Interesting Times No. 18
Mad Men; BOOKS! BOOKS!; surgeons; sugar; baby-talk; imposters; big boats; Londongrad; dirty work; personal branding; True Crime's deceits; Telly Tuita
Hello, the time has come for the best of the internet (so grandiose! I mean some things from the internet I’ve enjoyed) to be delivered to you. I hope you enjoy them too.
(And as always, if you like the newsletter, the spirit moves you, *and* you have a spare five $, you can buy me a virtual coffee. Thank you very much to those who have.)
JOURNALISM
‘What It’s Like Growing Up in a Beloved Chinese Takeaway.’
A long read from my favourite, Patrick Radden Keefe, and an interesting one: ‘In 1998, a thirty-eight-year-old former British paratrooper named Mark Burnett was living in Los Angeles, producing television. “Lord of the Flies” was one of his favorite books, and after he heard about [Swedish reality TV show] “Expedition: Robinson” he secured the rights to make an American version. Burnett had previously worked in sales and had a knack for branding. He renamed the show “Survivor.”’ Later, Burnett created the show The Apprentice, hired Donald Trump to front it, and many believe, ‘mythologized Trump—then a floundering D-lister—as the ultimate titan, paving his way to the Presidency.’ And ‘Trump’s noose tightens.’
On the personality of the surgeon. All I’ll say, having been treated by a few orthopedic surgeons, not for surgery, just for consultations, is that this dorky joke (please forgive me) does exist for a reason:
Q. What’s the difference between a surgeon and God?
A: God doesn’t think he’s a surgeon.
(Maybe you do need to have a god-complex to cut into another human’s body, and do complicated things to their insides - what do I know?)
And ‘Dissection: I have seen other people’s bodies, naked and browned like turkeys with limbs flayed open into lacework. I’ve held someone’s brain—someone’s mother or brother or daughter—in my hands. […] Medical students are forced to change their perceptions of the dead. There is a human instinct that must be overcome to stick knives and fingers into human flesh.’
‘Alice leans over to me and goes, “I have a Honda I’m thinking of selling. Would you be interested in buying it? It’s very commodious. VERY.” Did the subtle angle of my elbow cause a posh British woman to sell me her car?‘ On Body-language experts.
We all talk to babies in the same ridiculous ways (because we all know they’re adorable and delicious).
‘We’ve become convinced that if we can eat more healthily, we will be morally better people. But where does this idea come from?’ A Doctor struggles to give up sugar.
An insight into a mind, a life: ‘It’s disturbing, at almost 60 years of age, to be diagnosed with an illness that you’ve suffered from your whole life without it ever being named. Your first reaction is to protest. I protested, insisting that bipolar disorder is one of those notions that are all of a sudden in vogue and get pinned on anything and everything.’
‘True Crime’s Deceits: The Genrefication of Tragedy.’
‘Origin Stories: Competing theories of migrations.’
‘“I am in a different fucking category than you.”’ Very rich people’s very big boats.
‘Duelling oligarchs, priceless tiny jewels and internet beef: Tomas Weber documents an unseemly scramble. Inside the battle for Faberge’s eggs.’
‘What Happens When an Élite Public School Becomes Open to All?’
‘Once, I’m told, you could have lived a full and meaningful life with nothing more than a tolerable personality. Conversation coursed unmonetized through the boulevards and esplanades, and only the phone company took a cut. Then a handful of dead-eyed Californians decided to mess the whole thing up, under the pretext of revolutionizing communications technology. The Californians said: “Give us your most intimate information, and thousands of hours of your time, and in exchange…”’ On Personal Branding.
I don’t agree with all of this, but it’s an interesting piece. ‘Rigorous Feelings: The Tension at the Heart of Contemporary Feminism. […] The mainstream feminism of this millennium has been corny, childish, and lousy with feelings of self-worship. It has been sentimental, in that it frequently promised salvation through emotional identification, tending furiously to the general experience of being “put upon” by others. An incontinence between the personal and the political defined its expressions at the turn of the last century; from here stemmed the well-known lack of ideological consistency.’
‘Mad Men: Fifteen years after the show’s premiere, Peggy, Don, and the Sterling Cooper gang feel more relevant than ever.’ Oh, it was/is so good. Might be time for (another) rewatch.
Claes Oldenburg, the ‘Pop Artist who made the everyday monumental’ has died at the age of 93. Describing his approach to his work, he said in 1961, “I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.”
Top tips from Trinny for that everyday situation where you’re forced to wear a football kit:
BOOKS
July’s beautiful and ‘best book covers.’
‘One of Japan’s great modern masters Kaoru Takamura makes her English-language debut with this two-volume publication of her magnum opus: Lady Joker, a Japanese crime epic.’ Described as ‘a work you get immersed in, like a sprawling 19th century novel or a TV series like "The Wire”, it reveals its world in rich polyphonic detail. Inspired by a real-life case, it takes us inside half a dozen main characters, follows scads of secondary ones and enters bars and boardrooms we could never otherwise go . . . Yet for all its digressions, Lady Joker casts a page-turning spell.’ Get your copy(s) today ! !
