"Edition" Edition Edition
Hello,
Obligatory shilling. This week I wrote for the Spectator USA about the strange “boogaloo” meme and the potential for civic and state violence in America, reviewed Rutger Bregman's sloppy, sentimental Humankind for Arc Digital, discussed existential risk for the Daily Caller and profiled ten types of British expat for paid subscribers to this platform. (I've been putting off updating my website for almost two years and every time I think about it I am filled with a deep, unearthly dread.)
In the mood for a film. One of my favourite films, if not my favourite film, In the Mood for Love turns twenty this year. It is a lovely, sad, poetic film, and if you have the chance to watch it on these long and often aimless 2020 nights you should.
RIP Shad Gaspard. Rest in peace, Shad Gaspard, formerly of World Wrestling Entertainment. If you watch wrestling, you get very used to wrestlers dying. This is true if you watch WWE and even more so if you're into the independent scene. Just this year Justice Pain and Supreme of Combat Zone Wrestling and Xtreme Pro Wrestling died in their forties. Perhaps it had nothing to do with their work. Perhaps it did. Gaspard's death is different because it inarguably had nothing to do with wrestling. He was drowned when a riptide pulled him out to sea, and used his last breath to tell lifeguards to save his son. Some activities are more dangerous than others but death can stalk you anywhere. Do not life for granted.
Cummings and goings. Why can Dominic Cummings not just apologise? Even if, as I do, you think he made a justifiable decision to take his wife and child to Durham, why did he and his wife not just make a return trip to London but take a test drive – a test drive of thirty miles – first? Even if the risk of infecting somebody was miniscule, as it was, people were making bigger sacrifices on the basis of such risks. Well, perhaps it is because the people demanding apologies are the same people who viciously drove his young adviser Andrew Sabisky out of a job three months ago and he does not think they are behaving in good faith, which, indeed, they are not.
Fields of battle. I've been reading Ruth Harris' book The Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair That Divided France, and one thing I keep asking myself is why the anti-Dreyfusards were so invested in one Jewish man being a traitor. Even if he had been one, what was it meant to have proved? The answer is that Dreyfus had very little to do with it. The anti-Dreyfusards were upholding the virtue of the military and attacking the influence of cosmopolitanism. The Dreyfusards were defending the values of tolerance and scepticism towards authority. Dreyfus happened to be caught in the middle, without, for most of the affair, even knowing what was happening back in France. For the hard of thinking, I am not comparing the Dreyfus case to anything that is happening today. My point is that when armies fight on a battleground they are not only fighting about that particular stretch of land.
I & AI. Scott Beauchamp writes about the television show Black Mirror and a strange new product called Republika, a “Siri for therapy” you are “meant to confide in as a sort of bestie and therapist rolled into one.” Ultimately, Beauchamp concludes that both are “[artifacts] of the same denuded society [they] claim to help us heal from” but it is a more balanced essay than I would have been capable of producing, because my skin crawled as I read it.
The ghosts of writers. Jesse Tisch writes about exploring the archives of Philip Roth and the different aspects of the writer's life that they expose. I am not a big fan of Roth but I respect that he kept much himself private. This happens less and less now. We cannot get away from writers' tweets, and Facebook posts, and Instagram posts, and blogposts, and YouTube videos, and, well, newsletters, exposing every nook and cranny of their character. Sometimes this is welcome. Sometimes it means all their wheat is buried underneath their chaff. I am sick of Neil Gaiman and I have never read his books.
I hope you have a nice week,
Ben