SubstackRandom - BlogFlock

🟢Houston🚀, we've had a 🚀problem it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-02-06T16:04:25.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re Superbowlingly well and avoiding the sin bins.

𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY is my fin-tastic weekly that hooks you up with some fresh helpful stuff that I came across this week, gems netted from deep dives earlier this year or underwater nuggets from this lifetime resurfacing like friendly dolphins.

𝔽oolproof | Social Loafing

One of the easiest ways to achieve a set objective within an organization is to assign a group of people to work on it as a team. The idea is for everyone to contribute their skills and expertise to execute the tasks timely and effectively.Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

https://www.coachhub.com/en/blog/social-loafing

𝕀ntelligence | 28,000 corporate insolvencies last year

Sorporate insolvency-related activities – including administration and voluntary and compulsory liquidations, eased slightly compared with 2024, when there were 29,366 instances, they remain significantly above pre-pandemic norms, reflecting a fragile operating environment for many businesses.

https://www.r3.org.uk/press-policy-and-research/news/more/32720/page/1//

𝕊auce | Marginal Gains

You don’t need to improve one thing by 100%; you need to improve 100 things by 1%. Whether it’s your invoice design, your email signature, or your coffee machine—small tweaks compound into massive competitive advantages.

𝕙odgepotch | A bit more than gum shields

Sir Clive Woodward has oft mentioned he was influenced by Dr. Paddi Lund, an Aussie dentist who did the unthinkable. Lund fired 50% of his clients, removed his reception desk, and locked his front door.

https://www.leeduncan.com/dr-paddi-lund-the-mad-dentist-sir-clive-woodward-winning-at-business/

Have an Atmospheric Weekend!

Best Fishes

John Crowder

Emerald

T: 01744 353095

eicic.co.uk

Emerald helps SME directors fix cashflow and navigate insolvency with fast and free confidential support.

The Bluestocking 402: Stoppard and suicide penguins - The Bluestocking

2026-02-06T08:15:14.000Z

Happy Friday!

This year, I’m consciously trying to read more and scroll less. Click through below to gaze into the abyss of my January reading list.

Helen

A scene from Tom Stoppard’s last play, Leopoldstadt

There’s a very sweet line in this interview with the biographer Hermione Lee, where she makes an offhand remark about TV no longer doing substantive book conversations any more. But of course, who needs TV! There’s a place right here on Substack. This interview renewed my interest in seeing/reading all the Stoppard plays, which is handy, because I’m due to go to Arcadia next week.

And what a great line this is: “I took as the epigraph for my biography of Stoppard a line from Arcadia: ‘It’s wanting to know that makes us matter, otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.’”

I may be some time

If you’re anything less than Chronically Online, you might have missed the odd interlude where an official American government account entreated citizens to follow the example of a suicidal penguin in a Werner Herzog documentary.

This superficially inexplicable endorsement of wandering off into the frozen beyond is, Max Read thinks, part of the ideology of “suicide rightism”. MAGA has also taken the “Sky King” — an airport worker who stole a plane and flew about for a bit before fatally crashing — to its heart.

What’s going on? “Fascism is a literally suicidal ideology, one obsessed with purging the body politic to the point of total self-negation,” writes Read. “What’s funny about Suicide Rightism is how direct it is about all this. You don’t need some big theoretical analysis; there’s no level of abstraction to move through. It’s just pretty straightforwardly pro-suicide. I don’t think you have to be a professional psychologist to understand why dramatic, attention-grabbing suicide might be appealing to semi-employed guys who spend 14 hours a day watching Asmongold or whatever. Its promise is that all the pain and frustration you feel can be visited on the people you believe authored it—and then ended.”

Quick Links

“America’s history also sees such overlaps because of the extent to which its technology speeds up. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, heroes of the Apollo 11 mission, were all in their late teens by the time that Orville Wright died, and there were still a handful of former American slaves alive at the time of the Moon landing.” Ed West’s list of “crossover people” is fascinating (Substack).
Demographically, Homer Simpson is MAGA now, but Mr Burns is a Democrat (Substack).
“For a long time, I held my eating disorder out in front of me, a well-rendered excuse for why I simply couldn’t perfect my body — why my “imperfect” body was, in fact, a political statement. Still, as soon as I heard about GLP-1s, probably three years ago at this point, I knew there was no world in which I would not end up trying them.” On taking GLP-1s as a former anorexic (Substack).
Radiohead have posted their walking-in music.
“They flee from him that sometime did him seek. Poor old Peter Mandelson (still Lord Mandelson at the time of typing, but he should probably hold off ordering any stationery) spent Tuesday discovering that you’re never more alone than when your colleagues discover you were selling them out to a paedophile.” In the disgrace of Mandy, Rob Hutton has truly found his muse (The Critic).
Think you like football? Not as much as this guy’s parents liked football.

That’s all for now! See you next time.

What I Read in January - The Bluestocking

2026-02-04T19:45:31.000Z

Inspired by Caroline Crampton’s reading lists, which have induced me to try stuff I would otherwise never have known about, I’ve decided to track my reading in 2026. Although based on January’s selection, what I will actually be doing is giving readers a horrifying glimpse into my information diet.

Fiction

An Unsuitable Job For A Woman, PD James

Technically competent but sadly unmemorable detective story. There was a woman? Her partner died? She then had to solve the case. She stayed in a cottage where someone had been found hanged, which was pretty baller. <re-reads the Wikipedia summary> Oh yes! I quite enjoyed the twist at the end.

Ultimately, I suspect this one is a victim of what I called “the POTUS problem” in The Genius Myth: in 1972, when it was first published, a “lady detective” would have been quite refreshing and new. But now they’re a dime a dozen.

Five Little Pigs, Agatha Christie

I chose this because wrote that it was one of the best Poirots. It really was! A cold case mystery involving odd smells, sea shores and a double puzzle.

Shirley Valentine, Willy Russell

One of the great one-woman plays, subsequently turned into a film. I’ve been thinking about the monologue form, which is enduringly popular—you can blow your entire budget on one amazing actor (cf the recent Uncle Oneman-ya with Andrew Scott, or Shiv from Succession in a hi-tech Portrait of Dorian Gray).

On the page, Russell leans a little too hard on two conceits: the dramatic irony of his garrulous narrator’s naivety, and that Alan Bennett/Victoria Wood thing of “I said to Sheila, she can’t be a painted Jezebel at her age, she’s a martyr to her lumbago”. Nonetheless, a classic.

Entitled, Andrew Lownie

You thought you knew how awful Andy and Fergie were? WRONG. If this book has a flaw, it’s that the former Yorks are repetitively awful. They never learn. Andrew is gauche, horny and socially awkward. Sarah is a compulsive spender, frittering away everything she earns from Budgie The Little Helicopter and more.

Full of incredible anecdotes, such as this: “Andrew also tried to push Meat Loaf into a moat after he felt the singer had taken too great an interest in Ferguson. The US rocker, dressed in a fake suit of armour, responded by grabbing the duke, who reportedly moaned: ‘You can’t touch me. I’m royal.’ To be told, ‘Well, you try to push me in the moat, Jack, I don’t give a s**t who you are, you’re goin’ in the moat.’”

As ever with these stories, it’s also a tragedy. Andrew is so addicted to pranks, one friend observes, “because the duke did not have anything interesting to offer to a conversation.” Meanwhile, one of Beatrice’s boyfriends claims that she told him: “Daddy loves Mummy more than Mummy loves Daddy. But Mummy lives for her title and she loses her title if Daddy remarries.” Bleak.

Jilly Cooper, Polo

The third book in the Rutshire chronicles, and it’s an absolute whopper, spanning several years, dozens of characters and various polo hotspots (Palm Beach, Oxfordshire, an Argentine stables where everyone is beastly to all animals). Cooper’s social commentary is under-rated, IMO: here, she describes an annoying man’s annoying mother thus: “‘I’ve got no airpetite since your father passed away, but I must keep my strength up,’ said Biddy, piling a Matterhorn of mashed potato on to her plate. She had always been the most demonstrative leaver, always taking too much so she could leave a lot.” Another character is described as being the kind of weight that “appears exquisite in clothes, but rather too thin uncovered.” Also extremely informative about polo.

Jilly Cooper, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

Lysander Hawksley has undiagnosed ADHD (it was the 90s, they didn’t believe in it) and a massive dong. Through various connivances, he sets himself up as a lightside gigolo, flirting with married women —and making them diet — to make their errant husbands realise what a good thing they have going.

The book also introduces an absolute rotter, Rannaldini—basically the male version of Cate Blanchett in Tar—who swans around the world shouting at orchestras and banging anything that moves. He says stuff like “Having an affaire is like going on television, one gets the chance to talk at length about oneself in front of an admiring audience.”

Inevitably, Lysander gets hired to flirt with his plain but lovely wife Kitty, who is always making soups and washing laundry for her stepdaughter. She’s an evolution of Taggie, the much put-upon daughter of Declan and Maud O’Hara, who spends most of Rivals crafting elaborate puddings and having her best clothes borrowed by Maud. Jilly Cooper clearly realised that a key component of her books, along with all the shagging, was to specifically make sure that the kind-hearted, under-rated and maybe even slightly plain women should get their share of the shagging. Talk about knowing your audience.

Non-Fiction

Charles Cornish-Dale, The Last Man

Bit of a swerve now into a bunch of manosphere books I’ve been reading for work. This is by a man who goes by “Raw Egg Nationalist” online, and who became famous for starring in Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End of Men, alongside a man who tans his balls. (See above.) It’s an elegantly written exploration of the ideology and thinkers behind a lot of online tropes, eg “soy globalism”. I can’t say it convinced me to that liberal democracy had to be destroyed to unleash men’s thymos, but it has made me feel bad about using a plastic chopping board.

Laura K. Field, Furious Minds

Field was a graduate student who associated with many of the intellectual stars behind MAGA, often drawn from the Claremont Institute, a rightwing think tank that recently relocated from California to somewhere less woke. Here, she explains the intellectual underpinnings of Christian nationalism as preached by Claremont and the Heritage Institute, which has a huge overlap with very particular and traditional ideas of gender.

You can’t understand JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” jibe without understanding the influence of rightwing intellectuals such as Patrick Deneen and Scott Yenor, who argue that feminism has only “liberated” women to be wage slaves in cubicles, and that male-only spaces (for example, military training colleges) are essential to American flourishing. You can listen to a podcast interview with Laura Field and here.

Lost Boys, James Bloodworth

Bloodworth starts this book by describing his own attendance, in the 2000s, at a pick-up artist seminar. He tries to write throughout from a position of sympathy with men who find succour in the manosphere, while also acknowledging the (sometimes covert) extremism of some of its leading figures.

Hated By All The Right People, Jason Zengerle

I reviewed this for the Eye, so you’ll have to buy the magazine for my full thoughts. But I really do recommend this insight into the rise (and resurgence) of Donald Trump through the prism of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s career. His intellectual journey, from respected magazine writer to guy whose live tour featured Roseanne Barr explaining that Democrats drink blood, is extraordinary.

Does he believe it? His text messages describing Trump as a “destroyer” in 2021 suggest not. In fact, there’s a lively theory that people such as Carlson (and Vance) get so furious with libs because they know their criticisms of Trump are completely valid, and they secretly share them. You can read an extract here.

That’s all for January! Not as many books as I’d hoped, or as highbrow as you might wish. Then again, if you were reading about the soy globalism all day, you’d be happy to turn to Jilly Cooper in your downtime, too.

An Interview with Thom Yorke - A Lie Before Its Time

2026-02-02T14:41:02.000Z

An interview with Thom Yorke

(from the archives)

published in The Believer, 2008 (In Rainbows era)

At the turn of the twenty-first century, when Radiohead became the new gleaming hope for innovation in rock and roll, the band began renovating the dismal state of the music industry. At concerts they banned corporate sponsors; they attempted to minimize the heavy ecological footprint of traditional touring; and, recently, they released their seventh album, In Rainbows, without a record label, in a digital format on their website, allowing buyers to pay as much or as little as they liked.

