The Bluestocking, vol XXX: Genetics, Obama's almonds and late night TV
Hey all,
As you might have noticed, these newsletter have become more irregular, and that's probably how they are going to stay. Brexit blew a giant hole in my life, and time has been whistling through it ever since. And now there's a Labour leadership election this summer, in case anyone was hoping to chill out a bit and switch off.
To atone for my sluggishness, there are some great links, and if you stay to the end, there is final proof I have gone mad, in the form of my own Hamilton lyrics about Michael Gove.
Helen
The Trouble With Finding Out If Female Athletes Are Female
Amid complaints about the genital checks, the I.A.A.F. and the I.O.C. introduced a new “gender verification” strategy in the late ’60s: a chromosome test. Officials considered that a more dignified, objective way to root out not only impostors but also intersex athletes, who, Olympic officials said, needed to be barred to ensure fair play. Ewa Klobukowska, a Polish sprinter, was among the first to be ousted because of that test; she was reportedly found to have both XX and XXY chromosomes. An editorial in the I.O.C. magazine in 1968 insisted the chromosome test “indicates quite definitely the sex of a person,” but many geneticists and endocrinologists disagreed, pointing out that sex was determined by a confluence of genetic, hormonal and physiological factors, not any one alone. Relying on science to arbitrate the male-female divide in sports is fruitless, they said, because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw. They also argued that the tests discriminated against those whose anomalies provided little or no competitive edge and traumatized women who had spent their whole lives certain they were female, only to be told they were not female enough to participate.
The science of sex differences is really complicated. I don't really see any way out of the fact that most Olympic athletes have genetic advantages. (Turns out a fair few have chemical ones, too.) Hard to say which ones are "cheating" and which aren't.
Obama, after dark
Obama and his wife are also fans of cable dramas like “Boardwalk Empire,” “Game of Thrones” and “Breaking Bad.” On Friday nights — movie night at the White House — Obama and his family are often in the Family Theater, a 40-seat screening room on the first floor of the East Wing, watching first-run films they have chosen and had delivered from the Motion Picture Association of America.
There is time, too, for fantasy about what life would be like outside the White House. Emanuel, who is now the mayor of Chicago but remains close to the president, said he and Obama once imagined moving to Hawaii to open a T-shirt shack that sold only one size (medium) and one color (white). Their dream was that they would no longer have to make decisions.
Obama is an inspiration. Also a thinspiration.
Samantha Bee, beating the late night boys' club
Bee took the same approach to hiring writers, creating a blind application process that didn't favor people who'd already had success. (It spelled out, for example, how scripts should look when submitted, leveling the playing field for the uninitiated.) Lo and behold, she ended up with a writers' room that looked kind of like America: 50 percent female; 30 percent nonwhite. One of her hires had been working at the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles. "We don't feel like we solved the diversity problem. We didn't fix racism, quite," Bee jokes. "I mean, we almost did. We'll see how things pan out. I'm feeling really good about it." Anyway, the strategy worked. "I have literally filled my office with people who have been underestimated their entire careers. To a person, we almost all fit into that category. It is so joyful to collect a group of people who nobody has ever thought could grasp the reins of something and fucking go for it."
Wish I could watch this over here. Still, you can have nine minutes of Jon Stewart talking about Trump.
Pretending not to have heard of Žižek
This is the Žižek game, and I am going to teach you how to play it. Think of these instructions as the opposite of the ones offered in “How to Be Polite,” Paul Ford’s beautiful essay about graciousness and its effects on other people. Ford’s advice is meant to be lived by. My advice is intended only for special occasions. It is for when you have an itch to scratch, and that itch is called, “a puerile desire to get on other people’s nerves.” All you do is stonily deny any knowledge of a person or cultural touchstone that you should, by virtue of your other cultural reference points, be aware of. These will of course be different for everyone, but my favorites include:
Žižek, John Updike, MORRISSEY (only for experts), Radiohead, Twin Peaks,David Lynch in general, Banksy (only for streetfighters), Withnail and I, Bauhaus (movement), Bauhaus (band), Afrika Burn, the expression “garbage person,” A Clockwork Orange, Steampunk (this one is really good), Jack Kerouac, “Gilmore Girls,” Woody Allen, the expression “grammar nerd,” the expression “grammar Nazi,” cocktails, bongs, magical realism, millennials, Cards Against Humanity, trance parties, bunting, many comedians, William Gibson, burlesque, the Beats, The God Delusion, sloths, anarchism, Joy Division, CrossFit, “The Mighty Boosh,” and Fight Club.
Quick links: These photos of the environment are astonishing - can't choose between the peregrine and the dead pig. Trump's regretful ghostwriter telling all is fascinating; like Boris Johnson making up all those bendy banana Euro myths, it's another political career built on lies, which just don't seem to hurt him.
*** Warning: Hamilton section***
All About The Hamiltons
Oskar Eustis, who marks his ten-year anniversary as the artistic director of the Public with this production, says that “Hamilton” is the most exciting new work he has been involved with in years—perhaps since Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” which he commissioned, and directed in its première production, in 1992. He sees a connection between Miranda’s creation and the Henriad, Shakespeare’s early cycle of history plays: “What Lin is doing is taking the vernacular of the streets and elevating it to verse. That is what hip-hop is, and that is what iambic pentameter was. Lin is telling the story of the founding of his country in such a way as to make everyone present feel they have a stake in their country. In heightened verse form, Shakespeare told England’s national story to the audience at the Globe, and helped make England England—helped give it its self-consciousness. That is exactly what Lin is doing with ‘Hamilton.’ By telling the story of the founding of the country through the eyes of a bastard, immigrant orphan, told entirely by people of color, he is saying, ‘This is our country. We get to lay claim to it.’ ”
The New Yorker's piece on Hamilton before it launched. As some of you will know, I'm obsessed with the musical about the "forgotten founding father", and am slowly rewriting it to be about contemporary British politics. So far I have remade "Guns and Ships" to be about Michael Gove's leadership bid:
How does a ragtag pamphleteer army, led by a shower
Somehow downgrade a global superpower?
How do we emerge victorious from the quagmire
Leave the TV studios after Eagle calls our bus a liar?
Yo, turns out we have a man with hunger
A man adopted by an Aberdeen fishmonger
He's already making the other guys look like flotsam
Everyone give it up for the UK's FAVOURITE SCHEMING SCOTSMAN
Michael GOVE!
I'm taking this race by the reins making plush carpet redder with bloodstains
Michael GOVE!
And I'm never going to stop until I burn them up and reach the top and snatch all Bozza's gains
Michael GOVE!
Watch me debating them, I'm slating them, berating them!
Michael Gove!
I go to Boles for more men, Sarah picks up her pen
it leaks
And so their interest piques
We rendezvous with Henry, consolidate with Beth
We can end this war in the Mail, an oped on page 3
But for this to succeed, there's someone else we need…
Dominic!
Sir, he knows what to do with an ad, a few lies, is it really that bad, I mean -
Dominic!
Sir, you're going to have to use him eventually, you want him to work for Crabb, I mean-
DOMINIC!
No one is more punctilious
Bring me my tactical practical Odysseus
We wanna fight May and Crabb bad?
We need our right hand man back!
What can I say? I'm sorry. I'm also halfway through "Wait for It" to be about Jeremy Corbyn. See you next time.