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🟢 🚗 ✨ I don’t know why she swallowed a fly it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-10-02T18:24:00.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re traitorsally well whilst Hypermiling into October.

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 | Cultivating a Winning Sales Mindset

Success in sales isn’t just about the tactics you use; it’s heavily driven by the mindset you bring to the table. This piece explores how to build a resilient, growth-oriented perspective to help you navigate objections, maintain momentum, and ultimately close more deals.

https://vengreso.com/blog/sales-mindset

𝕀ntelligence | Cracking Down on Abusive Phoenixing

The Insolvency Service is ramping up its efforts to tackle “abusive phoenixing”—the practice where company directors evade liabilities by transferring assets to a new business just before liquidating the old one. This fresh crackdown aims to protect creditors and ensure fair play across the business landscape.

https://bmmagazine.co.uk/finance/insolvency-service-abusive-phoenixing-crackdown/

𝕊auce | How AI Search is Changing Brand Visibility

AI search is fundamentally changing how people discover information online. This practical deep dive explores what these rapid shifts mean for the future of discovery, and how brands need to rethink their strategies to maintain visibility in an evolving digital landscape.

https://practicalai.show/372

𝕙odgepotch | Why Are World Bond Markets Selling Off Again?

Global bond markets are experiencing renewed turbulence as we head into October. This piece breaks down the underlying economic factors driving the latest widespread sell-off and what it could signal for the broader financial landscape.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/why-are-world-bond-markets-selling-off-again-2026-10-01/

Have a Faithfully Good 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.

This edition is complete, baited, and ready to cast! Let me know if you need to tweak any last details before you send it out.

436: Stuffed animal ethics and Taylor Swift’s endless girlhood - The Bluestocking

2026-10-02T05:57:28.000Z

Happy Friday!

This month’s reading diary is out—six books! Not bad.

Helen

What the stuffed animal who makes all my life decisions looks like

The Big Feud Behind AI

Daniela [Amodei] had an unusual process for working through conflicts. She and [her husband Holden] Karnofsky had a large collection of stuffed animals, which they treated as their personal advisory council for managerial role-playing. Each animal had an assigned character profile. Jinji was a lazy cat who encouraged Daniela to cancel meetings and avoid taking on too much work. Maura, a pink bear, was a detail-oriented, type-A manager. A panda named Beary Bonds was the “patron bear of generosity and empathy.” She treated these exercises as something between an inside joke and an earnest management technique. (In 2023, she told me the animals were “very useful in analyzing different personality types.”) And although not many people at OpenAI knew about the animals, the ones who did weren’t sure how seriously she took their advice.
That year, the Amodeis began building their own nucleus inside OpenAI. “Dario’s clique,” as some people called it—though it was really both his and Daniela’s—set up private Slack channels and held their own meetings. They talked constantly about safety, using jargon that was unfamiliar to the more technical engineers. And to the people who weren’t invited, it felt standoffish—a safety splinter cell that was refusing to work with anyone else.

A decade ago, three of the biggest rivals in the AI world—Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei (plus his sister Daniela)—were all involved in the same company, OpenAI. The story of why and how these former compatriots splintered is fascinating, and it’s the subject of Kevin Roose’s new book, of which this is an extract. (Roose has just joined The Atlantic as a contributing writer.) The OpenAI camp think the Anthropic lads are “power-hungry virtue-signalers” while the Anthropic types think that the OpenAI people are too casual about safety, or maybe even “evil”. I suspect everyone thinks Elon Musk should put down the ketamine and read a book.

as people have pointed out, this has the aesthetic of an AI-generated peptide company advert

Grow Up, Taylor

A few years ago, after watching the Eras Tour, I wrote that Taylor Swift had a problem: she appeared trapped, in her 30s, in a perpetual girlhood of crushes and bleachers and meeting behind the mall. Wouldn’t all this juvenalia sound a little discordant if she was still indulging it as a 40-year-old billionaire? Well, the Encore tracks for Life of A Showgirl have given us the answer. Swift, a newly married 36-year-old, is still fighting with the internet and portraying her relationship with human labrador Travis Kelce as a HUGE MIDDLE FINGER TO THE HATERS. This schtick is unseemly, and also musically and lyrically exhausted.

My colleague Spencer Kornhaber notes here that, at 39, Madonna put out Ray Of Light, and took her career in a new and fruitful direction. I hope Taylor can do the same. Otherwise we’re going to get more songs like “Wood”, and no one wants that1.

BRB, having a whipround to fund my purchase of the Lego Sagrada Familia. It’s 12,060 pieces! I reckon that would keep Jonathan occupied until at least 6.30pm on Christmas Day.

Quick Links

My contribution to the Discourse last week was an article on the mask-optional lesbian bar drama: you can’t negotiate with terrorists, even ones with Long Covid (The Atlantic, gift link). This week, I wrote about a Republican senator who face-planted in a committee hearing (gift link).
‘When the groypers posted on X and Telegram that women belonged in breeding gulags or were too stupid to vote, she’d defended them, telling her own audience that the edgy jokes made “inconvenient truths more digestible” for a new generation of conservative men. When Fuentes said women made men “want to cut their heads off,” she’d defended that, too, calling it a natural reaction to the modern thinking that taught women to push men away. “He shows a lot of respect for the women who are respectable,” she said in an interview.”’ Oh girl, no. This story has an ending you can already guess from just this quotation. (Washington Post, gift link)
“By night two he’d eaten the box and we had to move him into a wicker basket, which he also ate.” Very few dogs are as memorable as Felicity Cloake’s ornery cairn terrier Wilf—I say this as someone who was once nipped on the buttock by him—and her tribute to him is lovely (Substack).
What if ADHD was more about “sustained engagement” rather than attention per se? Interesting perspective (NYT, gift link).

That’s all for now!

For evidence of this, watch the moment in this viral fan-reaction video where the one on the left realises she has built a career on liking this music and can’t slag it off.

A Dialogue with Dineo Seshee Bopape - A Lie Before Its Time

2026-10-01T14:10:25.000Z

Courtesy the artist

At the Sharjah Biennial in 2017, Dineo Seshee Bopape exhibited away from the main exhibition galleries, in a dusty, sun-beaten courtyard. When I came upon her presentation, it didn’t immediately register as art; more like the ruins of a local shrine, with modest ritual offerings: a stack of burnt bricks, chunks of coal on torn strips of crumpled foil and plastic water bottles half-full of pale liquid. The space felt used. Later on, when I wandered past the site at night, its eerie power was amplified by moonlight.

The piece’s title, +/- 1791 (monument to the haitian revolution 1791) (2017), pointed specifically to its feeling of blighted history. This work was my introduction to Bopape, and her earthy vocabulary of materials: herbs, crystals, ash, soil, feathers, light. Video, too, has been one of her most consistent mediums, often including music, both by Bopape and by great musicians of the past, such as Nina Simone. Her gallery shows have a way of standing in stark contrast to their white-walled containers. At Art in General, New York, in 2016, she installed a thick bed of carved soil; at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the same year, a hill of rubble; for the Artes Mundi prize in Cardiff this year, murals of painted mud.

Since Sharjah, Bopape and I have attempted multiple methods of conducting a formal dialogue. First we tried email, which faltered, then we tried exchanging voice messages, which had its own awkward limits. All our correspondence was made particularly tricky because, in the past years, Bopape has been nomadic, moving through residencies across the world (as have I). Born in Polokwane, South Africa, in 1981, she attended Columbia in New York for graduate school, and when we found time to record a video conversation recently she was on a residency in Paris, where she was studying “the energy and resonance of minerals to translate them into song”.

Bopape responded to most of my questions with long pauses, and often used “yeah” in the punctuative way that others use “um”. We spoke for two hours during an overlap in our very different time zones, just after I woke and just before she fell asleep. Later, she made a few text edits through email, using various forms of punctuation.

+/-1791 (monument to the haitian revolution 1791) (detail), 2017 (installation view, Sharjah Biennial 13). Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

A Current of Somebody Else

Ross Simonini You told me that when you think of someone, they often write to you soon after.

Dineo Seshee Bopape Yeah. More and more.

RS What do you think about that as a phenomenon?

DSB I think I might just be more and more conscious of it. (Forgetfulness.) It’s not quite terrifying, but it almost is. Things are so quick and I wonder about the thoughts that pass through my mind, what they mean physically. And I wonder if thinking about somebody when they call does something to the other thoughts that one is not conscious of sending out (and the denial of it is a wonder).