Along with all these experiments came furies of hype that Thom Yorke, primary hype-target and living-legendary singer of the band, described as “being the Beatles, for a week.” Yorke has been reticent in his interactions with the press, and in past interviews, especially those from the OK Computer era, Yorke acted downright spiteful: hissing at questions he didn’t like, ignoring others, and criticizing the interviewer with Dylan-esque zingers: “Next question…” “It’s not your business.…” “Answering questions like that’s a fucking waste of time.” Meeting People Is Easy, the only of several Radiohead documentaries the band endorses, is mostly an investigation into the conflicted relationship between the press and the music.

I met Yorke in the lobby of his hotel, the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. Before the interview, he had spent the day shopping with Nigel Godrich, Radiohead’s longtime producer, and during the interview he took a few minutes to talk about Australia with Neil Young’s manager, Elliot Roberts. He wore cargo pants mottled with white paint. He apologized four or five times for his jet lag, but responded to every question with thoughtfulness and patience, demonstrating what seemed to be a newfound acceptance of his place amid the stars of rock.

—Ross Simonini

I. “WINDOW-DRESSING AND NICE PROGRAMS ON THE TELLY”

ROSS SIMONINI: You’ve talked before about the environmentally awful aspects of touring and how Radiohead is trying to find more sustainable options for traveling. Have you come to any conclusions about a touring industry that would be less disastrous for the environment?

THOM YORKE: Well, when we started talking about touring, I had just been reading about David Bowie’s Station to Station tour. I’m not sure if this is entirely true, but as far as I can tell, he did actually go station to station. He didn’t get on a plane. He even did the Trans-Siberian Railway. And he did it across the US as well. So the first thing that I said, with a sort of pouty lower lip, was “I don’t want to fly, I want to go by train.” But then it was completely impossible. There was no way to do it. The infrastructure is no longer there. I mean, it wasn’t really there then either, but Bowie wasn’t taking a great deal of gear. So I don’t know. The whole thing has become a massive compromise, and the nature of flying, which is the absolute worst disaster situation… Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. The biggest disaster—’cause we had this study done—the biggest disaster is people getting there. People driving.

RS: That makes sense.

TY: We tried to set up carpooling things. I don’t know how effective it was. So we tried just playing cities, and that had its limits as well. But anyway, even if you ignore the flying thing, there’s still the basic lack of infrastructure and public transport, and that has the most significant effect on touring. And in fact, most of these issues, you go round and round until you sort of get to a point where unless, say, Obama decides to change the infrastructure, we’re all just pissing in the wind, especially in a city like L.A. I mean, did you know that it used to have fucking trams? I found that out when I wound up downtown one day. There’s fucking tram lines down there. And then a friend of mine gave me a book about it.

RS: Reading anything good right now?

TY: Yeah, I’m reading Bram Stoker’s short stories. Just read The Secret Agent, but I didn’t enjoy that very much. I’m a very slow reader. I don’t want anything heavy at the moment. But what was the last heavy thing I read? Borges’s Labyrinths. That was pretty cool. The idea is the story, you know. I tried reading it a few years ago, and I was like, “What the fuck is this?” and then some guy in the pub explained to me what was going on and then I actually really enjoyed it. And then I read that L.A. public-transit book.

RS: I remember when I first realized that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was really about the death of L.A.’s red-car system. That sort of blew my mind.

TY: The same thing happened in Europe. The car industry made a concerted effort to destroy public transit. And the Western government’s running around all like, “Oh no, what are we going to do? Blah, blah, blah.” Well, you fucking let it happen. You let it happen. So you figure it out.

RS: So on future tours, do you think you’ll stick to the standard touring style?

TY: At the moment, there’s a limit. Or we could just not do it.

BLVR: That shouldn’t have to be the answer. Should all international touring artists stop playing live to minimize emissions?

TY: Well, I don’t know, because at what point is it all a self-fulfilling ego thing? “Hey, I’m doing everybody a favor here.” Are you really? Are you sure about that? Or are you doing yourself a favor?

RS: What about your day-to-day life? Have you made any changes there?

TY: We’ve had a house by the sea for eight years. It’s got one of those systems that go into the ground. Uh, what is that called? I know this. I know this, but I’ve got jet lag.… Ground-source heat. Yeah, so that house has basically become carbon neutral, barring the energy it took to do it. So that’s exciting.

RS: Was that difficult to do?

TY: Well, we first looked into it two years ago and, yeah, it was a nightmare then—because again, the government hadn’t decided to encourage companies to invest in this sort of thing. But now they have decided to, so it’s a lot easier. So now companies know that they can make money doing it. So it’s the same thing. If Obama now said, “I want shit to happen,” it would make a massive difference. ’Cause no matter what way you look at it, once companies know they can make money out of it, they’re gonna do it. But they ain’t gonna do it if the government is standing in the way. Sadly, as individuals, you learn pretty quickly that this is about the big shit. It’s got to be at the level of law and infrastructure. It has to feel fair to people. I’m being vague, but I got involved in this campaign in the UK where we got bills through parliament to commit to reducing carbon emissions.

RS: The Big Ask?

TY: Yeah, and straightaway the thing we realized is, well, infrastructure is actually what this is all about. Everything else is window-dressing and nice programs on the telly that make you feel good. Everybody has to do it ’cause they have to do it. A friend of mine, an environmentalist, was explaining it like a war scenario. It’s exactly the same as a situation in the Second World War and rationing. People should start thinking that way right now. Rationing only worked because everyone knew that was the rule. That was it. That’s what it’s all about.

RS: So you think the government needs to step in?

TY: Well, say a Western government came out and said, “Now we’re going to ration your energy consumption.” I mean, that’s going to mean some serious shit to people. But that’s what’s going to need to happen.

RS: Would you say that the Big Ask was successful?

TY: It was successful because it made the government do something it absolutely did not want to do. But really, it’s not succeeded because, in a sense, it hasn’t done anything at all.

II. “THE MUSIC BUSINESS WAS WAITING TO DIE IN ITS CURRENT FORM ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO.”

RS: It’s looking like people aren’t going to listen to music in a physical form for much longer, since CDs and records are being replaced by digital music.

TY: But then the CD was never physical, because it was digital.

RS: Right.

TY: But yeah, you don’t have the artwork with digital. I mean, I always hated CDs. Me and Stanley [Donwood, Radiohead’s longtime album-art designer] always hated CDs. Just a fucking nightmare.

RS: Based on the way you released In Rainbows, it seems as if you have no problems with the digital switch.

TY: I’m happy to see the CD format disappear. But what about laser discs?

RS: Let’s switch to the most impractical medium of all.

TY: Yeah, completely. [Laughs] But, no, I’m not too bothered with it. I’m more interested with the way things sound. Because of the nature of the music software, within the music itself, the tendency is toward soft synths and soft effects—and I use these too—which are all internal, inside the computer. And I think that’s making a big difference to music as well. Some of it’s really exciting but some of it’s a bit lame-ass. It gives everything a softness which is not very exciting to listen to. I know Modeselektor would love me for saying this.

RS: Plus the tinny, low-fidelity quality of MP3s has become the standard way to hear music.

TY: Yeah, that’s a bummer. But I’m out of my depth here. Nigel [Godrich] is the one to talk to about this.

RS: It’s funny, because the loss of palpable CD artwork seems like it would effect Radiohead more than other bands, considering that your artwork collaborations with Stanley Donwood have become so linked to your aesthetic. How do you normally work with Donwood on artwork?

TY: Has it? Well, the In Rainbows artwork came literally from him knocking a table over. He had some candles on a table and, well, we were gonna do some pornographic etchings, which didn’t work out for a number of really good reasons…. They were pornographic landscape etchings.

RS: Pornographic landscape etchings, huh? Is that how I would describe them if I saw them?

TY: No, you’d say, “That’s a bunch of fucking scratches on a piece of paper, mate.” [Laughs] But in the process of doing that he knocked all these candles onto his paper and thought, Well, that looks nice, scanned it in, and went from there.

RS: And weren’t NASA pictures somehow involved?

TY: Me and my son got into watching the shuttle live. And one day I ended up at the gallery to the NASA page, which is fucking amazing. So all my input ended up being, “Here, look at these NASA pictures.”

RS: So you’ll continue collaborating with Stanley on artwork? This isn’t the end of Radiohead album art as we know it?

TY: No, we’ve actually got a really good plan, but I can’t tell you what it is, because someone will rip it off. But we’ve got this great idea for putting things out.

RS: In a digital realm?

TY: In a physical realm and a digital realm. But, yeah… no, I can’t tell you what it is. [Laughs] Sorry to be so vague about everything.

RS: Other than just the physical quality of the music, the move toward digital is killing the traditional music label.

TY: Yeah, there’s a process of natural selection going on right now. The music business was waiting to die in its current form about twenty years ago. But then, hallelujah, the CD turned up and kept it going for a bit. But basically, it was dead. So you have this top-heavy infrastructure. The press is top-heavy in the same way. You think, Why are these people surviving? Well, because they just started reissuing the back catalog.

RS: So it seems like you don’t really consider this transition a loss in any way whatsoever?

TY: Vinyl sales have gone up, you know. It’s no great shame that labels and CDs are gone.

RS: Will less physical musical production mean less plastic and carbon energy?

TY: That’s not entirely true, because, you know, all the servers have to run. All the big providers are trying to work out a way to reduce the energy waste of the servers. It’s a massive ecological disaster. The servers themselves are built like small rack things and they’re all running at the same power, day in, day out. But they’re not being used at capacity at all. And there are fucking huge buildings full of them. It’s apparently a huge expense for the providers and it’s a huge energy waste.

RS: And that’s worse than all the plastic?

TY: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know how to weigh them. That’s when you have to pay the twenty thousand dollars to the experts. The virtual world is not going to be environmentally safe until they find a way to rationalize it.

III. “FORTY MINUTES OF BLOOD AND SWEAT ISN’T ENOUGH.”

RS: One of the aspects of your pay-as-you-will method was that people could pay up to $99.99, right?

TY: Yeah.

RS: So why did you set that limit? Why would you say it’s OK for people to pay you a hundred dollars for this album?

TY: It’s not. You’re barking mad if you do that.

RS: But people did it, right?

TY: Yeah, yeah. Uh, why did we do it? Honestly, those meetings were so, so intense. I mean, they were really fun, but we were making it up as we went along. The ninety-nine-dollars thing came as a limit, because we didn’t want people showing off, saying, “Look how much I’ve spent!” But I guess the ninety-nine dollars was bad enough.

RS: How many people paid full price?

TY: I don’t know. There were a bunch. I’ve got all the figures somewhere, including a country-by-country breakdown.

RS: So you can see which nations are the most frugal...

TY: Oh yeah, but I’m not going to talk about that…

RS: People talked a lot about paying as little as they want for an album, but you didn’t hear a lot about people paying as much as they wanted. If you keep thinking about this idea a little, with people giving money to musicians, you start thinking that artists could start functioning, at least financially, almost like nonprofit organizations.

TY: Sure, but that sounds mawkish. For us, it was more about a statement of belief, like, “We believe the people find music extremely valuable and we’re going to prove it.” Everybody else was like, “Oh, it’s the end of the world, the sky is falling in,” and we decided to figure a new method. But then again, it depends who you talk to in the band, because, to me, the whole name-your-own-price thing was definitely secondary to being able to leak it ourselves, rather than having some guy at a record plant do it. And that was where I was coming from. But we’re a funny bunch. All these ideas came from a group of fifteen of us, sitting around a room, saying, “Yeah, that will work.” Most people would think, That will never work. A lot of it came from Chris [Hufford, Radiohead’s manager]. If it didn’t work, we could’ve just blamed him.

