Hello,
I missed you.
Obligatory shilling. I wrote for Spectator World about spree killers and Ezra Miller.
I wrote for The Critic about the end of Boris Johnson, why Tom Tugendhat was a dreadful candidate, and why Gen Xers are not as cool as they often think they are.
I wrote for my paying Substack subscribers about Cum Town, dogs, teaching, Hunter Biden, Dr Eric Ding, and friendship. (Frankly, I should have written more than that to earn your subscription, but starting a new job has made it an unusually busy month. Forgive me.)
Wherein I behave like a serious, respected political pundit. Boris Johnson is being removed. What does this mean for Britain? Frankly, it means that the Tories are cooked. It will take Keir Starmer and his entire shadow cabinet being outed as a band of rampaging serial killers to lose Labour the next election. There are no prospects for cheerful news and Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak — unlike Johnson — are neither personable nor funny and have no means of spinning events their way. Labour does not deserve to win, of course. But the Conservatives deserve to lose.
American decline. Well, Vince McMahon retired. Or did he? I have a suspicion that whoever “runs” WWE henceforth will have odd phone calls at 3am in the morning threatening them with a hundred shades of pain if they do not rewrite angles according to the big man’s wishes.
Since I wrote about McMahon here, other woman have come forward accusing him of sexual impropriety — including one female mwmber of the WWE roster who accused him of entangling her in a less-than-consensual affair. This is grotesque Weinsteinesque selfishness and I hope I was clear enough that Vince is not a good person. But Charlie Chaplin had a child bride and John Lennon beat his wife. Men can be impressive and disgraceful.
Home front. Being on the other side of the editorial fence has been a privilege so far. I’ve been waiting for intemperate authors with error-strewn copy but have found polite, talented ones. That makes my job considerably easier — though I wonder how much pain I have caused word-worn editors over the years by not using em dashes and curly speech marks.
Also keeping me busy this month was a visit from my dad. It was a real pleasure. Dads rock (the good ones at least).
Cognitive degeneration. Are large elements of our knowledge about Alzheimer’s based on falsehoods?
Some Alzheimer’s experts now suspect Lesné’s studies have misdirected Alzheimer’s research for 16 years.
“The immediate, obvious damage is wasted NIH funding and wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments,” says Stanford University neuroscientist Thomas Südhof, a Nobel laureate and expert on Alzheimer’s and related conditions.
Of course, these suspicions might be unfounded. What do I know. But if they are substantive it has devastating implications for people who suffer and have suffered from the disease — and their loved ones. It also raises troubling questions about how initial falsehoods can send scientific progress off in the wrong direction.
The gloom of Shein. The excellent cultural commentator Wessie du Toit has a new Substack, which deserves your subscription, and reflects on the diminishing effects of technology on design:
In a kind of postmodern twist, the task of generating new fashions has been outsourced to the consumers, who influence one another on social media to build up their own personal brands. Shein just picks the winning horses and encourages the trends to take off. It still relies on the artistic efforts of others – the company has stolen ideas from a bewildering array of artists and designers – but only once the virtual hive-mind has hinted at their desirability.
With events like these. Technological change is not at the root of everything though. Tanner Greer disputes people blaming societal fragmentation and declining faith in politics on “procedural mechanics”:
Credentialed experts, smart centrists, and small-l liberals of all stripes held the reins of power right up to 2016. They presided over a catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, two decades of defeat in Afghanistan, a hollowed industrial base, an earth-spanning recession, a secret surveillance regime, an opioid epidemic, and stagnating livelihoods in both the black communities of America’s inner-cities and the white communities of America’s rural hinterlands. With events like these, retweets are hardly needed to explain faltering faith in the American creed.
I feel like technology plays some role, to be fair. If nothing else, it globalises dysfunctional thought.
Wikipedia wars. The Internet also plays a significant role in managing international access to information, for better and worse. At Quillette, Shuichi Tezuka explores how progressive activists have rewritten history about intelligence research — even at the expense of opponents of belief in generalisable innate disparities, like James Flynn and Paige Harden.
The English ailment. Ed West is typically sunny and optimistic on the subject of Britain’s future:
We’re locked, unable to expand the economy without major planning reform, but with a homeowning population reluctant to co-operate. The result is stagnation, runaway housing costs, plummeting fertility and a government continuing to look for the short-term solution with record immigration, sold to the public as ‘highly-skilled’ but in reality heavily composed of students and family reunions.
Am I wrong and do the Tories have a chance to turn things around? I doubt it. But one hopes that a spell in opposition will sharpen minds.
The praiser. It has been an honour to assist the creation of great writing at The Critic this month. Some — though by no means all — of my favourites have included Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski on the war for warmth, Kit Wilson on the decline of moral language and Tim Chapman on landlords.
Cults and commerce. We alternately think of Japan — and other East Asian countries — as hyper-rational and incomprehensibly eccentric. Tediously, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In the aftermath of Shinzo Abe’s assassination, Leo Lewis explores religion and financial exploitation in Japan:
Other ex-cult residents I met in Komoro — a rural Nagano town whose mystical Shinto sect once held thousands in thrall across Japan — showed me cupboards stashed with what were once tokens of zeal, but were now mementos of financial regret. Bottle after bottle of healing potion had been purchased at the shrine for Y60,000 ($434) each, and contained tap water.
Eggroll Shogun wrote a nice tribute to Abe for us.
Enough from me? Enough from me.
Have a lovely month,
Ben