The Bluestocking, Volume III: High fliers, midlife crises and losers

Hello, Good Evening and Welcome!

If you're following the link from Twitter, I'm sorry I misled you about the hotness of the takes on offer here. There aren't any this week - I already did my time in the Opinion Mines with my column on how social media is full of ostentatious left-wing piety that means nothing for the future prospects of the Labour party.

Instead, I offer you lots of nice, funny, smart, eye-opening weekend reading.

Helen


The Man Who Flies Around The World Constantly - For Free

If there is ever a class in profile writing, this should be on the syllabus. People in the grip of an obsession are always interesting - particularly when their obsession seems to suck the fun out of whatever the basic subject is. I'm a sucker for a bit of armchair psychology about motives, too.

Plus the writer of this piece brought to life a world - first class cabins on aircraft - that many of us are intrigued about, that we can see in glimpses as we trudge to economy, but will probably never get to experience first-hand. So obviously we're in the game for a piece that both demystifies them and makes them sound, well, not all that.

Men Who Harass Women Online Are Literally Losers

Halo online was a very male-dominated space, then women came in - and the men who were most bothered by this were the ones who weren't very good at Halo. It's not too much of a stretch to apply this to Men's RIghts Activists, or the trolling of Anita Sarkeesian or Caroline Criado-Perez or Mary Beard. It's not just the sight of a woman that offends a certain type of man, it's a successful woman. A middle-class "privileged" woman. Feminists get particular ire because they are seen to be complaining about women's lot in life when their own lives look pretty sweet.

(While we're here, this Adrian Chen piece on Reddit's "moderatocracy" - which I wrote about last week, is thought-provoking. His 2014 piece on the low-paid workers in the developing world who keep "dick pics and beheadings" off your favourite internet places is also a sobering read.)

The Web We Have to Save

Imagine being away from the internet for the last six years (because Iran locked you up for your blog) and returning to find . . . well, this. An internet where news organisations no longer link to interesting content elsewhere - they gobble it up and spit it out in aggregated form. An internet where people share pieces they have no intention of reading because they like what it says about them.

Do Women Get to Have a Midlife Crisis?

A really honest, refreshingly low-key key reflection on what it's like to leave your husband and start your life again at 32. If I'm honest, I've read this writer at Comment Is Free and never been bowled over before - but clearly she's been hiding her light under a bushel. Anyone getting married younger than 30 should read this. Maybe older people should do too.

And finally: the Labour is going to spam its way to electoral success. Good luck with that.

"One evening, during a rather fraught dinner session with my two daughters, just after the two-year-old had aggressively frisbeed a plate of food across the kitchen, the phone rang. It was Tom Watson’s office. They fancied a chat. I did not fancy a chat."

This is the best thing anyone has written about the Labour leadership election. Giving all party member's emails and phone numbers to 4 leadership candidates, 7 deputy candidates, and the London mayoral candidates too? What could possibly go wrong?

A soothing canyon.

Quick links: Greenland looks . . . empty. The New Yorker does hip hop. This Trans Woman Kept Her Beard And She Couldn't Be Happier; a story that will challenge your preconceptions of what it means to "transition". The mad illegal things you can get up to on a ship in international waters (introducing me to the adjective "scofflaw", which I plan to use in a sentence as soon as humanly possible. Why Poland escaped the Black Death.

"My advice? Be terrifying": Kelly DeConnick tells you how to be a woman in a male-dominated world. What a bracelet made out of the Brontes hair tells you about them. Rachel Dolezal still isn't black but still won't accept it. Fossil ethics and the four-legged snake. Just for Caroline, Medici poison skulduggery. The "Batman killer" has female fans, just like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did. Miss Piggy sings BBHMM.

Plus: Should Ta-Nehisi Coates have written about the black female experience in his book that's a letter to his son? (My feeling: no, as long as he writes about a male experience specifically, not as the default. Still, it's lovely to see an identity politics argument online be thrashed out so cleverly and civilly with everyone involved treating everyone else like a decent person.)

PLUG: Hey, my friend Tracy is doing an animation with Chris Hadfield - the Canadian astronaut who sang David Bowie in space. It's free because they want to educate people about science, but you can back it on Patreon and get extra goodies.

AND FINALLY

Remember how last week I said I had picked my new hairstyle? That was before I saw THIS:

FEEDBACK: Am I too long? Too short? Too narrow in my focus? (I am the sentient voice of this newsletter). Email: helenlewisbook@gmail.com