RS: Do you think it worked?

TY: Oh, yeah. It worked on two or three different levels. The first level is just sort of getting a point across that we wanted to get across about music being valuable. It also worked as a way of using the Internet to promote your record, without having to use iTunes or Google or whatever. You rely on the fact that you know a lot of people want to hear it. You don’t want to have to go to the radio first and go through all that bullshit about what’s the first single. You don’t want to have to go to the press. That was my thing, like, I am not giving it to the press two months early so they can tear it to shreds and destroy it for people before they’ve even heard it. And it worked on that level. And it also worked financially.

RS: Do you think this method would work for other bands who aren’t as known as Radiohead?

TY: With the press, we’re in a lucky position where we don’t really have to rely on a reviewer’s opinion, so why would we let that get in the way? If people want to play it for themselves, why don’t we just give it to them to listen to? I just don’t want to have to read about it first.

RS: And that style of release definitely promotes the album as a work of art, rather than as a bunch of singles floating around the Internet.

TY: Oh, that’s interesting. I appreciate that. Unfortunately, a lot of people got the album in the wrong order.

RS: What about the idea of an album as a musical form? You think that format is still worthwhile amid iPod shuffling?

TY: I’m not very interested in the album at the moment.

RS: I’ve heard you talk a lot about singles and EPs. Is that what you’re moving toward?

TY: I’ve got this running joke: Mr. Tanaka runs this magazine in Japan. He always says to me, “EPs next time?” And I say yes and go off on one, and he says, “Bullshit.” [Laughs] But I think really, this time, it could work. It’s part of the physical-release plan I was talking about earlier. None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. Not straight off. I mean, it’s just become a real drag. It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. It’ll kill us. It’s also linked up to this whole thing about what is the band, what is the method of how we get together and work. But you know, Jonny [Greenwood] and I have talked about sitting down and writing songs for orchestra and orchestrating it fully and just doing it like that and then doing a live take of it and that’s it—finished. We’ve always wanted to do it, but we’ve never done it because, I think the reason is, we’re always taking songs that haven’t been written for that, and then trying to adapt them. That’s one possible EP because, with things like that, you think, Do you want to do a whole record like that? Or do you just want to get stuck into it for a bit and see how it feels?

RS: Certain ideas seem like they aren’t meant to be forty-five minutes long.

TY: Yeah. I mean, obviously, there’s still something great about the album. It’s just, for us, right now, we need to get away from it for a bit. But it’s important to keep it going. The CD-reissue thing almost killed it, because all the labels were like, “Seventy minutes! Let’s fill it up! Blah, blah, blah.” So you get all the bonus-track shit. The majors used to put huge pressure on us and everyone to put extra stuff at the end—you know, to give the shop something extra to sell. All that fucking crap. As if your forty minutes of blood and sweat isn’t enough. But basically, they were charging too much for the CD—they knew it, and they were trying to justify it with extra stuff.

RS: Thinking about it, digital albums could really be any length these days. You could make it five hours or you could do a Stockhausen thing and—

TY: What? With the helicopters? [Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet was written for string quartet and helicopter.]

RS: Yeah. He also wrote an opera that lasted seven days.

TY: Nigel wants to do this thing where, I mean, I know it would be awful, but hey…

RS: But hey…

TY: He says, like, OK, we book in for three days, and at the end of the three days we put two tracks up every week and we do it for six weeks. I mean, it’ll never happen, but that idea of, we put it out even if we don’t know what it is and then, oh dear, it’s out.

RS: Almost like an automatic writing process.

TY: To us, that’s completely against everything we normally think. This may be shit. We don’t know. We haven’t had time to realize it yet. You know, that sort of thing. But that kind of gives the game away, because, actually, we are shit. And that’s why it takes three years to uncover the stuff underneath. The lyrics, I know, would be appalling. Jonny’s really big on increasing our output, though. He has a better way of saying it. Like “knocking shit out” or something. He can’t stand it anymore, the pace of the way we work. It’s fallout from all our false starts.

IV. “THE DEATH KNELL OF AN AGING ROCK BAND”

RS: In some ways, the way Internet singles work is close to the way things used to be with the music industry in the ’50s, before full-lengths were the thing, and radio singles were what defined artists.

TY: Right, and if you forget about the money issue for just a minute, if it’s possible to do that—because these are people’s livelihoods we’re talking about—and you look at it in terms of the most amazing broadcasting network ever built, then it’s completely different. In some ways, that’s the best way of looking at it. I mean, I don’t spend my fucking life downloading free MP3s, because I hate the websites. No one seems to know what they’re talking about. I’d much rather go to sites like Boomkat, where people know what they’re talking about.

RS: Boomkat is great.

TY: It’s brilliant. To me, that’s a business model. It’s like when I used to go to music shops in Oxford. You’re looking at this and you’re looking at that and there’s a whole line of other things going down the side saying, “You’ll probably like this,” and “You might like this.”

RS: I love those stores where everything’s hand-selected and the clerks write little descriptions about the music.

TY: Yeah, and you can listen to it all. I mean, Boomkat is very specific with the type of stuff they flog there, but I can’t see why that wouldn’t work for all music.

RS: Actually, I think it was on one of those types of blurbs where I read the “return to form” phrase for In Rainbows, which I’ve heard about twenty times since.

TY: [Snorts] But have you not noticed that they always say that? That’s the death knell of an aging rock band right there.

RS: Well, it also doesn’t seem like there’s a form to return to.

TY: We’re formless motherfuckers.

RS: Do you feel like there’s any definitive sound that you’ve been solidifying over your career?

TY: I fucking hope not.

RS: There’s this idea of Radiohead as a band who is always in transition.

TY: It just always feels like, we’ve gone down that road now. We’ve done that now. That’s that. In Rainbows was a particular aesthetic and I can’t bear the idea of doing that again. Not that it’s not good, I just can’t… bear… that.

RS: Do you think it’s really possible for artists to stay static anyway, to take one idea and develop it on the micro level over an entire career?

TY: Solo artists can do that.

RS: Yeah, seems like it would be impossible to stay static in a band.

TY: Absolutely, completely, utterly impossible, at least in our band. I mean, because everybody wants different things. Everybody brings different things to it. Jonny’s got his thing. He’ll always be trying to get extra things in there.

RS: Extra things?

TY: Yeah, come on, we need some wrong notes, he’s always saying. OK, you got ’em.

RS: So what’s the next sound?

TY: As a band we haven’t gotten together much. I’ve just been working on stuff.

RS: Electronic?

TY: Well, yeah, ’cause my inability to play drums dictates certain electronic drums. Computers are pretty nice at tidying you up. It’s great. Actually, it’s not that great… but I’ve been working, keeping myself going. It’s like a limb. I need to keep exercising it. Otherwise it goes dead, floppy.

The below recording was made shortly after the above interview.

🍬 Sweet 🎹 it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-01-30T17:57:42.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re croissantingly well and finding your fun at work before February hits.

𝔽oolproof | Hanlon’s Razor

It’s easy to assume people are being difficult on purpose. Most business friction isn’t caused by villains; it’s caused by tired people making mistakes. Treating it as an error rather than an attack usually solves it faster and keeps the harmony.

https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/hanlons-razor

𝕀ntelligence | The 85% Rule

Is “giving 110%” the key to success? Elite track coaches know that sprinters actually run faster when they try to run at 85% effort. Why? Because 100% effort creates tension, and tension slows you down.

https://thechangepartners.com/is-the-85-15-rule-the-key-to-avoiding-burnout/

𝕊auce | Knowledge Transfer

Have you ever wondered what would happen if your most experienced employee won the lottery tomorrow and never came back? Would your operations grind to a halt? Perhaps you need to capture the unwritten know-how that keeps businesses running before it walks out the door.

https://harmoniousworkplaces.com/ep-96-knowledge-transfer/

𝕙odgepotch | Jump

Joe Meanen survived by making an impossible choice: stay on a burning platform and wait for rescue that might not come, or jump 175ft into a freezing, flaming sea.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/oct/28/the-piper-alpha-oil-rig-exploded-and-collapsed-and-i-made-a-desperate-175ft-jump-into-the-sea

Have a Liquid Weekend!

Best Fishes

John Crowder

Emerald

T: 01744 353095

eicic.co.uk

Emerald helps SME directors fix cashflow and navigate insolvency with fast and free confidential support.

🎣How did you know ‘cause I never told🍸 it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-01-23T14:15:47.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re all traitorously well, dodging banishment and grabbing those shields.

Thanks for reading 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

𝔽oolproof | The “IKEA Effect”

Why do you love that wobbly bookshelf you built yourself more than the expensive antique you bought? It’s the IKEA Effect: a cognitive bias where we place a disproportionately high value on products we partially created. For business owners, this is a powerful tool. If you want clients to value your solution, don’t just hand it to them—involve them in the process. The more they invest their time, the more they’ll defend the outcome.

https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/ikea-effect

𝕀ntelligence | The “Time to Pay” Window Closing

A critical nudge for directors: The Jan 31st Self-Assessment deadline is next Saturday. For many SME owners drawing dividends, this is the biggest personal cashflow hit of the year. If the liquidity isn’t there, HMRC is currently accepting “Time to Pay” arrangements—but you must set this up before the deadline passes. Silence is expensive; early communication is usually free.

https://www.gov.uk/difficulties-paying-hmrc/pay-in-instalments

𝕊auce | The “Hell Yeah” or “No” Rule

If your 2026 calendar is already filling up with obligations you dread, you need Derek Sivers’ rule. When deciding whether to do something, if your immediate gut reaction isn’t “HELL YEAH!”, then it should be a “no.” We often say yes to “meh” opportunities out of guilt or fear, leaving us no room for the life-changing ones.

𝕙odgepotch | How to Disagree

Divergent perspectives spark creativity, prevent costly errors, and drive better decisions, but are you attacking the tone, or are you actually addressing the core issue?

https://hbr.org/2025/11/a-smarter-way-to-disagree

Have a Falkey Weekend!

Best Fishes

John Crowder

Emerald

T: 01744 353095

eicic.co.uk

Emerald helps SME directors fix cashflow and navigate insolvency with fast and free confidential support.

The Bluestocking 400: Dilbert and pencil case feminism - The Bluestocking

2026-01-23T05:12:30.000Z

Happy Friday!

A huge thank you to John for sending me this terrifying graphic estimating the number of books you could feasibly read before you die. I just used up one of my c2,000 on Jilly Cooper’s Polo, and I regret nothing. Even though I still don’t really understand how polo can possibly be a real sport.

Until next time,

Helen

The Dilbert Afterlife

“Adams was 58 when Trump changed everything. In 2001, age 44, he’d found the failure of his Dilberito funny. But in another interview, at age 50, he suggested that maybe his competitors had formed teams to sneak into supermarkets and hide them in the back of the shelves. Being tragically flawed yet also self-aware enough to laugh about it is a young man’s game.”

This (yes, very long) obituary for Dilbert author turned MAGA influencer Scott Adams dwells on a regular theme of this newsletter—the midlife crises of Extremely Online intellectuals. Scott Alexander’s wonders if the other Scott A had a thesis—“I am cleverer than everyone else”—which ran headlong into an observable fact: “I always lose to the Pointy-Haired Boss.” He suggests that Adams’s way of reconciling this was to believe that everyone else was an easily manipulated sheep, and that charismatic manipulators (like Trump) were the final stage of evolution.