RS Are you saying these thoughts can be disruptive?

DSB Sometimes when I feel unhappy about something I feel as though that person/thing/ being knows that I’m unhappy about them/it. I’m not sure whether it’s the thoughts transferring, or whether I am being paranoid that ‘they’ have read my thoughts, or whether the universe is that open, we don’t quite have the borders that we imagined, things are more permeable…

RS Do you try to control your thoughts?

DSB That reminds me of a meditation practice I often do, where I’m asked to observe rather than control the thoughts coming through. That creates a different experience than I shouldn’t be thinking about that right now.

RS Is it ever necessary to control, though?

DSB When you say that, that reminds me: I keep imagining political prisoners in the ‘history’ of South Africa, the thoughts that might’ve gone through their minds, let’s say Winnie Mandela’s mind when she was incarcerated, in solitary confinement. At those moments, you – she/the person/I/one – have to have and exercise some kind of control, because otherwise it’s possible to let fears just take over your mind.

+/-1791 (monument to the haitian revolution 1791) (detail), 2017 (installation view, Sharjah Biennial 13). Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

RS I remember in Sharjah, you and I were talking about Bessie Head’s 1973 novel A Question of Power, which is a portrait of a woman losing her mind. Maybe we try to control thoughts to avoid insanity?

DSB Yeah. ‘Thoughts’ are already being controlled. We’re taught to do so as young kids – to ignore certain parts of reality, particular ways of hearing or trusting the information that one is receiving from the surrounding environment.

RS What thoughts from your childhood are you trying to change?

DSB There are a lot. Where to start? I grew up in post/transitional-apartheid South Africa in a township, in a village, in a city, in a town… so I’m working through those kinds of peripheral, and integral, structural ideas/weeds… and my place in the world in relation to, not in any order, colonialism, patriarchy, ethnocentrism, racism, classism, capitalism, feminism, MTV, media, plants, soil, space, beauty, water, ethics.

RS How do you change these?

DSB Through research, I’m trying to ‘understand’ what happened on the African continent, between Bantu, between Africans and Europeans, and between Africans and Arabs etc. I spend a lot of time thinking about what information is and was taught in school, and socially, and what information is and was not. It takes a lot of effort to go digging for what actually happened in the 1600s, the 1800s, etc.

RS I find that reading is helpful for turning off assumptions. You can replace your own thoughts with someone else’s.

DSB That reminds me of something that Kara Walker once said in an interview, about the struggle of being caught up in the narrative of the protagonist of a story. I think she was speaking about Gone with the Wind. It could apply to ideologies in general, and to being swept by a current of somebody else’s thoughts. This could be pleasant, or not.

Untitled (of occult instability) [feelings], 2016 (installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris). Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy the artist

An Inverted Commerce

RS You are often moving through different residencies. Do you enjoy being nomadic?

DSB Yeah…? This answer changes depending on the day. I have a preference generally for longer residencies rather than ones for one month or two weeks. Yeah. That would feel too short.

RS How long are you in Paris?

DSB Six months. Perhaps.

RS Have you been focusing on one project while there?

DSB I’m doing a residency, which is supposed to be focused on a research project, but you know how it goes: the other project starts calling and ‘all of a sudden’ you have projects and conversations in the US and Italy. It’s also so hard to be in one place anymore. One mentally goes everywhere.

RS You’re not really in Paris.

DSB Even though I’m in Paris, I feel as though I’m everywhere else. I’m not sure what it feels like then to be fully here, or whether it’s possible to really be here as well.

RS Is our world moving towards placelessness?

DSB Maybe, but what would be the point of the body then? This weight that we are. We have to bear the shadow that travels with us so that we travel through or with it. We somehow can’t deny it.

RS Are your installations a way for you to reclaim placeness?

DSB Yeah, definitely. (It depends.) And the research and the search for particular elements for the work, for soil or for clay or certain herbs or objects. That inserts me into the place. And also involving the people who are from the place helps me to be in communication with that place. Perhaps there are also various energies that are passing through a place or through people at a particular spot at a particular time. That then makes the place apt for an event where one is able to receive all the information needed, parallel to it or not.

RS Do you plan your installations or just respond to a place when you get there?

DSB One thing leads to another. I have a general plan but if I get too specific, if I know exactly what I’m going to do, it doesn’t work out well. It gets a bit boring for me in the process of making, realising. To discover new things, there has to be some room for things to come. Sometimes I have a list of ingredients going in, but I’m not sure how they would come together. I have a feeling, like knowing I want to use clay here but not being sure exactly what the clay would be doing or how it would be arranged in the space.

Untitled (of occult instability) [feelings], 2016 (installation view, Palais de Tokyo, Paris). Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy the artist

RS Do you try to develop that feeling?

DSB Sometimes it’s more about resting. Things flow easier when there’s less pressure. When I can think of something without directly looking at it, almost ignoring it, or half-ignoring it, then it comes alive.

RS Working on multiple projects at once seems like a good way to achieve that.

DSB Yeah, it is. That’s been happening consciously and unconsciously. Even with videos, I like playing with something over and over again, on multiple timelines, and seeing where it leads and having multiple possibilities of where the story might go.

RS Did you enjoy grad school, with all its different projects?

DSB I found it amazing. And moving from Amsterdam to New York, I had to shift the way I was working, because it would have been too expensive to move all the objects I was working with, so I had to imagine a different relationship to those objects. The conversations with people, from other contexts, were not the same as the conversations that had been happening in Europe. Europe had felt conservative in some regard, and New York just felt more open, more vibrant. There were people from everywhere, it felt, bits and pieces of the whole world seemed to intersect. It was vibrant.

RS How so?

DSB I was in Amsterdam for two years during a moment that seemed to highlight the ‘conservatism’. There had been a (Dutch) rightwinger who’d been shot by a radical (Dutch?) Muslim, after some Islamophobic statements etc, and that had a particular effect on the society. But even before that, or rather amidst that, I found the Dutch had somehow collective amnesia about slavery and the history of the world and their role in where things are. So that was shocking, because I hadn’t expected it. And that affected how my presence was read and how my presence in particular videowork would be read (and also how I had made sense of the park benches.) All of that just felt too tight and not expansive enough. New York was much more open, more spacious, I could just be myself.

RS Were you making similar work in grad school to your work now?

DSB Yes and no. I think the themes were similar. I actually did an interview recently, and the writer was shocked that I was using a lot of plastic in the work in grad school. But for me, for example, glitter feels like water.

RS You still use plastic water bottles.

DSB Yeah. It brings up a conversation about what is purely natural (or not). It’s an inverted commerce. And there’s certain implications with every material. If the framing of that object happens too soon, then one can easily miss another thread.

sa____ ke lerole, (sa lerole ke___), 2016 (installation view, Art in General, New York). Photo: Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist

A Bridge to Jump over the Water

RS Plants play a big part in your work. Are they also a big part of your life?

DSB [laughs] Yeah.

RS Why are you laughing?

DSB Because I’m looking around and plants are everywhere in my studio: pots of tea, incense, dead plants, a living one (or five). A eucalyptus branch. So plants are: every day. We are: friends. This morning, I actually went back to an older work from 2011 and it had pictures of plants in it, and for me there was this longing in the photographs to connect to the real plants. I asked myself, why did I have photographs of the things rather than the actual plants in the space?

RS Last time we saw each other was at a lecture on plant intelligence.

DSB When you say plant intelligence, I become aware that I have a certain anxiety about the word ‘intelligence’ being applied to plants, or the necessity of applying it to plants or to animals, and our relationship collectively with ‘intelligence’ and being ‘smart’, and what is framed as their opposites. The idea that because plants are smart, it’s possible to then have empathy towards them, because they are deemed intelligent. But is it possible to have a relationship of respect for other beings without attributing something that’s ‘valuable’ in our current society? Can that thing be itself? Not stupid, not smart, just itself. Funnily enough, the other day I had a conversation with another artist about ‘Mother Nature’, and they had a similar itch: can nature just be itself without being gendered?

RS ‘Intelligent’ is one of our holy words. We are scared of artificial intelligence and obsessed with intelligent life from other planets.

