"Game of ZONES" Edition

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. In case you missed it - or in case you ignored it, but I am going to put “missed” so as to sound less confrontational - I published my new book of short stories, Noughties. Thanks to everyone who has bought the book and I hope that you enjoy it. (But for a more downbeat note, see below.)

I wrote for UnHerd about Jack Dorsey’s resignation from Twitter, Spectator World about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial and the Spectator about comedy and “clapter”.

I wrote for my paying Substack subscribers about audience capture.

Evolution doesn’t go on vacation. Philippe Lemoine advises us not to take “Omicron” too seriously:

As I argued a few months ago, SARS-CoV-2 is not going anywhere, it will continue to mutate because evolution doesn’t go on vacation and new variants will keep emerging, but immunity – whether induced by infection or vaccination – should still protect us against severe disease, so it makes no sense to freak out every time a new variant that might be more transmissible is detected. This is the world we live in now, so we have to accept it and move on. Buying time doesn’t actually buy you anything when there is no finish line.

I supported the initial lockdowns, rightly or wrongly, as a means of buying time to build up medical capacities and test different antivirals. As Philippe says, what are we buying time for now? COVID will not disappear. Variants will come and go. If you support restrictions now, under what circumstances do you expect to change your mind?

Hygiene theatre. Here is a good post about COVID, governance and masking:

It is now clear that coronavirus will be endemic but governments always find it hard to say we can do little to stop this. They must be seen to be doing something. Asking people to wear masks is the most visible symbol that something can be done and the government is doing it and asking us to join in. Mask advice creates the illusion of control.

I was a big advocate of masking in 2020 so it is without schadenfreude that I say that their function - when it comes to cloth masks, not to n95 masks - appears to be largely emotional.

Demand, not supply. If something bad is happening on the other side of the world, you can bet that some progressive commentators will find a way to blame the West for it. To be sure, this can be justifiable. As Drew Holden and Aaron Sibarium write, however, the emergence of the omicron variant is not a result of Western vaccine hoarding:

In fact, several African countries have sent back vaccines: The problem they face is one of demand, not supply. Five of the eight countries from which the Biden administration has suspended travel have pumped the brakes on new vaccine shipments, even as cases have increased, because the countries have more doses than health officials can administer.

“Self-care” and self care. B.D. McClay writes an entertaining and insightful piece about “self-care”:

The self-care industry is annoying, the concept is elusive, and waking up at the same time every day will improve your life in clear ways. Every critique of self-care—that it glorifies consumption, promotes self-absorption, and represents an individual retreat from public life—is true. Unfortunately, you still have to take care of yourself.

I think a big problem connected with discourse around “mental health” is how advice that would be trite, simplistic and dull-minded if delivered to the mentally ill, like eating well and getting exercise, is held to be trite, simplistic and dull-minded if delivered to people who are “just” sad and stressed. That having a decent meal and going to the gym can make us feel better - not great, of course, but better - seems somehow unimaginative. But it works for me!

Book note. As soon as I clicked “publish,” on Noughties I bought an e-version, opened to a random page and read “he had no idea what is was”. Damn. Crap. Shit. But all books have typos, I suppose. Sadly, throughout the week I also found “a enormous” and a character “signing” with despair. I took the book down and corrected these errors. Self-publishing has a lot of virtues but I should have had the thing properly proofread. The problem with doing it as an author, as I should have known from my articles, is that one sees what one expects to see. Apologies to people who had bought the book already for those annoyances and I hope they did not spoil your reading experience.

Failure is inevitable. Joanna Kavenna reviews a collection of surprisingly mean columns that the late, great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska wrote to give advice to aspiring authors:

The aspiring writers imagine that being an author will bring them happiness, fame and fortune. Szymborska tells them to get a grip. Writing is a ridiculous profession, she argues, persuasively. Failure is inevitable. Success is highly conditional and mostly feels like failure as well.

White lies. This essay about the second life of Stephen Glass, the infamous New Republic plagiarist, is a beautiful and troubling piece of work. By the way, consider how much more people cared about magazine writing in the nineties that a New Republic writer could be “infamous”. A New Republic writer could strip naked, cover themselves in hot sauce and streak across Times Square without acquiring infamy nowadays.

Have a lovely week,

Ben