Also, Alexander really puts the work in, going through the Adams oeuvre—I had no idea he’d written so many self-help books. I also loved the bit where he traced Adams’s political evolution through his comics:

Quick Links

Peak Woke Archive, Part One: “If Full Fronts was on today, it might be called BlueSky TV. It made wine-influenced Facebook posts from your aunt seem like The Economist. Less than a decade later, the show already seems like an artifact from a distant time.” Jeff Maurer on the time that Full Frontal with Samantha Bee tried to make Elizabeth Warren happen (Substack)
“The second most competitive national tournament was won in 2025 by a team claiming that pretending to be magic mermaids is a good strategy for black liberation.” Peak Woke Archive, Part Two: Highly enjoyable romp through the freakout in competitive debate (Substack). Also I urge you to click the video link and skip to 40 minutes in to hear about the mermaid. The kid sounds like he’s having an asthma attack, but I’m guessing that’s a permitted strategy to talk faster?
Nice roundup of independent clothing brands (Substack).
“‘Prince William wasn’t that important when we were at school,’ my brother says now of his old classmate. ‘Nobody gave him special treatment. Back then, Eton was like a roll call of all the great British families — the Astors, the Spencer-Churchills — a who’s who of aristocracy. Nowadays, it’s a meritocracy’.” Insight into what it’s like to go to Eton. Spoiler: privileging but also awful (Substack).
Victoria Smith on “pencil case feminism”, or how noticing that gender stereotypes exist is not, in fact, responsible for postmodernist woo (Substack).
“Michael Lind, a well-known writer and academic who’d co-founded the center-left think tank New America, bristled at Lonsdale’s remarks. After asking some probing questions, Lind announced his resignation as a visiting professor on the spot, dramatically depositing his key fob as he exited.” Real shame to hear what’s happened to UATX. When I visited it, there was a conservative and Christian tilt, but it had real aspirations to be classically liberal place. Sounds like it’s fast becoming a Joe Lonsdale vanity project instead (Politico).
(Unintentionally?) funny profile of permaposting polymath Adam Tooze (The Guardian)
“Both of us posted multiple times about our Foreign Affairs essay. Only one of us, however, received a steady barrage of vitriolic criticism over the course of the day.Wanna guess which one of us it was? I bet you already know!” SHOCKED to hear that Bluesky, the kinder, gentler social network, doesn’t take well to female expertise (Dan Drezner, Substack).

See you next time! I’m talking at Jewish Book Week on March 8 in King’s Place, N1. Tickets here.

Subscribe now

🔴 Load 📼 Run 📼 it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-01-16T15:55:59.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re Commodoringly well and keeping your Datasettes level.

𝔽oolproof | The Lindy Effect

Why do we still read Shakespeare and listen to the Beatles? The “Lindy Effect” is a theory that the future life expectancy of a non-perishable thing (like a technology or an idea) is proportional to its current age. If a business model has survived for 50 years, it will likely survive another 50. In a world obsessed with the “next big thing,” sometimes the smartest bet is the “oldest big thing.”

https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/the-lindy-effect

𝕀ntelligence | The Mall of the Future?

While the UK high street struggles with vacancies and insolvency, a Swedish town might have the blueprint for retail survival. “ReTuna” is the world’s first recycling mall—everything sold is recycled, reused, or organically produced. It generated over roughly £1.5m in sales last year. For UK directors, the lesson is clear: the “Circular Economy” isn’t just an eco-buzzword anymore; it’s a viable, profitable business model that customers are actively seeking out.

https://www.retuna.se/english

𝕊auce | The Playbook Behind Every Great Campaign

Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, argues that the biggest problem in modern business is our obsession with logic. Spreadsheets love logic, but humans are “psycho-logical.” In this episode, he explains why the best marketing ideas often make no sense on paper (like Red Bull: a drink that tastes bad, comes in a small can, and costs a fortune). If you want to grow in 2026, you might need to stop being so rational.

𝕙odgepotch | Return of the King

The Commodore 64 (C64) is widely recognized as the best-selling single computer model of all time, holding a Guinness World Record with sales estimated between 12.5 and 17 million units. Now its back and this “Ultimate” review shows why simplicity never goes out of style. Now just give us an Amiga 500.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/jan/15/commodore-64-ultimate-review-computer

Have a Tramieldous Weekend!

Best Fishes

John Crowder

Emerald

T: 01744 353095

eicic.co.uk

Emerald helps SME directors fix cashflow and navigate insolvency with fast and free confidential support.

The Bluestocking 399: Wiener Mincemeat - The Bluestocking

2026-01-16T05:54:26.000Z

Happy Friday!

Highly enjoyed this chart about where big journalism outlets plan to focus their resources in the next year.

Sorry, Elon!

You can read the rest of the predictions for the future of journalism in 2026 here.

Helen

I had a sometimes-testy encounter with California state senator Scott Wiener, a politician who is a pro-trans Zionist YIMBY, aka shouted at by everyone. He gave me very good reasons for why he was not calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. And then, a couple of hours after the piece published—and, more crucially, a couple of days after the first candidates’ debate, where he got roasted for not doing so—abruptly announced that Israel was, in fact, committing a genocide. That’s a prerequisite to winning a Congressional seat in San Francisco, clearly.

Fair enough. Now apply this level of craven electorate-appeasal to some of your positions on gender, Democrats running for national office!

For The Love of Mincemeat

“Maybe the answer is that B is 8 and I am 50, and what B doesn’t know is that as they get older, there will be fewer things to love like this. . . And right now I am in the gloaming of all that — in the perimenopause of all my passions, a time when I still remember what it is to want, but from the shoreline. This might never happen again to me, I want to tell B. It’s a surprise it happened at all. Hasn’t anyone told you yet, B? It becomes rarer and rarer to be struck in the heart by something that consumes you, and one day you forget that it used to happen at all.”

I really enjoyed Operation Mincemeat—the little musical that could, now on Broadway—but I enjoyed this piece more, because it’s about how you lose the ability to just fall for something as you get older. (I wrote about this and Friends when Matthew Perry died; and before that when Terry Pratchett died.) Taffy Brodesser-Akner has seen Mincemeat 13 times, and I sense she’s not done yet.

PS If you’re looking for good London theatre, try to get a return or day seat for All My Sons, which I thought was terrifically directed by Ivo Van Hove (a few missteps aside—as one woman said to me in the pre-show loo queue, “only a man could run a play two and a quarter hours straight through”).

Bryan Cranston, as Joe Keller, did an incredible job of curdling from a late-era chuckling Dubya to a grim-faced Dick Cheney. We had Paapa Essiedu’s understudy, Zach Wyatt, as Chris Keller and he was great too.

I hadn’t fully appreciated how great a streak Miller had—this, The Crucible, A View from The Bridge, Death of A Salesman—of plays that ask what a man should be. “I know you’re no worse than most men but I thought you were better,” says Chris to his father, heartbreakingly.

Quick Links

Fan fic: imagining if Isaac Chotiner interviewed the person who runs the lottery in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.
“You are a healthy person. But you have been tired lately. Sluggish. You feel like you’re constantly fighting a cold. (You search “long Covid symptoms” and “do I have iron deficiency?” ChatGPT is inconclusive.) Your back hurts. Your neck hurts. Your doctor, if you can ever get an appointment, says, “It’s probably stress.” Or worse, “It’s ageing.” … The question you really want answered – the question all of us are in fact calculating at every moment in the fight-or-flight depths of our anxious brains – is ultimately: am I going to die soon?” Oli Franklin-Wallis gets his whole body scanned (and finds something in his brain, which is probably benign, explaining why I will not be getting my whole body scanned).
“Among the problems with this identity-obsessed insanity is that it short-circuits the process by which you’re supposed to figure out if a candidate is any good.” Those of you not lucky enough to be on Threads/Insta might have missed the backlash to Bowen Yang, recently ex of SNL, saying there was no point donating to Texas senate hopeful Jasmine Crockett because she couldn’t win (I don’t think she can win). He and his podcast co-host got lazily accused of racism in baffling posts about how he was white-adjacent. Josh Barro has neatly recapped the whole thing and come to the correct conclusion, which is that Crockett’s race and gender are irrelevant here, and Democrats just need to consider candidates as candidates.
“I hate small talk / I always angry”. This is my favourite thing I’ve found on the internet in FOREVER. This is my inner monologue and you don’t know what it costs me every day to repress it!

See you next time! Jesse Singal and I are doing an event in San Francisco on February 16. Tickets here.

Subscribe now

How does it 🔵feel to run🏃 like you do it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-01-09T17:06:06.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re Gymmembershippingly well and preparing for Blue Monday.

𝔽oolproof | The Pre-Mortem

Most businesses run a “post-mortem” when things go wrong to find out why. But research by Gary Klein suggests you should do a “pre-mortem” right now. Imagine it is December 2026 and your key project for the year has failed spectacularly. Now, work backward to determine why it happened. This “prospective hindsight” is proven to be 30% more effective at identifying risks than standard guessing.

https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem

𝕀ntelligence | UK Insolvency Trends 2025–2026:

The Bank of England’s decision to cut interest rates to 3.75% in December has been cautiously welcomed by businesses, with the prospect of easing borrowing costs and a gradual uplift in consumer spending. However, the benefits of monetary easing are colliding with persistent structural pressures across the UK economy — and insolvency risk remains elevated heading into 2026.

https://www.weightmans.com/media-centre/news/uk-insolvency-trends-2025-2026-horizon-scanning-for-businesses-and-lenders/

𝕊auce | New Business Idea?

If you have a new business idea for 2026, don’t ask your mum. She loves you, so she will lie to you. “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick is a set of simple rules for crafting good questions that even your mom can’t lie to.

𝕙odgepotch | Tsundoku

Do you have a stack of books you swore you’d read in 2025, but haven’t touched? The Japanese have a word for this: Tsundoku. It describes the art of buying books and letting them pile up without reading them. Unlike “hoarding,” it has no negative connotation—it simply means you are surrounded by potential knowledge. So, that pile isn’t a failure; it’s decor.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44981013

Have a Bernard Weekend!

Best Fishes

John Crowder

Emerald

T: 01744 353095

eicic.co.uk

Emerald helps SME directors fix cashflow and navigate insolvency with fast and free confidential support.

The Bluestocking 398: 2026 predictions and Genius Tortoises - The Bluestocking

2026-01-09T05:35:22.000Z

Happy Friday!

My record on making predictions is woeful, so how about we solicit the wisdom of crowds instead? Here are three random questions I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few days; your thoughts are welcome.

Is there an AI bubble that will pop this year in a way that severely impacts the “real” economy (ie stock markets, pensions, unemployment figures)?
Will the midterms in the U.S. be free and fair elections, without widespread violence?
Will Keir Starmer still be leader of the Labour party by the end of 2026? If not, who will replace him.

On the last one, everything says “he’s a goner” but the Labour party is notoriously useless at getting rid of its leaders (some of us are still scarred by having to broadcast through the morning everyone resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet while Tom Watson sat on a train platform home from Glastonbury). On the principle of “the worst thing you can imagine happening is probably what will happen”, I’m going no on 2 and yes on 3.

Talking of which, do the words you use to describe probabilities match up with the ones other people use—is your “very likely” the same estimated percentage chance of happening as theirs? Take this survey and find out.

Helen

The Genius Tortoise Beats The Hare

If you want to raise an elite high-achiever, don’t force them to specialise too early. The research is clearly summarised in The New York Times, and this handy graph demonstrates the argument:

A defence of the prodigy-model comes from Ellen Winner, who suggests that selection bias is at work in the sample of elite achievers: “I suspect late bloomers (they do exist) are less common than early bloomers who keep on blooming.” Sssh, Ellen. Some of us are still holding out hope that we will wake up one day as Hilary Mantel.

The Front Runner

ICYMI, here’s a gift link to my profile of Democratic governor Gavin Newsom. One thing I noticed during the initial response to ICE assassinating an unarmed 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis (and then the White House lying about it), was that leading Dems—the local mayor Jacob Frey, Minnesota Senator Tina Smith, and governor Tim Walz—all used extremely blunt language to describe what was going on. Frey told ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis”. Smith said “leave us the fuck alone. . . when does this stop being about politics, and start being about human decency?” Walz told people: “Don’t believe the propaganda machine.”