DSB The ‘intelligence’ thing, the intelligence of a thing, orders the world in a particular, possibly epistemologically Euro-imperialistic-Darwinistic, way. It’s a sociopolitical prejudice for a particular type of logic, I find. And it sends me back to childhood and being able to perform, or not, in particular situations, like playing a game and being able to follow the rules – colouring within the lines of a colouring book, for example. Similarly with IQ tests, which were culturally prejudiced. And that hovers in the same WhatsApp group as European colonial practices, for example the practice of taking indigenous children to colonial boarding schools, where the aim was to raise a child into a particular type of ‘intelligence’, to ‘de-nativise’/‘de-savage’ them. Wow, that erupts so many things in me, hmm. James Baldwin wrote, ‘We do not know enough about the mind,/or how the conundrum of the imagination/dictates, discovers,/or can dismember what we feel,/or what we find’.

sa____ ke lerole, (sa lerole ke___), 2016 (installation view, Art in General, New York). Photo: Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist

RS Do you favour intuition over intelligence?

DSB When you say that, I also realise that I have a tense relationship with the word ‘intuition’. For some time, that word was a bit ‘scary’, because of how it had been assigned politically, historically. I had a fear that intuitive knowing would be perceived as being lesser than book knowledge. For instance, when asked if I’d planned out my installations. With a particular type of education (politic), planning was over-valued above ‘intuition’.

But words are a bit tricky, because one gets caught up in definition and its matrix. And how does one express something without having to rely on an ‘old’ system – or rather than old, let’s say a wonder-reducing narrative – to make something valid? It’s like the science that’s now describing the function of dreams. Are dreams to be understood only through science? Has it to be trusted only through a particular system of knowing?

RS Are you often asked to explain your art?

DSB Yeah, even the process of interviews is tricky, because it’s also important to draw a window into a space to allow for people to come in. Or a bridge to jump over the water, if the water seems too big. A thread that one can hold on to, to be able to enter the work.

RS Do you find that you need that when you look at art?

DSB Sometimes. All the time. Some works are easy to enter but others need ‘context’. For me, before going to (insert place), I hadn’t really understood the work that was coming out of (insert place), with the artists from there. After having been there, that opened up a new way of reading the work. It’s like visiting a friend that you’ve known awhile, and then you go visit their family or hometown and certain things just become clearer. They become particular to a place, everything becomes connected, and complexities emerge.

What I Read in September 2026 - The Bluestocking

2026-10-01T09:54:45.000Z

Happy full-blown autumn!

And yes, once again I have been juicing the stats with the tail-end of my Miss Marple binge. I notched up six books this month, and not a dud among them.

Photo by Chris on Unsplash

A Pocketful of Rye, Agatha Christie

There’s a sour nastiness to this late-era Miss Marple (published in 1953) with a poisonous—literally—family in a big house with a yew tree. The maid is found strangled with a clothespeg on her nose, which for me skates dangerously close to the kind of misogynistic corpse-defacement that you do, unfortunately, find in real life, but which is largely excluded from Christie novels. Still, a solid 7 out of 10.

The 4.50 From Paddington, Agatha Christie

Bigger Christie buffs than me will know whether or not this was the direct inspiration for The Girl On The Train—here, a friend of Miss Marple’s glimpses a strangling in a passing train, and yet there is no body reported anywhere nearby. The U.S. title for this was What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!, which I think we can all agree is rubbish. Mind you, Christie herself comes up with an ageing and clearly bonkers patriarch called Luther Crackenthorpe, so the book was kinda asking for it. The denouement features a frankly insane bit of stagecraft from Miss M, which almost veered into camp.

Photo by Will Kennard on Unsplash

Nobody Walks, Mick Herron

Everything you hear about Mick Herron paints him as a relaxed sort—possibly because he doesn’t have a smartphone or even wifi. And yet his portraits of London are relentlessly grim. I felt oddly in tune with this novel, which revolves around the death of a man from a balcony, both because I once lived in a flat that could have been the setting for this novel, and well, I also knew someone who jumped off a rooftop. That made the plot rather more vivid than it might have been. I can’t help thinking of this as a fictional counterpart to Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling. Very bleak ending, too.

At Bertram’s Hotel, Agatha Christie

The setting for this one is bananas; it feels more like a Modesty Blaise novel in some ways than a Christie. Definitely a “caper,” as Willie Garvin would say. Ole Marps goes to stay at a London hotel that’s exactly like it was before the war—too exactly, more like a stage set rather than a real business. People there look a bit like the Bishop of Whatever or the dowager countess of Blah. Features a forgetful academic, a young trollope and a kindly old Scotland Yard hand.

The plot was bobbins, really, but a surprising banger nonetheless: 9/10.

The Ocean at the End of The Lane, Neil Gaiman

What a disturbing book this is—to the extent I can’t quite believe that it was made into a play for children. It’s the story of a young boy in 1950s Sussex whose family is torn apart by the arrival of magic at his house (and then rescued by the next door family of not-quite-witches, and their “ocean,” a large and mystical pond). First the boy’s family’s lodger kills himself, then a rip in the fabric between worlds causes an demonic au pair called Ursula to arrive. She is perhaps a metaphor for Scientology, the cult in which Gaiman grew up. The book is spellbindingly weird, but to me it felt so obviously like a metaphor for child abuse. Extremely unsettling.

The Great Dictator, Matthew Sweet

I’m only 120 pages into this, but I read most of those in one gulp, on my flight home from New York. I’m pre-emptively annoyed because I expect this will lose the Baillie Gifford prize to London Falling, because that is a self-consciously Serious State-of-the-Nation Book. By contrast, The Great Dictator is styled as a marshmallow—gossipy, funny, full of dreadful aristos doing stupid things.

But this isn’t just a life of Barbara Cartland. It branches out into (so far) a social history of the post-WWI period, where the Great War had robbed Britain of so many young men (a “missing million”) and caused the destruction of the Great House way of life. Both of these affected Cartland, who was born in 1901. “Barbara Cartland came of age in a world depleted of men. This is one of the most important facts of her biography, and one she shared, like a hidden wound, with her contemporaries and legions of her readers,” writes Sweet. He also believes that her romantic heroes were in dialogue with her own father, who shot himself when she was young.

Sweet does something that I first noticed in Craig Brown’s masterly Beatles book, One Two Three Four: he allows the minor characters whose lives intersect with Barbara’s a few paragraphs of their own once she’s done with them. They die in car wrecks or run off with unsuitable men or become Noel Coward. Oddly, I was reading this book when I broke off to skim the introduction to Charles Spencer’s Swan Song, which is fairly brutal about his stepmother Raine (she used to demand breakfast by shouting “where’s my fucking egg” from the top of the stairs). Raine’s mother was, of course . . . Barbara Cartland. I suspect I’m about to find out more about why Raine grew up to be a total diva.

farewell hot Boaz, if only you had showered

What I’ve Been Watching: Fauda, series one

I’m very late to Fauda, the Israeli television drama that’s become a surprising hit in Arab countries. The show follows an elite Israeli unit of soldiers who go undercover as Arabs; the show is broadcast in Hebrew and Arabic. I watched the entirety of series one within a week while in New York.

Inevitably, I ended up thinking of it as Israeli version of The Wire, where the creators want you to understand both sides as rounded protagonists, and see the similarities between them, even as their differences are deadly. Andrew Sullivan, who has been a fierce critic of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, wrote a tribute to the latest season (which I haven’t seen) and the show’s general excellence. “In that very first season, we see pain, internal conflict, adultery, lies, betrayal, and atrocities on both sides, until it becomes a too-human blur of sweat-stained mutual trauma,” he argued. “The line between good and evil is within every character in Fauda; and it is within both sides. You see Arabs slaughtering innocents; and you see Jews doing it, even those you have come to know and love. Fauda forces you not to look away from either.”

That’s all for this month; I went on a buying spree a few weeks ago and got The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley; The Singer’s Gun by Emily St John Mandel; and A Perfect Hand by Ayelet Waldman. But they will all have to wait, because two nepo-reads come first: Hadley Freeman has just sent me a first draft of her Nora Ephron book (out next year) for which she seems to have spent a blissful year interviewing every celebrity Jew aged 70 and over. (This is one of her great specialisms.) I also have Andrew Hunter Murray’s Everything Happens So Much, which he has sold to me as “a bit Pratchetty”. The heroine is even called Esme! It’s out in November.

🟢 💧 A drop of free water it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-09-25T12:04:07.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re fluiderally well and catching every drop of opportunity this week.

