling to let anyone in to her thought processes and inner circle. But this by Rebecca Traister is more revealing than most, and I think the anecdote above is fascinating... and it's a theme that comes up again and again in modern politics. Middle-ranking men are being shuffled down the social order by successful women. And it's tempting to blame the women, rather than society (as in the example above - it's not HIllary Clinton who started a hugely ill-advised war on Vietnam).


Twitter is betting everything on Jack Dorsey

Dorsey replied that his work wasn’t done on the product he had helped start. Indeed, he now spends a large portion of his day trying to pitch people—investors, new recruits, current employees who might be on the verge of quitting, the board—a narrative of what Twitter can still be. “I want people to wake up every day and the first thing they check is Twitter in order to see what’s happening in the world,” he said between bites of his first crispy beef taco. “It’s a metaphor for checking the weather. Twitter has a similar potential.”

Twitter is dying. Can its original founder breathe new life into it?


Crush Point

So why do we still think in terms of panics and stampedes? In many crowd disasters, particularly those in the West where commercial interests are involved, different stakeholders are potentially responsible, including the organizers of the event, the venue owners and designers, and the public officials and private security firms whose job is to insure crowd safety. In the aftermath of disasters, they all vigorously defend their interests, and rarely are any of them held accountable. But almost no one speaks for the crowd, and the crowd usually takes the blame.

This piece on how crowd disasters happen is fascinating, but WARNING: there's a very graphic photograph of the Hillsborough victims at the top. I very much doubt a British publication would use that picture, so I suppose it's an insight for us into how people in the developing world feel about black and brown bodies being splashed over the news in a way that westerners' wouldn't be.)

Quick links: Translating Ancillary Justice into languages which are more highly gendered. Inside the life of an insane over-achiever who is a judge on Miss Universe. The first Godless American election. What the most alluring women of the 17th century England looked like. The Economist on how free speech is under threat across the world. Among the many things to love in this obit of a Bletchley Park codebreaker is the fact her school was called "Miss Ironsides". Liberace Trump. Why the UK Ghostbusters trailer is funnier than the US one. (Related: a great profile of the film editor who does Apatow comedies, and how you edit jokes on film to be funnier). How much is a 1,109 carat rough diamond worth? I'm a massive fan of mad monarch stories, but very few are women. Come on down, Ranavalona of Madagascar!

Guest gif: Lightning in slow motion.

That's all - if you like this newsletter, forward it to a friend. They can sign up at tinyletter.com/HelenLewis