I can’t help attributing some of this tonal shift to the example set by Newsom, who has abandoned the lofty rhetoric/bloodless oratory fashionable in the Obama era, in favour of swearing, being mean and fighting Republican fire with fire. There’s been a noticeable vibe shift in American political language. You might find it vulgar, but it’s also acknowledging the reality that Donald Trump has changed the verbal landscape.

Quick Links

“Claudius, the customized version of the model, would run the machine: ordering inventory, setting prices and responding to customers—aka my fellow newsroom journalists—via workplace chat app Slack. “Sure!” I said. It sounded fun. If nothing else, snacks! Then came the chaos. Within days, Claudius had given away nearly all its inventory for free—including a PlayStation 5 it had been talked into buying for “marketing purposes.” It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes and underwear.” Don’t let an AI run your office vending machine just yet (Wall Street Journal, $)
“So total is the cis woman’s right to safety that she cannot even be asked to stop and think of the other; just as the total right to Jewish safety means that any appeal to the dignity of Palestinian life is already an antisemitic assault.” A friend sent me Amia Srinivasan’s winter lecture on Freud and the unconscious (but also Gaza and TERFs???) with the comment that it was “the most LRB thing ever to have been written”. It really is.
This post is a very good collection of mad shit that happened in the late 2010s and early 2020s, which I fear is being memory-holed (Substack).
How old does your name suggest that you are? Use this calculator—trained on US census data—to find out. From this, I found out the sad fact that most of the Helens there have ever been are dead.
“Just one of these factors on its own – either depopulation in the North or climate change in the South – could be enough to drive mass migration. Taken together they make it inevitable. Anyone who thinks the 21st century will not see the biggest global movement of peoples in history has not been paying attention.” David Runciman answers the question: Are we doomed? (LRB)
“The easiest way for my children to know where I am at all times is to weigh me down with their little hefty bodies. They begin doing this several hours before sunrise at around 4.30 am.” Sara Pascoe on motherhood (Substack).
Mad bastard house listing of the week (Rightmove).
“I wondered how many of our friends we were drastically overestimating, and I proposed that we actually call everyone to ask if they would poop on our floor for the party. And thus the idea was born.” Aella always delivers (Substack).
My literal henchwoman Sarah Ditum has written a gym guide for complete newbs.

See you next time! PS Sorry if you bought tickets for Greenbelt to see me; I won’t be appearing.

The Chad Gavin Newsom - The Bluestocking

2026-01-06T15:42:13.000Z

Over the festive break, California governor Gavin Newsom got an unexpected endorsement in his (unannounced) campaign for the U.S. presidency.

“JD Vance is subhuman, and Gavin Newsom moggs,” said 20-year-old Braden Peters, better known as the rightwing looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular. The current Republican vice-president has “a very short total facial width-to-height ratio, he’s obese, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like [a] six-foot-three chad.”1 Clavicular would therefore vote for the Democrat, he claimed.

In apparent response, Newsom’s social media team posted an unflattering picture of a pre-beard Vance.

from his elegymaxxing era

This kind of posting is typical of Newsom’s current approach: when they go low, he goes lower. “Given the choice,” he told me when I interviewed him, “the American people always support strong and wrong versus weak and right.” It was an insight he learned from the politician he most resembles—Bill Clinton.

Having met Newsom, I can report back that a) unlike most men who claim to be more than six feet tall, he’s not lying about his height; b) he does indeed mogg, which is Gen Z incel slang for dominating someone else, usually through being hotter or more athletic; and c) he has a well-formed strategy for making himself the Democratic frontrunner.

Fight hard, fight dirty.

By that, I don’t just mean the nasty tweets about Trump’s bruised hand and how Vance is fat and Elon Musk’s transgender daughter hates him. Newsom is also fighting ruthlessly in substantive ways. He took a big gamble last autumn on Proposition 50, a plan to redraw California’s electoral map in a straightforwardly partisan way, nudging five seats towards the Democratic column.

Last summer, when Newsom made the big call to back Prop 50, it looked like a risky proposition. But he fundraised for it assiduously, drafting in both his longtime patron Nancy Pelosi, to wring money out of big donors, and young Dem superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who cut him an ad in Spanish. He framed the campaign as a chance for Californians to say a big F*** You to Trump. They seized that opportunity. As I write in the piece: “The new map was a blatant partisan gerrymander, a departure from the time when the Democrats used to talk up the fairness of independent commissions. Morally wrong, maybe—but do you want to win back the House or not? Prop 50 passed by a two-to-one margin.”

There’s a particular reason for Newsom to turn himself into the Ultra Mogging Chad of U.S. politics, which is that, in the MAGA imagination, California is a state of absolute simps. To them, this is the place where, if you get robbed, the police will turn up and not only fail to arrest the perpetrator, but give you a lecture on how you shouldn’t call the guy who ransacked your house a criminal but instead a person experiencing criminality.

This perception is Newsom’s big weakness—more so, I think, than his gilded upbringing alongside the Getty family, or his sometimes rackety personal life. As California governor, he has championed universal healthcare for undocumented immigrants, talked big on climate change, and signed a bill putting male criminals in women’s prisons. He says his critics have “California Derangement Syndrome” and that he’s tougher on crime than the press has reported.

This guy also mogged

Earlier, I said that Newsom most reminded me of Clinton, but of course there’s one big difference. Ol’ sax-playing Bubba grew up in conservative, southern Arkansas, and won the governorship there initially for a single term, after which he was defeated by his Republican opponent. He came back in 1982, and won another five terms.

In the 1992 presidential election, Clinton broke off campaigning specifically to fly home and sign off the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man who had shot himself in the head after killing a policeman, leaving him with profound cognitive impairments. (Rector notoriously asked to save the pudding from his last meal “for later.”)

By contrast, Newsom signed an executive order in 2019 pausing executions in California. He has never won a competitive election against an opponent from the right—his closest race was the first term of his mayoralty in San Francisco, where second place went to a Green candidate.

In light of that, you can see why two of the first guests on Newsom’s podcast last year were Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. He needs to find a vocabulary in which to talk beyond the Democratic base.

He currently has pretty good numbers with likely Democratic voters, making him the frontrunner right now (I’m taking a call that Kamala Harris’s higher numbers in some polls are partly a function of her much better name recognition). But the general election is where he would need, Ross-like, to PIVOT.

It’s a hell of an ask.

Below, you can read an excerpt from the piece. The rest is available at The Atlantic. Here’s a gift link.

The Front-Runner

Ryan Young for The Atlantic

All right, let’s talk about the tweets. The redistricting fight showed one version of Newsom’s strength, as he ran an expensive anti-Trump campaign focused on the threat to democracy and civil rights. His online presence, however, demonstrates that he can also mock Trump like a mean ninth grader. This is the work of a team of young staffers, whose Sacramento-office door carries an AI-generated image of Newsom being prayed over by Kid Rock, Tucker Carlson, and Hulk Hogan (RIP). Newsom is not Michelle Obama: When they go low, Newsom’s team goes even lower. (Despite this freewheeling approach, Newsom is not an informal boss; his staff calls him Governor, not Gavin.)

The instant I mention this combative social-media strategy, Newsom knows where I’m going. “We didn’t like the Marie Antoinette?” he says, joshing me. He is referring to the haunting AI-generated image that he’d circulated of Trump decked out in pearls and a towering gray wig. Appealing to his press aide Bob Salladay, sitting quietly in the corner of the room, he adds: “Did we offend her?” The Trump image, Newsom suggests, has upset my “European mindset.”

I make a face to indicate that my problem is not, in fact, that I am a French monarchist.

The rest is here. And if you would like to fund me to argue about Marie Antoinette memes with other American politicians, do subscribe to The Atlantic.

Thanks for reading The Bluestocking! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Ryan Young for The Atlantic

If you want to watch two rugged Ubermenschen discussing minoxidil, steroids and lifts in their shoes, before swerving hard into white supremacy, here are Fuentes and Clavicular in conversation.

On the Vitality of All Things - A Lie Before Its Time

2026-01-04T18:04:11.000Z

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Materialists are compelled by the things of the world. Usually such things are understood to be luxuries—cars, clothing, jewelry—objects they accumulate for the sake of worldly status. In artistic circles and leftist political ideologies, these sorts of materialists are often derided as the shallow kind of people you should avoid at all costs.

The philosopher Jane Bennett provides a more generous concept of materialism. For her, matter is everything—electricity, feelings, ideas—and each of these things is an embodiment of a “profoundly generic” vital force. This is not a mystical source of energy, like God, but the fundamental animating substance of the world. There is no intrinsic hierarchy: gold hums with the same vitality as carrion.

From this perspective, a materialist connects to the force through things, whether natural or artificial. Hoarders and artists are two examples of people who are so sensitive to things that they dedicate their lives to the power of thingness. Such people are not acquiring things for wealth, but because they find the truth of reality within the living presence of matter.

Neovitalists, new materialists, object-oriented ontologists—Bennett is part of a movement of philosophers rethinking our relationship to things. The implications of their ideas are vast, radically shifting the way we engage with the natural world.

Bennett is a professor of political theory at Johns Hopkins and is the author of The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009), and Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (2020). We corresponded by email in fall 2024 to produce the following exchange.

—Ross Simonini

ROSS SIMONINI

As you’ve developed your own philosophy over the years, how has it changed the way you experience the world?

JANE BENNETT

A philosophy of vibrant matter is, among other things, a filter for perception. It directs attention toward—marks as notable—some happenings and some aspects of things rather than others. A philosophy is in that way a sensibility, a style of seeing and feeling and thinking, of selective sympathy.

Sensibilities evolve or dissolve on their own, as time passes and different atmospheres are inhaled. But a particular style of encounter can also be induced by more conscious practices or habits. My growing sense of the liveliness of things was cultivated by a habit of reading nineteenth-century nature writing, twenty-first-century ecological poetry and plant science, and Renaissance herbalists, and by a tendency to doodle (more on that later) and to walk along Baltimore’s alleys and patches of woods and trash-strewn streams.

Lately, the reading also includes Paul Klee’s notebooks (“there is a non-optical way of intimate physical contact . . . that reaches the eye . . . through the cosmic bond that descends from above”); Cicero on divination (frogs have “some faculty of premonition, clear enough of itself, but too dark for human comprehension”); Zhuangzi (on orienting toward the hinge of the Dao, “a state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites”); Roger Caillois (“I felt myself beginning to resemble, not to resemble anything but just to resemble”); the poets Inger Christensen (“I always thought reality was something you became when you grew up”), Lia Purpura (“the despoiled and radiant now”), and Forrest Gander (“How to sustain attentiveness? How to keep the mind from dropping its needle into the worn grooves of association?”). These and other literary/literal exercises help to reveal how bodies and forces exceed their role as useful/harmful objects. They show nonhuman or non-exclusively-human things to be participants living alongside and inside human endeavoring; they direct attention to how things ingress into and alter us.

Do you often think through other people’s quotations?

Yes, for sure. When I come across a good one, I write it down on one of the index cards I keep in my bag.

Joseph Beuys said, “Only the human ability to think is able to bring new causes into the world.” What do you think about this? To you, is it anthropocentric? Absurd?

Anthropocentric, yes, but not absurd. Because there are surely occasions when the ethical need is to prioritize people over other forms of being—even as I also affirm an expansive, multispecied understanding of what it is to be human, and even as I also affirm that there are many other-than-human agencies involved in “creativity.” I am here drawn toward Henri Bergson’s notion of “creative evolution,” i.e., the claim that the universe as such, and not only its human elements, is capable of a more-than-mechanical repetition that produces novelty, or that which is more than the sum of preexisting parts.