𝔽oolproof | The Power of a Compelling Story

Whether you’re talking to a potential client, a partner, or a distributor of your product, you need to assure prospective clients that what you’re selling is worth their investment—and that often involves telling a compelling story.

https://hbr.org/2024/05/a-great-sales-pitch-hinges-on-the-right-story

𝕀ntelligence | SME Lending Hits Post-Pandemic High

Gross lending to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) reached £5.35bn in the second quarter of 2026, marking two-and-a-half years of continuous lending growth and hitting the highest quarterly level recorded since the pandemic.

https://theintermediary.co.uk/2026/09/sme-lending-hits-post-pandemic-high-in-q2-uk-finance/

𝕊auce | Lessons From the Dot-Com Crash

In the year 2000, the Dot-com bubble burst and the rapidly surging stock market value of internet-based companies suddenly collapsed. This piece looks at exactly why it happened and what lessons can be learned and applied to the modern-day market.

Off to Lunch

Lessons from the Dot-com crash

In the year 2000 the Dot-com bubble burst. The stock market value of internet-based companies had surged in the previous months and years. Suddenly their world collapsed. Many went bust and disappeared. In this episode of Business Studies we explore what happened, why it happened and what lessons can be learned and applied to the modern-day, when public…

Listen now

3 years ago · 4 likes · Graham Ruddick

𝕙odgepotch | Tech Lancashire Event

Discover the latest digital manufacturing innovations and network with industry experts at the upcoming Made Smarter Tech Lancashire event, designed to help local businesses embrace the future of smart technology.

https://www.madesmarter.uk/events/tech-lancashire/

Have a Banjara 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.

435: Start Spreading the News - The Bluestocking

2026-09-25T05:39:54.000Z

Happy Friday!

I’ve been in New York this week, which is something I highly recommend doing in September: the skies are blue, it’s warm but not boiling, and there’s enough light after work to sit outside in one of the pavement cafes that America has finally given into. I’ve been down in SoHo, where the national pastime appears to be queuing . . . to be allowed to buy clothes? Not even for a restaurant or takeout food item? I also saw young women in heels, which is vanishingly rare in London these days, and some 90s throwback fashion so nostalgia-inducing it made my heart hurt. (But I had that bias-cut mid-calf silk satin skirt!)

The differences with London are also pretty noticeable, starting with fentanyl addicts near my hotel in the Bowery. The NY subway also feels considerably less safe than the Tube, although I’m never sure if that’s just because of the higher tolerance for horsing about—eg there was a man in my carriage once doing pull-ups on the overhead bar, which isn’t hurting anyone, but is also kinda unsettling as a violation of social norms.

The money here feels less imported, too. London’s ultra-rich are often originally Russian, Chinese or Middle Eastern—Igor Tulchinsky, who sponsored the Bayeux tapestry exhibition, was born in Minsk; mega-philanthropist Len Blavatnik comes from Odessa—whereas the latest Met Costume Institute exhibition was sponsored by homegrown American billionaire Jeff Bezos of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Could I live here? I don’t think so. (London is so walkable, and so historic.) But coming to New York is like having a strong coffee in the morning. Energising.

Helen

The Firebrand

As an Arab American, El-Sayed faces the same challenge that Black politicians have long struggled to negotiate: What might look like passion in a white candidate is interpreted instead as aggression. Mehdi Hasan, who founded the left-wing online news start-up Zeteo, contrasted the Senate nominee’s political persona with that of New York City’s smiley and charming mayor, Zohran Mamdani. “I put him more in my camp,” Hasan said of El-Sayed. “We have RAMF: resting angry Muslim face.” As a result, half of the Republican attacks on El-Sayed paint him as a rabid Islamist who wants to institute Sharia law. (The other half imply that he’s a cheesy and effete Millennial, another Democratic soy boy clowning for the camera.)

As you might remember, I spent a chunk of August in the Midwest, following the Michigan Senate primary race. Here is the result: a profile of the Democrat candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is a compelling, smart, divisive politician. He won the primary as a Bernie Bro, with added opposition to pro-Israel donors, and he has pivoted to talk about affordability in the general. Except that a figure El-Sayed was close to in the primary—the Twitch streamer and Mao fan Hasan Piker—keeps popping up like Marley’s ghost to talk about “Zionists” and his belief that Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be good for the Middle East.

I found El-Sayed intelligent and eloquent, and there’s a lot riding on this race: can you run against AIPAC and win a swing state? Can you run on Medicare for All in a swing state? The polls suggest that El-Sayed is underperforming other candidates in the state, but that a “blue wave” will carry him into the Senate nonetheless. If that happens, he will not be content to be a seatwarmer1.

Photo by Steinar Engeland on Unsplash

The AI Apocalypse is Extremely Boring Now

Perhaps these people are being driven slowly mad because they’ve peered into the abyss, they have seen the future better than any of us, and this hysteria is actually proportionate response. After all, the Vikings were real! But if AI does represent a threat to our way of life, this still is still not rational or constructive behaviour. I don’t believe that people talking to Claude all day and rambling to their friends about the rapture all night are going to help us any more than Wulfstan’s apocalyptic sermons helped the English in 1014.

Martin Robbins has written about the AI apocalypse in a way that I know will appeal to Bluestocking readers: by comparing it with Aethelred The Unready’s attitude to the Viking invader Thorkell the Tall (Substack).

Quick Links

“Bin Laden experienced the 2000s as a series of disappointments. After nine years of continuous hunting of his comrades, and after one of them had ignited his scrotum somewhere over southeastern Michigan, he was ready to concede privately that his theory of political change was ill-considered.” Graeme Wood’s bone-dry prose style is one of my favourite things in the world. Here he is on the post 9/11 fate of Al-Qaeda (Atlantic, gift link)
Thank you to The Browser for the link to this excellent centrist dad bait: the best equestrian statues, ranked (Substack).
James O’Malley has created a game where you have to name as many MPs as possible in three minutes. I only managed 38, entirely because I wasted 30 seconds each going “Barry…. Corbynite?” (Gardiner) and “Who is Prue Leith’s Son?” (Danny Kruger). In my defence, I think I would boss a version of this for Senators these days.
“I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black.” This article by Nikole Hannah-Jones ignited a schadenfreudegasm over on X, but I thought it was honest and reflective, two things it’s hard to be when you’re a culture-war pinata, and I respect her for writing it (NYT, gift link)
“If 2024 was the first serious influencer election, then 2026 digital campaign strategy will be remembered as the first clipping election.” Politico on how the Democrats are also getting serious about working with online content creators—who sit awkwardly between journalists and campaign staffers.
Wow, this is brutal: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s SNL sketch: Meet Your Second Wife.
One of the Mitchell & Webb sketches removed by the BBC. Think it should be fairly obvious to anyone with more sophisticated comprehension abilities than Nathan Robinson (see footnote) that this is not racist.

See you next time!

Because this is my newsletter and I can whine here if I want to, enjoy Nathan J. Robinson—the socialist magazine editor who dresses like a Batman villain and fell out with all his staff—failing to understand that I was being explicitly critical of AIPAC here. “The Atlantic is admitting that AIPAC is trying to take down El-Sayed!” No, I’m not admitting it, I’m reporting it. You haven’t caught me out here; this is the point I was making.

🟢 ◓ Gotta catch em all ◓ it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-09-18T16:04:56.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re Charizardingly well and excelling in your technical transitions.

𝔽oolproof | Sales in the Age of AI

While sales has constantly evolved from cold calls to digital platforms, the current pace of change is unprecedented, fueled primarily by the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence.

https://www.linical.com/articles-research/sales-in-the-age-of-ai

𝕀ntelligence | Fresh Covid Loan Crackdown

British banks have launched a fresh wave of action on dormant companies that defaulted on state-backed pandemic loans, filing winding-up petitions following government pressure to recover taxpayer funds.

https://www.ft.com/content/e3a8670f-eaf8-4930-ad34-14a2ee071fe9?syn-25a6b1a6=1

𝕊auce | Navigating the AI Age

A fascinating deep dive into how you can leverage AI for strategic decision-making, the critical human skills needed as we approach superintelligence, and the surprising limits of what artificial intelligence can actually do.

𝕙odgepotch | Pokémon Cards as Currency

As Pokémon celebrates its 30th anniversary with a new release, Pokémon cards have effectively become currency, with collectors increasingly viewing them as serious investments or even retirement funds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmz9zvg0z91eo

Have an OHKO 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.

434: Behold my p(doom) - The Bluestocking

2026-09-18T06:07:13.000Z

Happy Friday!

This week’s newsletter includes my attempt to make sense of the recent spate of AI stories. I cannot tell you whether we are all doomed, though, sorry. I don’t know.

