The Bluestocking, volume 50: Young Adults, lost voices and baby names

Happy Friday!

This week I wrote about why Martin Crane's chair was the true star of Frasier. My Twitter mentions have just been full of lovely people sharing lovely anecdotes about why they love the programme too. Remind me never to write about the Labour party again; 1990s sitcoms are where it's at.

Helen

The Toxic YA Twitter drama

Dramatic as that sounds, it’s worth noting that my attempts to report this piece were met with intense pushback. Sinyard politely declined my request for an interview in what seemed like a routine exchange, but then announced on Twitter that our interaction had “scared” her, leading to backlash from community members who insisted that the as-yet-unwritten story would endanger her life.

The title of this is surely a callback to Michelle Goldberg's superb piece on feminism's toxic twitter wars. Progressive online communities do tend to go weird in quite similar ways. FWIW, I think that the dynamic happening here is best expressed as a protection racket: a couple of people set themselves up as the Arbiters of Wokeness, or the Problematic Finder-General, which gives them a huge amount of clout within a very small pool of people. As the writer of this piece notes, though, it's a largely illusory power: most readers (and most book buyers) don't care. That doesn't mean that PFGs can't make life deeply unpleasant for essentially well-meaning people, though.

Notes from a baby name obsessive

The exuberance of American names has been one of the country’s hallmarks since its founding. In sixteenth-century England, the Puritans started using their children’s birth certificates as miniature sermons. They produced some doozies: Humiliation Hynde, Kill-sin Pimple, Praise-God Barebone (whose son, If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned Barebone, eventually went by Nicholas Barbon). Charles II largely stamped out the trend during the Reformation, but the Puritans continued the practice in the New World. The Claps—a Roger and Johanna who immigrated to Dorchester in 1630—produced a virtue-themed progeny that included Experience, Waitstill, Preserved, Hopestill, Wait, Thanks, Desire, Unite, and Supply, making them perhaps the Kardashians of Colonial Massachusetts.

Lauren Collins's piece about picking out a baby name is very sweet. One of the problems many people have is that they don't want to give boys "weird" names. I recommend this Deborah Cameron piece about the intense gender split in names, and why it persists.

You Are The Product

The big internet enterprises seem invulnerable on these narrow grounds. Or they do until you consider the question of individualised pricing. The huge data trail we all leave behind as we move around the internet is increasingly used to target us with prices which aren’t like the tags attached to goods in a shop. On the contrary, they are dynamic, moving with our perceived ability to pay.​5 Four researchers based in Spain studied the phenomenon by creating automated personas to behave as if, in one case, ‘budget conscious’ and in another ‘affluent’, and then checking to see if their different behaviour led to different prices. It did: a search for headphones returned a set of results which were on average four times more expensive for the affluent persona. An airline-ticket discount site charged higher fares to the affluent consumer. In general, the location of the searcher caused prices to vary by as much as 166 per cent. So in short, yes, personalised prices are a thing, and the ability to create them depends on tracking us across the internet. That seems to me a prima facie violation of the American post-Bork monopoly laws, focused as they are entirely on price. It’s sort of funny, and also sort of grotesque, that an unprecedentedly huge apparatus of consumer surveillance is fine, apparently, but an unprecedentedly huge apparatus of consumer surveillance which results in some people paying higher prices may well be illegal.

John Lanchester is a rare literary writer who really understands technology (rather than haughtily dismissing it). As a result, there's acres of gold in this piece on Facebook: click fraud, the growth problem when you're running out of humans, the underlying psychology of Facebook. The part about a groupthink cartel of ad buyers possibly realising they are spending money for no reason should terrify anyone in the media.

Chaser: Franklin Foer on what went wrong when a Facebook co-founder bought the New Republic
Additional chaser for the road: The Guardian's Chris Moran on the demonisation of audience data

Why stars like Adele keep losing their voice

While the media was celebrating this miracle surgery, one woman in the music industry raised a dissenting voice. According to Lisa Paglin, a former opera singer turned voice coach, Zeitels had simply found a temporary fix; in the not too distant future, Adele would once again be forced off the stage and back into the operating theatre. It was a prediction that Paglin and Marianna Brilla, her coaching partner, were willing to stake their reputations on. The rash of vocal injuries silencing our most promising young talents, they argued, is too big a problem to be solved by microsurgery.

We're doing singing wrong, and it's hurting singers.

Quick links

I'm thinking about boys, too.
What if Mike Pence became president?
This 100-tweet thread lays out what Stephen Bush calls the "Rossier" - proof that Ross from Friends is a monster.
Humans are amazing. And completely mad.
A loooong piece about Christopher Nolan's use of time.

Goodnight Seattle, we love you!