You mentioned Renaissance herbalists. What have you learned from them?

I’ll talk about the strange and wonderful Paracelsus (1493–1541): herbalist, alchemist, experimental scientist, pagan/Christian. He teaches me to look closely at the physical shapes of things, and to better discern how the past gets inscribed in the lines of a body. Paracelsus was good at the patient, curious, nonjudgmental practice of what Walt Whitman called “doting.” He doted on plants in order to divine the divine signs he believed were implanted in them—hints from God concerning their potential uses to retain or restore human health. The Satyrion plant, for example, a kind of orchid, has roots resembling testicles, a resemblance that for Paracelsus indicated its medicinal use for men seeking virility. I don’t share his faith in a cosmos of divine hints or “signatures,” but I try to imitate his exquisite, sensuous attention to the lines and shapes of things.

Paracelsus also teaches about the value of focusing attention not only on already-formed shapes but also, and this is more difficult, on the energetic processes from which they emerge. Keep on the alert, in particular, to those very subtle moments inside a process when a vague potential is about to (maybe) become something more actual—when the seed is just about to sprout, or the democratic culture is on the cusp of transitioning to fascism. Paracelsus describes this as happening at the “hem” of the “matrix” of nature: the edge of the matrix folds over on itself to form the consistency needed for a “thing.”

Is your definition of vitality entirely about a thing’s capacity to produce effects in the world?

Yes, more or less. I think there are vitalities and intensities that are not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by the meanings they offer us.

I know your definition is not a kind of animism or pantheism, where there’s a nonmaterial presence behind the substance. Do you believe that everything is a kind of material?

Yes, I do, but materiality in the sense not only of formed bodies but also of their protean potential precursors, such as effervescent energies and restless movements, some subtle in the extreme, which is why I am now trying to catch the drift of the Daoism of Zhuangzi.

Erich Fromm talks about two modes of existing in the world: being and having. Our relationship to things in the world is usually having-based, but you also believe that people who are sensitive to objects can relate to things in a kind of being mode. Is that right?

Yes, in a being mode, and also in a mode of sympathizing or trying to form productive alliances across always-porous bodies. Even stones can absorb new colors or microorganisms.

Are some things more alive than others? Are some artworks?

Everything has the potential to enliven and reveal its liveliness. In general I think it’s foolish, and falsifying, to offer a definite rank ordering, despite the fact that some such ranking seems endemic to human perception and to some extent survival. The force of one thing as received by another (including us) varies with every occasion, with every encounter—the elements composing that force are always multiple and in transit.

What art expresses your philosophy?

One powerful such expression is Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Dada heads (1920) and her marionettes and stage set for King Stag (1918). Puppets deploy anthropomorphism to nonanthropocentric effect.

What film does?

I am infected by Len Lye’s Free Radicals (1958–79; more on that later). I also can’t get over Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987).

As a political philosopher, do you care about the fruit of action being grown from your philosophy?

I do care. I’m hoping to add an oomph of endeavor to more ecological ways of sensing and acting—with the hope that such a sensibility becomes a slightly more powerful lure within a nightmarish culture of endless growth, consumption, exploitation, extraction, waste, profit, etc. etc. A philosophy sensibility can’t yield “fruit” in the reliable way that trees (sometimes) do, but it can still be a subtle force vying and allying with billions of other influences.

It’s also a good idea to be somewhat skeptical about the dominant model of action that’s usually assumed within the question of a philosophy’s effectiveness. That model tends to imagine actors as standing outside the field of happenings, and entering into it by way of a decisive act, an assertive intervention whose effects will be obvious and macro level. Motivated in part by a longing for one fell swoop, that model associates what is most effective with what is most direct or overtly disruptive. Sometimes that works, but that image of efficacy tends to occlude other, less heroic models of acting. There are feminist, Daoist, and many other kinds of practice oriented instead to becoming attuned to the natural, political, economic, aesthetic ecologies in which we live, in order to foster a capacity to discern their potential turning points or nascent shifts in direction. The idea is to enact small but potent tweaks or amendments that inflect, from the inside out, the tenor, propensity, or trajectory of a process. And to do so in a way that’s unlikely to prompt an immediate counterreaction.

Have other philosophers ever changed your experience of the world in a way you wish they had not? Have they opened Pandora’s box for you? Or has the understanding of philosophy always been helpful?

Interesting question. I was a nice Italian American Catholic girl until I stumbled upon [Friedrich] Nietzsche, who opened a Pandora’s box of disquieting affects—new anxieties about violence, and more generally about mortal creatures’ prospects for happiness once god is dead. Do I regret that? No. That encounter opened the way for what came next, which was the course of my life. (Nietzsche is onto something with amor fati.) More generally, if I encounter a philosophy that doesn’t stick, or bores me, or is ethically or aesthetically repellent ([Jacques] Lacan? Ayn Rand?), I tend to just move on.

I’ve heard you describe doodling as an expression of the nonhuman. For you, does this relate to the way automatic drawing attempts to express the unconscious?

The unconscious is but one way to acknowledge that there’s so much that happens to us, with us, around us, about which we are ignorant or only very dimly aware. Another way to nod to that point is to appreciate that we live on many planes at once—the conceptual and the spatial, the shaped and the vague, the static and the vibratory, the geological and the biographical, the everyday and the cosmic. Each plane intersects with or shades off into others; existence is an overrich mix of impressions, tempos, feelings, and moods. Life, as they say, is complicated. Or, as Klee puts it, “It is not easy to orient yourself in a whole that is made up of parts belonging to different dimensions.”

Doodles, as lines and shapes on their way to elsewhere (Klee speaks of lines “out for a walk”), mark and express the dim, unspoken, vibratory, or cosmic planes of human existence. There’s a peculiar experience of myself that comes to the fore while doodling—an “I” that is carried along by a creative process of influx and efflux that would not be the same without me and yet seems to carry on whether or not I am present. That’s a theme I find in and explore by way of Whitman’s poems, as in this passage from “Song of Myself”:

Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,

Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,

Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,

Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,

I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.

Partaker of influx and efflux I.

The nondeliberate aspect of doodles suggested to the Surrealists that doodles express an obscure region of the human psyche called the unconscious—what Carl Jung called the “unfathomable dark recesses of the conscious mind,” with its “wealth of subliminal perception.” The Surrealist Max Morise described doodles as “spontaneous images” prompted by “imperceptible undulations of the flux of thought.” Surrealist games of automatic drawing, such as the “exquisite corpse,” aim to unearth the secrets of this psychic substratum and to render more perceptible the undulations of human thought.

There’s no doubt that the figure of an inner unconscious realm has much explanatory and therapeutic power. But a Freudian model of it does not capture well the doodler’s sense of the presencing of a flux that exceeds intrapsyche and interpsyche relations, a vibrant matter that overflows the frame of human thought/mind and operates more broadly. The anthropocentrism of Surrealism makes it difficult to detect ahuman prompts from flora, breezes, atmospheres, fauna, etc. A psyche-centric account of doodling raises the question of whether doodling is an automatic process or a creative human act, but such an either/or insinuates that artistry is an exclusively human power, an idea fostered by a binary grammar of active subjects and (relatively) passive objects. And if, instead, bodies and forces of many different sorts are capable of the effort of impress-operations, then other questions concerning doodling come to the fore: How do doodles bear witness to outside forces that have seeped in, and to a distributive, conjoint quality of action? A messy swarm of outdoor elements activates a drawing process, which leans into the momentum of the strolling line, which taps the shoulder of the human doodler, who lends her arm to the pencil, which gives the nod to emergent shapes (with vice versas all around).

I know you’ve been writing about the newly published doodles of Franz Kafka. Why are these of particular interest?

Lye’s four-minute experimental film Free Radicals, created by scratching lines directly on celluloid with a pointy stick, consists of mesmerizing, vibrating, wiggling lines that appear and disappear on a dark background. They dance to the music of the Bagirmi people of the southern Sahara. The film, says Lye, is a “vicarious evocation” of inexact energies already among us, energies that include but also exceed those emanating from human artists or audiences. The energies exposed are atmospheric, generic, cosmic, and usually unsensed. But the film dotes on them and pulls them within our radar of detection, even as they remain not fully defined or determinate. I think some of Kafka’s drawings do the same. I don’t mean his better-known stick figures or abstract depictions of human postures and moods. But rather the ones that are more like scribbles of apersonal lines and vectors—vital forces. These doodles express the apersonal movements or vitalities of our more-than-human world. They are apersonal, sparse line-vectors that are irreducible to their anthropocentric entanglements with Kafka’s individual/cultural biography. Through them comes through the generic vitality of matter.

In your mind, can writing ever be a form of doodling? Or does language prevent us from doodling?

The first Kafka doodle I came across was made from words—it was Odradek, the protagonist of Kafka’s three-paragraph story “The Cares of a Family Man.” Odradek is a small (mouse-sized?), spool-shaped, wooden, thread-tangled animate (non)creature, able to speak and laugh but mostly mute, scurrying but also lurking in the bourgeois household. Kafka’s impossible or absurdist description of Odradek goads the reader into trying to imagine its specific shape. It prompted me to try to draw it on paper. Because there’s a lack of fit between Odradek and the Euclidean space required for normal things to exist, you have to kind of just “let go” of that world, relax any strongly agentic effort, and go with the flow of the emergent process. Just doodle it.

originally published in Gagosian Quarterly in 2024.

Each new 🕑hour holds new 🍀chances it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-01-02T14:03:02.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re resolutioningly well and remembering your login passwords in 2026.

𝔽oolproof | The “Fresh Start” Effect

Psychologists call it the “Fresh Start Effect”—landmarks in time (like New Year’s) that help us dissociate from our past failures. We view our “2025 Self” as a different person from our “2026 Self.” The danger? This motivation usually burns out by January 19th (officially “Quitter’s Day”).

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/4000-mondays/202412/fresh-starts-the-psychology-behind-new-year-motivation

𝕀ntelligence | The High Street Hangover

The financial hangover for UK businesses often starts now. Commercial Rent was due on Christmas Day, the VAT quarter is ending, and the “quiet” trading period of January is here.

https://www.theindustry.fashion/pressure-on-high-street-shops-likely-to-intensify-in-2026/

𝕊auce | Profit from Absence

The gym business model relies on you not showing up. They aren’t selling access; they are selling the feeling of being a “gym-goer.” If everyone who paid actually went, the business would collapse instantly. Can you build elements of this into your business model?

𝕙odgepotch | Color Me Badd

Pantone has officially released its Color of the Year for 2026: “Cloud Dancer.” Perhaps chosen to offer a sense of calm in a noisy world, it might have the opposite effect.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w7qg2grq4o

Have a LTJ Weekend!

Happy New Year and Best Fishes

John Crowder

Emerald

T: 01744 353095

eicic.co.uk

Emerald helps SME directors fix cashflow and navigate insolvency with fast and free confidential support.

The Bluestocking 397: Amadeus and Vanishing Men - The Bluestocking

2026-01-02T05:12:22.000Z

Happy New Year!

As a bonus post, I wrote about the five ways I brightened my life in 2025, which you can read here. For The Atlantic, I talked to David Frum about how comedy got so rightwing, and wrote about the new London opening of Cole Escola’s historical melodrama, Oh! Mary. (Yes, the Americans have discovered panto.)

Helen

The (Partially) Lost Generation

If you wish to keep abreast of The Discourse, then you need to read this Compact essay on the “lost generation” of white millennial men. Its author Jacob Savage previously wrote a piece about the disappearance of Jews from prestige professions in the US. He was also the guy who wrote the viral “vanishing white male writer” piece a few months ago. Kudos to the man for working his beat hard.

On X, discussion of Savage’s latest article inevitably swung quickly towards thinly (or not so thinly) veiled suggestions that the main problem was unqualified black people and women hoovering up all the good jobs, depriving men of their natural birthright to secure jobs in prestige disciplines and forcing them instead, to podcast independently or even lower themselves to having a Substack.