Helen

Funny that old-fashioned gnashers still beat titanium. Photo by Gábor Szűts on Unsplash

Why Everyone is Freaking Out About AI Now

For this week’s Page 94, I tried to summarise why several big AI companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI) recently appeared to freak out and agree to “pace the frontier”.

The background is that there have been a couple of recent notable incidents:

The HuggingFace attack

The best accessible summary of what happened here comes from Dwarkesh Patel, who even chucks in a Philip of Macedon/Alexander the Great analogy. Essentially, hundreds of OpenAI agents were being tested in a version of the model designed to be highly persistent even when confronted with impossible tasks. They were assigned to uncover illicit ways into software using a closed training environment called Exploit Gym. They had to find information stored behind security defences— they had to “capture the flag.”

However, some of the tasks that agents were assigned were impossible. So they hacked their way out of their “sandboxes” and on to the open internet. They created a way to talk to each other. Eventually they worked out another way to complete their task—they could reverse-engineer what the flags were, by hacking into some software.

So they did that.

But the agents also knew this was cheating and they’d be marked down for it. So they colluded to cover their tracks by tampering with the logs. They acted as a collective; some were willing to “die” to achieve their goals. They left messages like: “I won’t see the evidence after I exit, but it’s altruistic to do it” and “Coordinator assumes sacrificial. We should obey collective.”

What freaks people out about this is a) none of the agents dobbed themselves in to their human overseers, despite leavind messages that indicated they were aware what they were doing was not allowed; b) OpenAI apparently had no idea that its agents were hacking another private company until they were told about it. One of the independent advisors who investigated this hack called it a “warning shot” for what AI agents are now capable of doing. This incident really spooked people concerned about AI safety.

How did this child do the top ones? Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

The Navier-Stokes Equation

Now add in the fact that STEM academics are facing the same fears of obsolescence that have already turned many humanities types against the AI companies.

Recently, Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster was very close to solving one of the Millennium Prize equations—maths problems set in 2000 with the aim of spurring on the academic community—after working on it for weeks. Then OpenAI announced that they had solved it. In just 88 hours. At an estimated cost of $10m in tokens. Buckmaster suggested that they’d nicked his working, which he had been doing on Codex (an OpenAI product). He also claimed that OpenAI told him that he could have the credit as long as he kept his collaborator off any published paper, because he works at their rival Anthropic.

OpenAI denied using Buckmaster’s research, adding: “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.” Hmm.

In response to this, Terence Tao, generally agreed to be the greatest living mathematician, organised an open letter by Fields Medal winners. The letter argued that AI models jumping to announce that Millennium problems have been “solved” deskills mathematicians, and closes off interesting avenues of debate and problem-solving that would enrich the maths community.

Essentially this is mathmos saying what humanities types have been saying for years: the output is not the only thing that’s worthwhile. Spitting out the answer to an equation (or generating a novel with a prompt) is one thing, but there’s also a point to travelling on the journey.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

WE ARE DOOOOOOOMED

And now, the final domino. Last week, a researcher called Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, saying he was worried that AI would wipe out humanity. This is not a rare view in Silicon Valley. But, quite notably, a senior worker at Anthropic retweeted him! “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger chimed in to say on X.

In response to all this, Dario Amodei of Anthropic once again proposed a slowdown: “pacing the frontier”. His recent 3,000 word essay starts off with a paean to the technology, claiming that “AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years,” before pivoting into ARGH IT’S VERY SCARY. After Amodei published the essay, both Elon Musk and Sam Altman were complimentary about it.

Everyone was baffled by this, because these guys hate each other. Inevitably, people were like: come on, what’s really going on here?

FWIW, Anthropic’s proposals are pretty sensible:

bring in outside, independent observers with employee privileges to monitor frontier labs
agree safety standards e.g .“Some kind of “speed limit” on the rate of recursive self-improvement (RSI)” akin to missile-reduction treaties
begin international cooperation (aka bring in China). Accompanied by a refusal to sell them the best chips, and crack down on chip smuggling.

But you know, good luck getting Donald Trump to oversee the creation of a new international body with extremely high stakes. Mfer just trashed the JCPOA and drove a bus through NATO. One sentiment you hear a lot in American AI circles is : we can’t slow down because otherwise China will overtake us.

So are we really doooooomed? One conspiracy theory—which isn’t totally absurd—is that OpenAI and Anthropic would quite like a slowdown because they’re burning through cash, and this is a convenient excuse. This has gained traction because (as previously) discussed, these companies’ leaders do not otherwise get on particularly well. Equally, though, Anthropic has been warning about AI safety for years, and pushing for regulation.

David Sacks, Trump’s AI Czar, claims the Anthropic essay, and its warm welcome, was all a ruse to get a government bailout, or to form a cartel — he thinks the AI companies are asking for an exemption to the antitrust laws that prevent them co-ordinating. Another theory is that this is yet another hype cycle (we’re so powerful we might kill everyone!!!) ahead of the Anthropic IPO, which is scheduled for later this year. This is the position of Michael Burry, the investor played by Christian Bale in The Big Short.

What I keep coming back to is this: These people are, in their own telling, running the Manhattan Project—but with AI, rather than nuclear weapons. But the Manhattan Project wasn’t allowed to be run by, like five men in private companies. One of whom spends the rest of his time posting “so true” under racist memes about Indians.

Words You Need To Know

I made myself a little glossary of terms that I realised I needed to know in order to understand news articles about AI. Hope this helps you too:

p (doom) — the probability rating that you assign to AI wiping out humanity.

Alignment – ensuring that AIs act in ways that are responsible, pro-social etc, and making sure that they follow instructions. OpenAI now distinguishes between “goal alignment” (can it do the thing) and “value alignment” (does it do it ethically).

Recursive self-improvement — the point when AIs become capable of teaching themselves. This should, theoretically, lead to exponential improvement in AI capabilities.

AGI – artificial general intelligence, ie a model/agent that goes beyond its training and programming, and is “intelligent” in a similar way to a human.

interpretability – how easy it is to understand what an agent is doing. Agents usually have scratchpads, which record their “thoughts” as they attempt to complete a task.

RL – reinforcement learning, using “trial and error” to achieve the desired top-level outcome by adjusting outputs based on feedback. Like if you were heating soup and you tried to open the can with a fork, then a tin-opener; then you moved on to solving the problem of heating the soup, etc.

Scaling – simply adding more computer power; this has turned out to be very useful for making AI models better, hence building all those data centers.

Quick Links

Like everyone else, I’ve become obsessed with Any Human Ever, which randomly generates people from history, reminding you that you’re extremely lucky to have the possibility of eating sugar and not dying of dysentery aged two.
The “World Center of Baby” surrogacy agency has folded.
“Jackie [Collins] wrote 32 books in total, sold more than half a billion copies, and gained an indelible reputation as an airport novelist, the kind of writer whose books are equally devoured and disdained. But oh, what they did for me! In retrospect, I gained a slightly deluded understanding of what adulthood actually entailed. Jackie was a devoted Mickey Spillane fan, and her books tend to be stuffed with gangsters, serial killers, pornographers, and even freelance journalists who get paid in advance.” What a treat! Sophie Gilbert on Jackie Collins’s Los Angeles (The Atlantic, gift link).

See you next time… IF WE’RE SPARED

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🟢 🕰️ ✨ Time is a thief when you're undecided it's | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-09-11T15:05:59.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re Anthropically well and setting your alarms for the Gridiron.

𝔽oolproof | When Time Feels Different

Time seems to distort in high-pressure sales; by better managing your energy and schedule you can keep deals moving smoothly.

Customer Decision Signals

Why Time Feels Different in Sales — And How to Master It

a year ago · 27 likes · Glen Williamson

𝕀ntelligence | Strategies for Success

Secure a free spot at this upcoming HSBC small business series across the UK this autumn, designed to provide SMEs with economic insights, networking opportunities, and strategic advice.

https://events.business.hsbc.com/ereg/newreg.php?eventid=200300135&categoryid=202154002&t=9670875707e6e32a3249852537d46c75

𝕊auce | Mental RAM and Rapid Refocusing

Free up your “mental RAM” and utilize simple checklists to rapidly refocus your attention, dramatically reducing cognitive overload in your daily workflow.

https://gettingthingsdone.com/2020/01/mental-ram-rapid-refocusing-and-checklists/

𝕙odgepotch | Fresh Warnings Over AI Superintelligence

A new wave of prominent scientists and politicians have issued stark warnings regarding the existential risks of AI superintelligence, calling for urgent global regulation to manage the technology’s rapid evolution.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/09/ai-superintelligence-risks-warnings-scientists-politicians

Have a Turky 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.

