Hello,
Obligatory shilling. I wrote on THE ZONE this month about the meaning of laziness, the pettiness of murder, the greatness of friendship, Putin’s bad history about Poland, the good and bad sides of conspiratorialism, how moralism can ruin literature, making Europe less dependent on the US, hatchet jobs and grooming gangs and the British state. In case it wasn’t obvious, about two thirds of my pieces here are for paying subscribers only, so do consider a paid subscription if you have the motive and the means.
I wrote for The Critic about Keir Starmer, the elite focus on societal irrelevances, Biden’s decline, eccentric thought, Goalhanger Podcasts, Israel and free speech, gangs and policing, Tories playing the victim and Labour’s attempts to combat toxic masculinity.
Finally, I wrote for the Spectator World about Tucker Carlson in Moscow.
British politics, evaluated. James McSweeney on equality law and Sam Bidwell on stakeholderism explain why Britain is the national equivalent of a man choking himself to death — a completely avoidable, enthusiastically chosen fate.
Right-wing Russophilia. Ed West explores this marginal but interesting phenomenon. Like Ed, I don’t have anything against the Russians — but I don’t see the appeal. One thing I’ll add to his analysis is that some people on “our side” appear to think that Russia is a place where men can be real men — honest and honourable. Not that I’m the arbiter of “real” masculinity but that sounds fanciful to me. It’s a state where you can be as honest as the man above you in the food chain is prepared to tolerate. Nationalist darling Igor “Strelkov” Girkin is in jail for his attacks on Putin’s handling of the war. How much “honour” is involved in the political machinations of a country featuring such cold conspiratorialism that unfortunate pilots and flight attendants can be blasted out of the sky along with Putin’s enemies is also dubious. Criticising your homeland does not demand positing another state as the superior alternative.
Industrial savagery. Vox reports on the horrific development of the US factory farming system:
The factory farmification of the American food system dates back about a century and accelerated post-World War II. But today’s factory farms have taken on an even more extreme dimension. Forty years ago, a facility raising 100,000 chickens per year would have passed for a large factory farm; now more than three-quarters of chickens live on massive complexes that sell more than 500,000 animals annually.
Of course, such trends are not limited to the US. I don’t know if our descendants will think less of us for accepting this but they should.
On wanting. Oliver Traldi writes beautifully about how the cause of modern unfulfillment can be not an excess of desire but an excess of insecurity about desire:
What I had, what I often still seem to myself to have, is like the tuning-up of a life, a timid back-row cello just waiting for that perfect C, G, D, and A to arrive before the bow can stroke the catgut of the world. The concert never begins; the only ear is the cellist’s, glued to the wood…
Unpopular culture. I gave up on The Simpsons two decades ago and can’t believe that poor Nicholas Clairmont has been watching up to now, but this essay is still very insightful on why the “pop” in “pop culture” is becoming irrelevant:
… our relatable universals have been dissolved and slurried and poured into siloed fandoms that are created by life on social media, a life that promised infinite variety and personal expression but in fact delivers tasteless mush.
Granted, there’s a lot to like about this. I can find a lot of things that interest and amuse me that I would have needed a full-time job to uncover in the days before the Internet. It would be insane to write a Substack, of all things, that laments the decentralisation of culture. But we also need things that unite us.
Bad Therapy. Mary Harrington reviews Abigail Shrier’s new book:
The children and young people raised by boundary-negotiating, feeling-validating, trauma-exploring, “talk it out” parents and educators, marinaded in the therapeutic worldview are not, as hoped, happier, more confident, and more emotionally literate. They’re neurotic, anxious, and self-absorbed…
No, seriously, what is a woman? Ginevra Davis writes on feminism contra womanhood:
Today, females look for hope in technology: in artificial wombs and same sex reproduction. And I think that would be such a funny way for feminism to end—if someday, we get artificial wombs, and parents get to choose the body of their child, and they all choose “male,” and females can be, at long last, wiped from the face of the earth.
A hatchet swings both ways. I wrote about hatchet jobs this month. A critic famous for them was the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani. Publishers even referred to getting really bad reviews as being “Kakutani’d”. Yet a brutal critic must prepare for brutal criticism. At Slate, Dan Kois is unimpressed with Kakutani’s new carry-on luggage-filler The Great Wave:
The buzzwords, jargon, and tired cultural references reach their apogee in Kakutani’s chapter headings, which read like baroque PowerPoint slides for an undergraduate survey course about all the shit we’re already thinking about every minute of every day.
Have a lovely month!