But the piece itself is far more interesting than that.

Its really novel argument was the idea that powerful Gen X and Baby Boomer men didn’t give up their own power when the demand for greater diversity came around in the 2010s—instead, they pushed it on to the next generation down: “Yale’s history department, with 10 white male professors over the age of 70, provides a striking illustration of the generational divide in hiring,” writes Savage. “Since 2018, they’ve hired four older white men as full professors—but among sixteen tenured or tenure-track millennials, just one is a white man. At 84, the Cold War historian John Gaddis isn’t even the oldest in the department.”

What also emerges is that an equally big culprit for mid-range white men being overlooked was the continued triumph of well-connected white men, who took the few White Man spaces available. The author, Jacob Savage, argues that when the older white men running Hollywood writers’ rooms were hiring, maybe they first gave out gigs to their own (older, white male) buddies, and then backfilled the remaining positions with entry-level “diverse” candidates to juice the statistics.

As Musa al-Gharbi wrote on X: “One thing I note in my book is that everyone supports lots of progressive social causes in principle but no one wants to be the one to actually pay the costs. A consequence is that the people who *are* eventually made to pay the costs when progress is actually made are the most vulnerable members of the ‘privileged’ groups: people with the least connections, folks who are less established, those who possess less cultural and financial capital, etc.”

I’m open to the idea that the small cohort of millennial men trying to get jobs in publishing, academia and journalism c2014-2020 really did face harsher odds than they would have done a decade earlier—about as harsh as a woman trying to become a senior executive in 1990, maybe. Something was happening in specific high-status places—in MacArthur genius grants? in writers’ rooms? in theatre commissions? TV panel shows? — because of how many men in my generation in knobby jobs have told me that they heard the phrase “we need to hire a woman this time” or similar during this period. For anyone directly affected by the White Male Rapture, I’m not surprised they’re pissed off.

That said, Callum Williams of The Economist wasn’t all that convinced by the headline figures on white male professional decline overall, and neither was Matt Bruenig, who looked at census data and found “30-something white males over this period increased their Bachelor’s and post-Bachelor’s degree attainment and employment, while holding steady in the arts/media sector and in the upper echelons of the personal earnings distribution”. There might be some sampling bias happening here: maybe every rightwing influencer on X or Substack has a story of being passed over for being a white man, because that’s where passed-over white men hang out.

The “problem”. Photo by Abby Savage on Unsplash

Another interesting piece of evidence came from Sasha Gusev, a Harvard professor, who dug out Harvard’s diversity stats:

“The example of Harvard humanities hires in 2023, for instance, is driven entirely by new Asian and Hispanic faculty,” writes Gusev. Just a wild guess here, but given what we know about Asian SAT scores in the U.S., no one was lowering their academic requirements to hire those Asian faculty—which is the lazy claim being made about all of this demographic change on X.

In the Compact essay, Savage does identify examples of what sounds like genuine, overt and probably illegal discrimination. At other times, he’s talking about the (over)correction of a previous white male over-representation. (White men make up around a third of the American population.) Some cases of female dominance in academia, such as the greater number of women in med school, are also the predictable result of a disproportionately female applicant pool. For years, American universities have been putting their thumb on the scale in college applications—in favour of men—to redress the lack of male applicants for many courses1. Affirmative action has always been more subtle than high-profile quotas, and there’s a more interesting story here than the lazy grievance-mongering commentators have suggested.

However, I do think it’s wrong for Savage to handwave away “secular decline” (essentially the idea that men don’t want to work in declining industries, or ones dominated by women). That is a real phenomenon. Why are crypto and podcasting so male? Because they’re growth industries that are flush with cash2.

Like I said, do read the essay—it’s thought-provoking, and more robust (and focused) in its argument than much of the commentary around it. It’s also pretty brave of Savage to write it from the perspective of a (self-identified) upper-mediocre man who has struggled to make a living in journalism.

Bluestocking unrecommends: I wanted to love the new television adaptation of Amadeus because a) it’s such a brilliant story and theme; b) Joe Barton is a great writer (cf Giri/Haji) and c) Will Sharpe is an upsettingly handsome and talented man.

Unfortunately, Sharpe took a rather more lowkey approach to Mozart’s vulgarness than Tom Hulce in the 1984 version. That didn’t work for me, and nor did Salieri jerking off to his memory of Wolfie in flagrante and thereby regaining the ability to bang out a quick sonata. I don’t think we needed a gay subtext to explain why Salieri is driven mad by Mozart. The 1984 explanation—that seeing this hideous cackling toddler produce divine music shatters Salieri’s faith in God—was fine!

Also, once you realise that Paul Bettany is doing a vocal impression of Rory Stewart, you won’t be able to un-hear it. I kept waiting for him to criticise Zack Polanski’s understanding of the deficit.

“Did you really mean MILLIONS, not BILLIONS?” Also, the fact he looks like Robert Webb in this wig is very disconcerting, too

Quick Links

The NYT has finally done the big investigation into Epstein’s money that I’ve wanted to read for months. In the words of SuperHans, the secret ingredient was crime.
Thanks to John Y for this clip: prime Tony Blair takes on a young Richard Tice on Question Time. DRAG HIM MR TONY
Rob Ford has done his annual pundit audit. My big takeaway: politics is even more volatile and chaotic than conventional wisdom allows. People keep asking me if Nigel Farage could become prime minister, and my answer is “Yes”.
Marie Le Conte had a Correct Take on the move to video podcasting: it’s bad for women (largely me) because you are expected to be “camera ready” instead of turning up in joggers to waffle on about nothing.

That’s all for now—welcome to 2026. Thanks for all the funny/insightful/alarming emails and comments over the last year. For those of you who enjoyed Jonathan’s mega-wall, here’s one more. Clue: One group is easier if you watched Fantasy Football League in the 1990s, as I did. I’ll put the answer in the comments.

Subscribe now

This situation is not unique. For Difficult Women, I interviewed men who had been given bursaries to become teachers, because of their under-representation in the profession.

Zack Stentz made a good point about the early years of the Hollywood diversity drive coinciding with the streaming boom, “so for a while it felt like there was room for everyone to succeed. Not so anymore.”

Five Ways I Brightened My Life in 2025 - The Bluestocking

2025-12-29T11:04:40.000Z

Hello, it’s Helen Lewis from the Bluestocking here. This didn’t feel quite right as a regular Friday post, but I wanted to write it down in case anyone found one of these suggestions useful. You can subscribe to the regular Bluestocking below, which gets you a free weekly roundup of the best of the internet (according to me):

Five Ways To Brighten Your Life

1. Get a bird table

I asked for some sort of bird feeder for my birthday, and in the months since, Jonathan has quietly built an avian palace—we’ve got sunflower hearts, we’ve got fat balls, we’ve got peanuts and suets and a birdbath. As a result, every morning I get to have a cup of tea and see who’s popped into the garden.

I assumed that, because we live in Lewisham, all we’d get would be pigeons with flick knives1, so imagine my delight to open the blinds on the very first morning and find this magnificent specimen — a greater spotted woodpecker.

Woody!

The garden also attracts great tits, coal tits, blue tits, sparrows and dunnocks—the last of these being a bird that I had until now assumed was also a sparrow. (Dunnocks are more uniformly brown, and also they are ground feeders.) I love watching all the birds, with their unexpected appearances and their tiny interpersonal dramas.

My delight in Woody the woodpecker’s presence has only been dimmed by the fact that apparently, in spring, woodpeckers forsake their usual favourite food (the fat ball) for baby blue tits (warm fat balls).

I read somewhere this year that you can tell if your relationship is healthy if your partner responds positively to you telling them you’ve seen a bird. Why not buy a bird feeder and put this to the test?

2. Make a photo book

For Christmas, I made a photobook of 2025 memories with Mixbook, because my iPhone has decided to save photos as .HEIC files rather than jpegs, and Mixbook didn’t ask me to convert one to the other.

Sure, photo books are naff, blah blah, but I loved the process. I had remembered 2025 as a pretty dry year (promoting the book, being tired of promoting the book) but pulling together all my photos reminded me that it was also a year when I went some interesting places—the Eagle’s Nest, Riyadh, Dunrobin, Chattanooga—and got to spend time with some of my favourite people.

did i mention we repainted the living room

3. Don’t scroll—read trash

Readers of my end-of-year books roundup will know that I spent a lot of time this year reading detective fiction and thrillers. I regret none of it. Whereas I do wish I had spent less time on Instagram reels. Face it, you’re not going to switch seamlessly from watching videos of travel influencers doing 2-minute reviews of Q Suites to plunging into The Brothers Karamazov. Just read some Agatha Christie and feel OK about yourself. Over Christmas, I read two of her “Mr Quin” series, where a strange, quasi-mystical being turns up to solve mysteries, right past wrongs and stop people doing terrible things. Eerie and playful.

4. Never second-screen

We have all ruined television by refusing to watch only the thing we’re watching—and studio executives discovering this.

This year, we’ve rewatched the first few seasons of House, from the late 2000s, and it’s incredible that the most popular drama of its time was content to deliver payoffs and dramatic moments just through a single look, or an unspoken thought. If they remade it today, House would have to sit at his piano in his apartment at the end of an episode about Huntingdon’s, singing a song about how he’s not sure that there can be a God when good people have heritable diseases.

You can’t fight human nature, however, and I know that I get fidgety if asked to concentrate on the television alone. Hence buying cross-stitch kits of famous paintings, to do while sitting on the sofa. Cross-stitch is extremely regimented—the canvas is pre-punched, so you know where the stitches should start and end—and the resulting efforts have a cool, pixelated effect.

During the pandemic, I finished the Great Wave, and then I moved on to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which now hangs in my parents’ kitchen:

Having got tired of yellow, I’m currently working on Van Gogh’s chair, so I can get tired of green instead. The best kits are the National Gallery ones by DMC, which come with plan, aida, threads and a needle. Buy a wooden embroidery hoop (10in) yourself to keep the canvas steady.

5. Lurk on social media

Let’s see if I can keep this one up. Social media is for reading posts, not posting on. In the last few years, the dream of a Socratic forum for debate has died, and being a “content creator” has become a proper job. So I’m leaving the content creation to the professionals.

I mean, yes, there is also a rat, but it looks quite clean and respectable, plus the occasional pigeon (rat with wings) and squirrel (fluffy rat).

🟢 Top to toe in 🚗tailbacks it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2025-12-26T10:33:20.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re turkey-sandwiching well and finding a home for all those new socks.

If you are feeling guilty about sitting on the sofa and doing absolutely nothing today, don’t. You are simply practicing the Dutch concept of Niksen—the art of doing nothing with a purpose. Unlike mindfulness (which requires focus), Niksen is about letting your mind wander. Psychologists say this “idle time” is actually when your brain does its best creative problem-solving. So, that nap is technically a business strategy.

https://time.com/5622094/what-is-niksen-dutch-concept-doing-nothing/

𝕀ntelligence | The “Limbo” Week

We are currently in that strange, foggy week between Christmas and New Year where nobody knows what day it is and email inboxes are ghost towns. While it’s tempting to switch off entirely, a quiet hour spent on the numbers today can save a month of panic in January.

https://hourhands.co.uk/productive-business-owners-between-christmas-and-the-new-year/

𝕊auce | Bagless Wonder

In 1979, James Dyson had an idea for a new vacuum cleaner — one that didn’t use bags. It took him five years to perfect the design, building more than 5,000 prototypes in his backyard shed. He then tried to convince the big vacuum brands to license his invention, but most wouldn’t even take his calls. Eventually, he started his own company.

https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-dyson-james-dyson/

𝕙odgepotch | Why is it called Boxing Day?