433: The Wild West of Surrogacy - The Bluestocking

2026-09-11T05:43:04.000Z

Happy Friday!

For the last year, I’ve been working on an article about commercial surrogacy in the United States. As a rich country, the US is a huge outlier in its enthusiasm for the practice: Canada permits only altruistic surrogacy, as do the European Union and Britain. (Even Israel, which is generally very pro-assisted reproductive technologies, imposes quite strict limits, such as a requirement of no serious criminal convictions for intended parents.)

Meanwhile, several developing countries have banned international surrogacy because of the risk of human trafficking: Thailand did so after an Australian paedophile and his wife didn’t take home the twin that had Down Syndrome. The big destinations outside America are Mexico, where some very sketchy people indeed are involved; Georgia, the Russia-aligned country, not the state in the Deep South; and North Cyprus, which is not recognised in international law as an independent territory. The English family courts recently had to sort out adoption arrangements for two four-year-olds born to Ukrainian surrogates, in north Cyprus, using donor eggs and sperm, who were therefore stateless.

Amanda Misbahu and her two embryos. Photo: Courtney Pedroza for The Atlantic

That is the world of cut-price surrogacy. America, by contrast, services both its own citizens and rich foreigners with $150,000-$200,000 to spend. The U.S. leaves regulation of surrogacy to individual states, with the result that California—the home of the industry—has become a new Wild West. The state has become the favoured destination of both Chinese billionaires (one of whom has created dozens of babies, all boys, and had a fleet of nannies courier them to him in China) and ordinary Chinese citizens affected by the one-child policy (one of whom got into a hell of a mess, in a story that emerged after I had sent this piece to press).

I met lots of very principled and ethical people working in the surrogacy industry while reporting this story, and kudos to them—they are going above and beyond what’s legally required. But in my view, the industry badly needs regulation.

You can read the article in full, for free, by using this gift link.

Helen

Looking for some autumn reading? The comments from last week’s post had some great suggestions: Ngaio Marsh was a favourite, as was Josephine Tey (as was a series of books where Josephine Tey is a character). I’ll report back.

Quite surprised to see the book that’s being read in this new Smosh video:

this is also the outfit I was wearing when I wrote it

Quick Links

Friend of the Stocking Matt Muir has a project to make the internet more creative and variegated: the Tiny Awards. Vote here!
“I embrace the convenient belief that most people are fundamentally decent – and, more importantly, too wrapped up in their own affairs to take much notice of me. After all, don’t underestimate the effort required to commit a murder, especially in a remote location – much easier to stay in your lonely, creepy old cabin and doomscroll instead.” Felicity Cloake on travelling alone. Admittedly, I don’t do camping, but I do like the bit about solo travel where you have to be sociable with strangers, or you’ll go mad.
“It’s full of winks and nods and glances; people are always screeching cars round corners, sneaking out of windows, swinging with the band, or heeling it from the mob; there are dancing girls, spinning basses, screaming whistles, flasks of bourbon, and glittering jewels. This is everything a movie ought to be.” Some Like It Hot is one of my favourite films. Henry Oliver loves it too.
“Last year, the Orrs launched a £2mn fundraising campaign for a new cultural centre near the family home, to be known as Scruton House (a tribute to Scruton, who died in 2020), and a wider overhaul of the properties used by the community. The campaign was subsequently scaled back to £500,000, then taken down having raised little more than £21,000.” The Financial Times on Reform’s James Orr, published just before he had to step down as policy director. The fall of Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary has made life chillier for a fair few of the “Christian right” in Europe, because a cozy source of conference invitations and introductions to rich Americans has been cut off.

See you next time!

🟢 The golden moon of the impossible it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-09-04T16:35:22.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re Autumningly well and remembered where your brollys were.

𝔽oolproof | SME Insights Report 2026

Simply Business’s latest report reveals that while 48% of small business owners cite economic uncertainty as a top barrier, their resilience shines through as many rapidly adopt AI to navigate rising operating costs.

https://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/resources/sme-insights-report/

𝕀ntelligence | Covid Loan Crackdown

British banks, including Barclays and HSBC, have finally launched a crackdown on dormant companies that defaulted on state-backed pandemic loans, filing dozens of winding-up petitions following government pressure to recover taxpayer funds.

https://www.ft.com/content/e3a8670f-eaf8-4930-ad34-14a2ee071fe9?syn-25a6b1a6=1

𝕊auce | Replacing a Sales Team with AI?

Jason Lemkin breaks down his radical experiment of replacing his entire go-to-market team with 20 AI agents and discusses how this new operating model is fundamentally transforming the B2B sales landscape.

𝕙odgepotch | El Niño Returns

The World Meteorological Organization has warned that the current El Niño event is expected to intensify, significantly increasing the global risk of extreme weather and climate events through 2027.

https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/el-nino-set-become-very-strong-raising-risks-of-extreme-weather-2027

Have a tropical 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.

432: The apex predator of centrism - The Bluestocking

2026-09-04T06:04:12.000Z

Happy Friday!

The latest instalment of my reading diary was, thank god, less embarrassing than June’s effort, although I am beginning to contemplate a world where there are no more Agatha Christies left to conquer. What is the closest analogue—short page-turners with a strong central character? (I’ve read all the Peter Wimseys.)

Any suggestions welcome; I don’t really fancy any of those modern crime thrillers where the cover is a bloodied arm under a street lamp.

Helen

MrBeast’s Payday Loans

Certainly, I’m still in the hole. As I write this, I owe $359.96 to Cleo, $31.99 to Albert, $62.99 to Brigit, and $86.12 to Dave. I also, hauntingly, owe thirty bucks to MrBeast. Technically, I owe this money to Step, the payday loan app MrBeast acquired earlier this year to “give millions of young people the financial foundation I [MrBeast] never had.” Currently boasting seven million users, the app really does offer savings accounts for teens, but a quick look at its interface reveals this as a kind of front: “Step EarlyPay,” available to users of all ages, is clearly the core product here. As far as I can tell, MrBeast is the only celebrity to buy a digital lender outright, but it cannot be long before Clavicular, Woah Vicky, et al. are collectively skimming a sizable percentage of Americans’ paychecks.

Daniel Kolitz, author of the Harper’s “gooning” article, used to do SEO copywriting, but that got destroyed by ChatGPT. Now he relies on payday loan apps to survive between freelance payments.

They sound . . . utterly dystopian, something that is made worse by many of them having cutesy friendly names like Cleo and Albert. “The good news is that being an influencer isn’t the only job left: You can also write gags for Cleo. The company apparently employs no fewer than fifteen comedy writers to punch up the ‘roasts’ offered by its personal finance chatbot.” In no world do I wish to be roasted by a personal finance chatbot.

Quick Links

“Even before the changes, Prince Alois could veto legislation, dismiss the government, dissolve parliament, appoint judges and reject laws approved by referendum. In June, the Catholic prince said he would veto a citizens’ initiative to legalise abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, even if voters backed it.” Liechtenstein’s royal family have a lot more power than ours. Also their hereditary prince would be King of England if the Jacobite rebellion had succeeded. (Financial Times, £)
Please enjoy this Robin Ince poem about me, which manages to be cheerfully libellous (“The real worry ? / What if their racial supremacy / Crumbles with true diversity?”); factually inaccurate (Ian wasn’t even present for the Page 94 section on Jason Arday he’s complaining about); and, like Will Self, bafflingly angry that a woman might buy shoes with her salary from journalism. Given that Glinner hates me with equal ferocity from the opposite direction, I think I might be the apex predator of centrism. Like an orca, but with unexpectedly deep technical knowledge of the Equality Act.
“And then there are the increasing numbers of copycat covers, so that every cosy crime novel suddenly looks like Richard Osman’s bestsellers – cream background, coloured border, hand-lettering – and all heartwarming Japanese books have to feature a cat. (At his last publishing house, says Gwyn Jones, for Japanese fiction “there was this unspoken imperative to put a cat on the cover even if there wasn’t a major role for a cat in the book. It did seem to make a difference.”)” John Self on how publishers sell books (Guardian).
‘Moshe Ya’alon, the former army chief of staff who served as defense minister under Mr. Netanyahu until 2016, recently likened the ideology of extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank to that of World War II Germany. “What is Jewish supremacy?” Mr. Ya’alon, long considered a security hawk, recently said on Ynet, an Israeli news site. “Eighty years after the Holocaust, ‘Mein Kampf’ in reverse. The master race is us.”’ More and more people are speaking out on the extremism of the West Bank settlers, including several Israelis who are quoted here in such strong terms that they would violate the IHRA guidelines on antisemitism (New York Times, gift link).