‘A Love Letter to (Perpetually Underfunded, Gloriously Democratic) Public Libraries.’
RECOMMENDED READING
Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley: ‘[…] Mozley’s interest is in agency — specifically, how it cuts across class, a vibrant reboot of that ancient British hang-up, and its modern iteration, “authenticity”’ and describes ‘a London teeming with bodies, buildings, desire and greed.’
The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight: ‘A stunning piece of work. Brimming with mystery and suffused with haunting atmosphere, The Premonitions Bureau is the tale of a team of midcentury investigators who set out to answer some of life’s most imponderable questions. With calm rationality and a keen sense of pacing, Sam Knight relates the extraordinary story of this initiative to study those among us who appear to be able to predict the future—and in particular, to predict disaster. An enveloping, unsettling book, gorgeously written and profound.’
Animal by Phaidon Editors and James Hanken: ‘A visually stunning and broad-ranging survey that explores and celebrates humankind's ongoing fascination with animals. Since our very first moments on Earth, we have been compelled to make images of the curious beasts around us - whether as sources of food, danger, wonder, power, scientific significance or companionship. This carefully curated selection of images […] delves into our shared past to tell the story of animal life, [and includes] the first cave paintings, extraordinary medieval bestiaries and exquisite scientific illustration, to iconic paintings [and] contemporary artworks.’
One Day I Shall Astonish the World by Nina Stibbe: ‘It’s a departure from the trilogy that followed her autobiographical debut, Love, Nina, but there remains much here that’s pleasingly familiar, from its regional backdrop and period detail to its gossipy bookishness, which runs to Ian McEwan’s theft of pebbles from Chesil Beach and a cameo for a certain “Margaret A”. Above all, there’s the voice: idiosyncratic and droll, bittersweet and clear-eyed.’
This Is Not Propaganda by Peter Pomerantsev: ‘As Peter Pomerantsev seeks to make sense of the disinformation age, he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, ‘behavioural change’ salesmen, Jihadi fan-boys, Identitarians, truth cops, and much more. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, he finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia – but the answers he finds there are surprising.’
The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang: ‘An ingenious and cunning reboot of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The harrowing and humorous family drama is wrapped in a murder mystery... In this timely, trenchant, and thoroughly entertaining book, an immigrant family’s dreams are paid for in blood.’
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas: Vladimir unpicks ‘the complexities and generational tensions around assault in an American university, the power play between professor and student, the tangles of desire and envy, defiance and shame, ambition and failure. Above all, though, Vladimir is a novel about female appetite – for sex, food, power, success – and what the aging process does to it.’
Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn: ‘The recent demise of The Independent’s print edition highlights the perils of the real-world press in the face of the internet. […]
The truth that Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning still drips with relevance goes some way to prove this. Written in 1967, aside from the mechanics of the press and Fleet Street as an institution, much is familiar. Journalistic concerns are largely petty, where vague resentments and half-baked dreams flesh out the onward slog of providing copy for an (always anonymous) newspaper’s lesser-trod pages. Our quasi-hero at the centre of it all is sympathetic bore John Dyson, editor to a team of two, responsible for the inclusion of the crossword and other weightless ephemera.
Frayn’s hilariously fine wit expertly dismantles Dyson’s pretensions to fame (television) and […] little else remains unskewered by the author’s genius for social analysis; much that was relevant to the late sixties continues to carry an eerily similar weight, even today.’
PODCASTS
Visible Women. ‘Caroline Criado Perez has spent years investigating the gender data gap – and how women are simply forgotten in a world designed for men. Her best-selling book, Invisible Women, was published to critical acclaim, and Caroline was inundated with readers sharing their own stories of the “default male”.
In her brand new podcast Caroline investigates what happens next: how can we close the gender data gap and design a world that works for everyone? Caroline will hunt for missing data, get in fights with manufacturing companies, and find the people who are working to close the gender data gap.’
Londongrad. ‘Britain prides itself on being impregnable; a country which hasn’t been invaded for 1000 years and can’t be bought. The Lebedevs give the lie to all that. They spent a lot, but not a fortune, buying their way into British public life. And they did it in a way which perhaps nobody had tried before: they amused the people who mattered. […] Paul Caruana Galizia continues his investigation into Russian money in London, telling the story of Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev, and what Britain did to itself.’
Vox Conversations: The Moral Dangers of Dirty Work. ‘Vox’s Jamil Smith talks with journalist and author Eyal Press about "dirty work" — the jobs Americans do that, as Press explains, can lead workers to perform morally compromising activities unwittingly. They discuss examples of this kind of work (drone pilots, meat packers, prison aides), talk about its relation to the term "essential workers" that gained prominence during the pandemic, and explain how certain jobs highlight the disparities of class, race, and gender in American society.’
See you next time!
Ellie