It has nothing to do with prizefighting or disposing of cardboard boxes. The tradition dates back to the Victorian era when the wealthy would box up gifts and leftover food to give to their servants on December 26th—giving them a day off to be with their own families.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/46454700

Have a Wonderful and Abundant Christmas!

Best Fishes

John Crowder

Emerald

T: 01744 353095 (New Landline)

eicic.co.uk

Emerald helps SME directors fix cashflow and navigate insolvency with fast and free confidential support. I focus on legally obtaining the best commercial and personal result for you, often with significant savings. Got a quote? I’ll likely beat it.

A Christmas (Blue) Stocking - The Bluestocking

2025-12-26T06:17:23.000Z

Happy Boxing Day!

In case you want to escape your family briefly, here—in lieu of the usual Bluestocking—is a special Christmas puzzle. Created by Mr Bluestocking, Jonathan, it is an Only Connect wall, but with five categories instead of four. A MEGAWALL.

For the uninitiated, you’re looking for five groups of five. Each square only appears in one group.

Top row: Sparrow / Fox / Right Said F / Army / Hat; Second Row: Baron / The Thin Line / Lobster / Bat / Robin; Third Row: Arrows / Deer / Intentionally Left Blank / Stripe / 3 Colours; Fourth Row: Panda / Simply / Dragon / Giant Flying Squirrel / Bull; Final Row: House Painters / Coat / Hot Chili Peppers / Devils / The Hunt for October

And yes, this is a particularly fiendish wall, as evidenced by Jonathan’s glee on Christmas Eve as he watched the rest of us realise what he’d done:

Smugathan

I’ll post the answer in the comments here on Sunday morning; until then, please feel free to discuss possible solutions below the post.

Happy Christmas!

Helen

This post is public so feel free to share it:

Bring 🎄 us some figgy pudding❄ it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2025-12-19T16:26:58.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re nutcrackeringly well and remembering were all the presents are.

𝔽oolproof | The Zeigarnik Effect

Ever feel like you can’t relax on Christmas Eve because your brain keeps reminding you of that one email you didn’t send? That’s the Zeigarnik Effect—our psychological tendency to remember interrupted or incomplete tasks better than completed ones. The fix? Write a definitive “Brain Dump” list today before you log off. Your brain will treat the list as “closure,” allowing you to actually enjoy the tinsel and turkey.

https://learningloop.io/glossary/zeigarnik-effect

𝕀ntelligence | £100 contactless card limit to be lifted

Banks and card providers will be given the power, from March, to set a maximum - or unlimited - single payment amount without the need to enter a four-digit PIN. The move comes despite the FCA’s own survey showing little appetite among consumers and industry respondents for a change from the current £100 limit on contactless cards.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2prjr4lpko

𝕊auce | The Big Business of Christmas Music

Christmas music may only dominate a few weeks a year, but its impact on the music business lasts for decades. Billboard On the Record breaks down why holiday songs are some of the most valuable assets, why writing a timeless Christmas hit is so difficult and how industry traditions around holiday albums have shifted from mandatory releases to strategic singles.

𝕙odgepotch | The NORAD Santa Tracker

It started as a mistake. In 1955, a Sears ad printed the wrong phone number for a “Call Santa” hotline, connecting children to the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) operations center instead. rather than hanging up, the commander on duty ordered his staff to give the kids radar updates on Santa’s location. 70 years later, it’s still the coolest logistics operation on earth.

https://www.noradsanta.org/

Have a cup of good cheer Christmas!

Best Fishes

John Crowder

Emerald

T: 01744 353095 (New Landline)

eicic.co.uk

Emerald helps SME directors fix cashflow and navigate insolvency with fast and free confidential support.

The Bluestocking 396: Knives Out For Oliver Sacks - The Bluestocking

2025-12-19T05:04:27.000Z

Happy Friday!

Regular readers will know that I’ve binged on detective fiction this year, so I was pretty hyped for the new Knives Out. One of the books I mentioned last week—Murder At The Vicarage—is even mentioned in the film as possibly providing a solution to the case, alongside The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (the one I thought was going to be the template) and Whose Body? by Dorothy L.Sayers.

Josh O’Connor and Daniel Craig in Wake Up Dead Man

One of the things that’s quite odd about the film is that it melds together a proper Agatha Christie-esque setting in Ye Olde Village Church, with a MAGA pastor, played by Josh Brolin. Some of the accents (I’m looking at you, Andrew Scott) are similarly transatlantically ambivalent. But overall, the acting is great (Josh O’Connor is particularly good) and the art direction is beautiful. I got half the twist, in the end, and the other half, very pleasingly, gestures at a famous Poirot story, The Double Clue.

But the really interesting thing about Wake Up, Dead Man is that at heart it’s a pro-Christian parable. That might seem an odd thing to say when the baddie is a rum priest—basically Monsignor Steve Bannon—and the title is a wry allusion to the resurrection.

But the simple faith of O’Connor’s Father Jud Duplenticy is never mocked or denigrated. (Halfway through the film, the narrative stops so he can console a woman whose mother is dying.) Even Benoit Blanc, an atheist, ends up having his own Damascene revelation to the importance of grace and mercy. Cradle Catholic dweebs like me will notice the attention to detail, like the fact that Monsignor Steve Bannon is correctly wearing pink vestments in one tiny shot leading up to Easter, because it must be Laetare Sunday.

The suspects.

I got into terrible trouble on BlueSky and Reddit earlier this year for suggesting that White Lotus was the first great “post-woke” artwork—i.e. critical of Trumpism and rightwing excess generally, without being default liberal. Its creator Mike White is the son of a man, Mel, who ghostwrote sermons for homophobic preachers, came out as gay himself in middle age, and yet remained religious. I think that’s why I feel an affinity for its world view, which can be summed up as “we’re all sinners.”

I felt the same about Wake Up Dead Man. Benoit Blanc is gay, and in this film he reveals that his mother was a fundamentalist—just like the hate preachers Mel White wrote for. But then he has to deal with Duplenticy, who really has sinned—he killed a man in a boxing match after letting his anger overwhelm him—and is struggling every day to be better. As much as the murder, the film turns out to be about the misuse of faith by cult leaders and other charlatans. (I had a sudden vision of Donald Trump speaking at Charlie Kirk’s funeral1.) Brolin’s dead priest is “a distillation of a cloud of things that I experienced growing up in an evangelical household,” Johnson told a Catholic outlet. “I would say Jud, in contrast, is an example of all the positive things I heard growing up in church services and represents the beauty of Christ’s love. I thought it would be interesting to pit those two against each other.”

This is also very post-woke! Here’s a film where the foil to bad religion is not know-it-all atheism, but good religion. I wasn’t surprised to see Johnson reference The Book Of Mormon in that interview, because that manages to be sharply satirical and to present the sweet young missionary kids as genuinely earnest, without them being saccharinely perfect.

Happy Christmas!

Helen

PS. Thank you to the Bluestocking readers who pointed out I had incorrectly killed off Gregor Fisher in the last newsletter. He lives! And is about to go on tour! Jonathan eventually worked out that I had become confused with Onslow, the other person who wore a string vest on television in the 1990s.

Oliver Sacks. Photograph by Lowell Handler

The Confabulations of Oliver Sacks

I read this brilliant Rachel Aviv piece on Oliver Sacks with steadily increasing dread. A few years ago, I enjoyed Sacks’s memoir, On The Move (in which he finally revealed that he was gay, and also had been celibate for most of his life, without explaining further). I mentioned how great Sacks’s writing was to someone I was working with, who said: well, it is easier to write perfect stories when it’s all made up.

Credit to that person for being more sceptical than me2. On The Move has a couple of eyebrow-raising moments: Sacks claims to have ridden his motorbike at 100mph for hours on end, and to have held several unofficial weightlifting records at Muscle Beach. Having read Aviv’s article, I now seriously doubt both those stories. After all, Aviv—who has been granted access to Sacks’s archive—makes the case that he was a serial fabricator in his early case studies. Sometimes he had the patients say or do things that made the story neater; other times, they took on aspects of his own biography. (He had one of the Awakenings patients express an interest in the poet Rilke, whom Sacks loved; the man himself wrote more compellingly about how he liked to do rapes.)

Here’s Aviv:

But, in his journal, Sacks wrote that “a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached” to his work: he had given his patients “powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have.” Some details, he recognized, were “pure fabrications.” He tried to reassure himself that the exaggerations did not come from a shallow place, such as a desire for fame or attention. “The impulse is both ‘purer’—and deeper,” he wrote. “It is not merely or wholly a projection—nor (as I have sometimes, ingeniously-disingenuously, maintained) a mere ‘sensitization’ of what I know so well in myself. But (if you will) a sort of autobiography.” He called it “symbolic ‘exo-graphy.’ ”

Oh dear. And oh well. This was a good reminder that most things that seem to good to be true . . . are not true. IMO, the most narratively satisfying stories are about 20 per cent fake. Do not trust parables presented as fact.

Photo by Christopher Anderson

“The others filed in, a bit like nervous schoolchildren. Miller balked at the idea of sitting on the end of the table—“not natural,” he declared. There was giggling. A “Blue Steel” joke was made. “We’re all going to get fired for this,” someone cracked. “Except for me,” the vice president said. “I have 100 percent job security.””

Vanity Fair did the senior White House staff up like kippers—publishing an extreme close-up photo where you can see Karoline Leavitt’s lip filler injection sites, for example. However, many of the harshest burns come from chief of staff Susie Wiles herself, talking with surprising candour about JD Vance (a “conspiracy theorist”), Elon Musk (whacked out on ketamine), and even Trump himself (“an alcoholic’s personality”).

Quick Links

Enjoyed Alexander Skarsgard and his father Stellan interviewing each other, probably because they are Swedish and therefore honest (Variety).
The Daily Mail laments the departure of Polish plumbers from post-Brexit Britain.
Feel much more warmly about John Carey after discovering that a) he got compulsory Anglo-Saxon removed from the Oxford English syllabus; b) he wrote this wonderful explanation why, at the level of the sentence, Shakespeare was a better writer than Marlowe.
“That was when I quit talking about it. I mean, how hard should it be to get a little sympathy when an unleashed dog bites you? What if I were a baby? I wondered. Would people side with me then? What if I were ninety or blind or Nelson Mandela? Why is everyone so afraid of saying that drug addicts shouldn’t let their dogs bite people? Actually, I know why. We’re afraid we’ll be mistaken for Republicans, when, really, isn’t this something we should all be able to agree on? How did allowing dogs to bite people become a Democratic point of principle?” David Sedaris on being bitten by a dog, and misplaced liberal sympathy (New Yorker, £)
“If I wanted to be cruelly unsympathetic – and it’s my Substack, so, as it happens, I do – I’d say the smug, aren’t-we-all-very-clever sniggering at Loadsamoney reveals the base snobbery of middle-class professionals who think the skilled tradesmen they resent paying to do the things they can’t are mostly fat-arsed racists and unscrupulous cowboys who should know their place, be grateful for their “builder’s tea”, and live on the other side of the railway. They are condescended to, patronised, undervalued, and endlessly moaned about by the people who define “work” as Gmail, Teams calls and calendar invites.” It’s coming up for January 31, the time that many of us contemplate how much the government hates people who have to complete tax returns, so I particularly enjoyed Patrick Maguire on how Labour loves “PAYE Britain” and disdains the self-made and self-employed.

See you next time—and happy Christmas!

Theres’s another echo of Trumpism in the fate of Andrew Scott’s character, a science fiction writer who cashes in by writing a book about the murder, only to end up with an audience of camouflage-wearing truckers that he despises.

Credit, too, to Bluestockinger Andrew Brown, who was appropriately sceptical all the way back in 2005. And to Jonathan Miller, who despite being friends with Sacks, offered up this quote: “Oliver has aspects of a Borgesian fantasist. He remembers things that have never happened ...”