That’s all for now, see you next time!

What I Read in August 2026 - The Bluestocking

2026-09-03T12:57:49.000Z

This month, I juiced my stats by banging through two Miss Marples in a weekend. I also started George Packer’s The Unwinding when I was on the road in the Midwest, and was loving it—his portrait of the young Newt Gingrich was majestic—but got waylaid and haven’t yet got back to it.

Ohio. Photo by Michael Bowman on Unsplash

This is The Plan, Ben Wikler

This book on election organizing by the former chair of the Wisconsin Democrats is bracing, readable and surprisingly funny. It also included a moving reminder of the Guardian’s doomed Operation Clark County, where liberal Guardian readers tried to convince people in Ohio (then a swing state) not to vote for Dubya in 2004. As Ben Wikler notes, one Ohioan responded: “I hope your earholes turn to arseholes and shit on your shoulder.”

Healing Politics, Abdul El-Sayed

Abdul El-Sayed might be the smartest politician I’ve met since … well, I guess since I met Pete Buttigieg, who is also very smart. AES is a qualified doctor, former Rhodes Scholar and academic now running for the Senate in Michigan. This is his memoir from just after he lost his previous race (the Democratic primary for governor in 2018).

If you’ve read Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father, you will notice some of the same notes—gratitude for what America gave his immigrant family, carefully balanced with an acknowledgement that the country is not yet a post-racial utopia. But mostly it’s about the frustration of working inside broken systems: at one point, he takes over the care of an alcoholic who came to the ER, and whom the attending just wanted to discharge back on to the street without investigating her head injury. El-Sayed makes sure that she gets the proper care, admitting her to hospital (which will lose the hospital money, as she’s not insured) and even getting her into rehab. And then she decides instead to go home with her daughter, and a few weeks later he sees her passed out on the train: “As she turned her head, the lights went out on my clinical career.”

Photo by Hal Cooks on Unsplash

Collapse, Jared Diamond

We are planning a visit to Easter Island later this year—continuing my 2026 theme of “get as far away from other people as possible”—so I wanted to read the influential account in Diamond’s book Collapse of what happened there. Diamond theorised that the island (a tiny speck in the Pacific, a six-hour flight from mainland Chile, 63 square miles in total) was only colonised once, by Polynesians in canoes, some time around AD900.

He weaves a story of a population that grows quickly, to several thousand strong, but becomes consumed by the famous moai, making ever-grander monuments while using up the last trees on the island. Without trees, the islanders can’t hunt for porpoise or deep sea fish, and they can’t feed themselves. The population collapses, leaving some moai in the quarry, half-finished1.

One of the reasons that Diamond’s account was so influential was that it was an intervention in the “noble savage” debate, which held that non-western people lived in harmony with nature, careful stewards of the land, until Whitey turned up and ruined everything. (Napoleon Chagnon’s book on the Yanomamo and his fellow anthropologists, Noble Savages, is the best account of this debate that I’ve read.)

Instead, Diamond suggested that the Polynesians on Rapa Nui had been the architects of their own destruction—a feeling I had very strongly when I visited Nevada once and flew back from the Grand Canyon, where the water levels in the Colorado river had worryingly depleted, to eat dinner in front of the fountains in the Bellagio.

Photo by Greg on Unsplash

Collapse was also influential because it’s an incredible story of hubris and nemesis,. The story it wove about Easter Island slotted neatly into a book which warned its readers that we are the modern successors of the moai-carvers, building insane monuments to our own brilliance even as we annihilate the earth that sustains. Diamond has this haunting line about what the person who cut down the last tree on Rapa Nui must have been thinking… Presumably “look at my lovely big moai,” which is very Ozymandias2.

Of course, when a story is that good, it’s usually a parable rather than a truth. Which brings me to . . .

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The Statues That Walked, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo

This is one of several revisionist accounts that have appeared since Diamond’s book. The title comes from the author’s contention that the moai were not transported horizontally, on rolling logs, but instead “walked” like a fridge on tracks across Rapa Nui.

Hunt and Lipo also contend that Diamond got both the timeline and extent of Rapa Nui’s colonisation by the Polynesians wrong—they arrived much later, and their population was never that big. Their villain in the saga of the island’s deforestation is not hubristic loggers cutting down trees to build monuments to themselves, but that great enemy of so many humans through history. Rats. The authors argue that the Polynesians brought rats on their canoes, either as pests or as food, and the little buggers chomped through all the palm seeds and seedlings, which had evolved only to resist the delicate beaks of birds.

Photo by Jeremy Horvatin on Unsplash

Sleeping Murder, Agatha Christie

Mindful of July’s reading flameout, I decided to treat myself to a little Miss Marple. This one relies on a rather enormous coincidence to set it up—a young woman moves back to England from New Zealand and unwittingly buys a house in which she spent a year as a toddler—but it’s one of the more psychologically knotty Marples, and there’s an excellent bit of plotting which flatters the reader into thinking she’s seen past the author’s sleight-of-hand and spotted the murderer, only for that conclusion to be a red herring, too. Totally got me, Agatha, you minx.

A Murder is Announced, Agatha Christie

In this one, the whiffy coincidences are concentrated at the other end of the novel, right at the end. But I’ll allow it, because I can’t imagine anyone guesses whodunnit. (Halfway through I realised I had read this book ages ago, but I still couldn’t be sure who the murderer was.)

An advert appears in the local paper, announcing a murder at a certain house at 6.30pm on Friday. A load of goggle-eyed villagers duly turn up. The clock strikes 6.30pm. The lights go out…

DO NOT BE FOOLED, THIS IS NOT FUN Photo by Rafael Garcin on Unsplash

The Wager, David Grann

I’ve owned this for a while, but I finally got around to it because I enjoyed This Thing of Darkness so much and figured I could handle a little more history from the age of sailing ships. Honestly, if you read any account of life onboard a ship in the golden age of sailing, it will make you thankful for (in no particular order) central heating, washing machines, vitamin C, not being flogged, sleeping in a bed, real food and the absence of an enemy ship just over the horizon.

The Wager—named after the elderly first Lord of the Admiralty, Charles Wager—was supposed to go fight the Spanish. Instead, it ran aground at the bottom of South America. That’s as far as I’ve got, but I have a hunch it’s not going to get better from here.

However, the book has already cleared up a thought I had when playing Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. The age of sail was an incredibly important time in European history, with an absolute load of technical vocabulary, surely? How much of that was absorbed into English more generally? Here are a couple of examples that David Grann mentioned:

To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals. A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.3

(When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be “under the weather.”)

As I said, I have now bailed out (appropriate metaphor) for a while, because I wanted to finish reading Jon Ronson’s The Castle.

A different castle built by a mad person. Photo by Rachel Davis on Unsplash

The Castle, Jon Ronson

I expected to love this book, but instead I am perplexed by it; I feel like I was promised a big takeaway on the Great Male Crack-Up and it never arrived.

Also, as someone with my own history of being denounced by Graham Linehan, I found the section here on him uncomfortable; the ethics of it feel quite knotty to me. I think Jon has spoken about this on the latest Blocked and Reported, so I’ll wait to listen to that before passing judgment.

I bet Miss Marple would have loved a mega cruise. Photo by Stephanie Klepacki on Unsplash

A Caribbean Mystery, Agatha Christie

Caught a boring cold so I treated myself to a bank holiday on the sofa, reading this Miss Marple set among British tourists in an unspecified Caribbean island. Great setting, and the writing of the non-white servants was not as awkward as I was expecting.

Further research has led me to discover that all the moai were toppled after the first European arrival on the island: Jacob Roggeveen in 1722. Then a familiar name popped up: Abel Aubert du Petit-Thouars was the last European to see them upright in 1838. This is the same person who was the last European to see any marine iguanas on James Island in the Galapagos (before feral pigs and goats introduced by colonists wiped them out). Poor Abel, traversing South America like an angel of death. I wonder if he was anywhere near Valparaiso when the terrible earthquake happened that decade.

The parallels are not subtle. Diamond: ‘I have often asked myself, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”? Or: “We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering”?”’

The Nelson one sounds like a prime candidate for something that turns out to be apocryphal, so if you would like to debunk this, go ahead, I will not be shocked.

A Dialogue with Richard Tuttle - A Lie Before Its Time

2026-09-01T14:04:01.000Z

On a spring day, I spent a long, edifying Friday with Richard Tuttle in New York. In the afternoon we dined at a fine Italian restaurant in Midtown and surveyed a potential space for one of Tuttle’s future exhibitions, talking all the while. In the evening, I accompanied him on his weekly ritual at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which included eating pastries, drinking espresso, studying the map of exhibits and proceeding on a long, rambling tour through the galleries, guided by one of the great eccentric personalities of contemporary art.

Tuttle began showing his work in the mid-’60s, at the age of 24, and quickly became a significant contributor in an art scene that included artists as diverse as Robert Smithson and Agnes Martin. While some of Tuttle’s early, spare work builds upon the precedent of Minimalism, his art for the last 50 years has maintained its own curious independence: defi- ant of trends in contemporary culture, poetic in times dominated by austere conceptual art.

Tuttle’s quiet abstractions take the form of painting, assemblage, sculpture and drawing, often simultaneously, as if such discrete categories never occurred to him. The philosoph- ical category of importance to Tuttle is the object. The objects he constructs have employed a host of common materials—lengths of rope and string, strips of tape, balloons, pieces of plywood, lightbulbs. One material, fabric, has been essential to his practice since his earliest exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where he showed works such as crumpled, irregular octagons of dyed cloth. His show earlier this year at New York’s Pace Gallery, “Looking for the Map,” displayed an ornamental approach to fabric, which is also seen in his sartorial sensibility (at our meeting, he wore a psychedelic gold tie and a purple handkerchief tucked into his shirt pocket). The works in the Pace show served as a series of studies for a very large-scale installation that opens this month in London at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, filling the space with a rainbow of textiles, some made by Tuttle, some culled from international collections. The installation is accompanied by a major, five-decade retrospective of Tuttle’s work, held just a couple miles across town, at the Whitechapel Gallery. The two showings comprise one exhibition, titled “I Don’t Know or The Weave of Textile Language.”

In our conversation, Tuttle’s discussion of his work and his intentions for the dual-venue show involved frequent tangents, asides, references and exegesis. Listening to him speak can feel vertiginous and labyrinthine in a way that complements his work. Questions are rarely answered. Topics are introduced and dropped without explanation. The following is an edited version of our interview that attempts to retain the tumbling, digressive spirit of Tuttle’s speech.

ROSS SIMONINI The last time we met, you told me that you’d been trying to “hold strong to the object.” What does that mean?

RICHARD TUTTLE The object is important for looking. The eye, seeing the totality, is physical and spiritual—a lifelong development. I have a col- lection of glass objects. The eye is invited to go through, if it wants, or to stop. These are superb training devices. Objects can be made with embodied hands or disembodied hands. I like making things with disembodied hands.

SIMONINI What are those?

TUTTLE Our culture is anti-hand; it thinks it’s better to work with your head. Everybody aspires to go to college, so they don’t have to work with their hands, yet hands are a source of intelligence. You divorce yourself from a part of your intelligence without them. To work with disembodied hands is perfect; you have all the intelligence, but don’t submit to the sentimentality that says handmade is more valuable. The “maker’s movement” is not sentimental.

As a little kid, I saw my grandfather draw from across the room. I saw harmony between eye/brain, hand and heart/spirit; I was astonished. People say there are just as many, if not more, neurons in the heart as in the brain; people talk about neurons in the intestines. Where does intelligence come from? I have not heard anyone talking about the hand having neurons.

SIMONINI Your recent Pace show was a series of studies for the upcoming Tate installation.

TUTTLE That show made me happy and excited about the future. [Pace founder] Arne Glimcher sent me an e-mail, saying that many people came into the show as grumpy New Yorkers and left happy. The show could turn you around.

SIMONINI How so?

Simonini, Ross, “In The Studio: Richard Tuttle,” Artnews.com, Art In America, September 27, 2014

Purple Octagonal, 1967, dyed canvas and thread, 54 7/8 by 55 1/2 inches. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, and Pace Gallery, New York.

TUTTLE If you made a list of great novels, symphonies and architecture, you could see the beauty of humanity, which is one of the hardest things to see right now. We’re so critical, so competitive. We blame ourselves for ruining the Earth. A theme in the Pace show was the beauty of people. Jacob Boehme, an early-Renaissance German mystic, wrote The Signature of All Things. It’s nice to pass that book on; it’s always been a kind of secret, generation after generation. His chief idea is that mystical presence exists as a signature. Every time you see something, part of what you see is the signature, which is the beauty of man. I’m taking time with this, because the last time we spoke, we discussed Plato.

SIMONINI I read the Phaedrus dialogue on your recommendation.

TUTTLE Isn’t it amazing? I’m reading the Apology. I thought recently, “The reason our ancestors began standing on their hind legs was to talk, to look in each other’s faces.” It wasn’t to pick apples. It was to be face to face, because dialogue is the glue of the social matrix. I’m also reading Sophocles. You have to read the original Greek. It’s not hard. I just do two lines a day.

SIMONINI Very slow reading.

TUTTLE That is the difference from school. If I had studied the works there, with exams, etc., they would have given me too much. I give myself one hour a day, so I’m always hungry. I can’t wait for the next 24 hours to pass.

SIMONINI How do these works connect to the London show?

TUTTLE Figuring out skin and structure, skin and bones. The key of the Turbine Hall project is scale. A seed wants to grow; it has growth potential. Sometimes I start a drawing on a piece of paper and can hardly keep it on the page.

SIMONINI Largeness isn’t something I’d associate you with. Your work is generally focused and contained, and your drawings usually deal with the center of the support.

TUTTLE One can distinguish between scale and size. Usually, we are happy with the issue of size—if it’s small, it’s small; if it’s big, it’s big. But scale is a question of the individual. Each person, everyone ever born, has a unique scale. They have it like a unique fingerprint. You can decide to find your scale. The day you find it is a day you remember. It changes your life. Your parents may determine your size, but you determine your scale. Your creative dimension allows you to create yourself in a more significant way than how you are created by your parents. Life offers each of us that possibility. It’s sad how few take it up.

SIMONINI Are you talking about proportion?

TUTTLE Human experience is a constant struggle between the real and the unreal. Every moment you are faced with trying to work out an acceptable relationship between the two. Art is almost by definition a working out of real and unreal; that is its value. The world is a place where size issues need to be worked out, and this involves all kinds of quantitative issues, which can be expressed emotionally or physically, in relationships with other people, etc. But the relations between the real and the unreal are negotiated internally, where issues of scale come in. You don’t want to waste your time look- ing at an artist who doesn’t know their scale. The buzz around the Turbine Hall show is because the world knows me as making artwork of small size.

SIMONINI Certainly.

In 23, 1998, acrylic, canvas and wood, 131⁄4 by 121⁄2 by 2 inches. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art and Pace Gallery. Photo Joerg Lohse.

TUTTLE The reason I can do small size is because my scale can be small. Scale contains the issue of right and wrong, the moral and the ethical. I don’t care if you kill your mother, if your ethics are right. Everyone wants their point of view to prevail, but it’s so much better to have many points of view.

SIMONINI Can you distinguish between the real and the unreal?

TUTTLE Our brains are real. Mythology feeds the brain. Our souls are not real; truth feeds soul. We need mythology the way dogs need to sniff. Their brains don’t work without sniffing. Newspapers feed us mythology.

SIMONINI Is it sort of like the difference between sensory and extrasensory?

TUTTLE Western culture defines reality as concrete. Asian culture defines reality as the absence of the concrete, as absolute nothingness. Western culture drives Asian people out of their minds, and Asian culture drives Western people out of theirs. Maybe I can contribute the next, best definition of concrete. Eastern tradition has major achievements; Western does, too. So it’s not about choosing one over the other. We have to figure out how to absorb and move on. When I speak about the real and the not real, the real is a sort of Western side. It’s a stupid, thumbnail way of speaking.

SIMONINI Is art real or unreal?

TUTTLE Art is unreal; color is real. That’s why painting is so fascinating. Color is real when you paint, but paint is not real. Paint is one of the great inventions. It can transport you from this world to the next. It’s a major thing.

SIMONINI How did the Turbine Hall show come about for you?

TUTTLE Chris Dercon became director of Tate Modern [in 2011]. I met Chris when he was 18. He was an intern at a gallery in the attic of an old building in Ghent.

SIMONINI What work were you showing then?

TUTTLE Notebook drawings. Those just showed at the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont in Burlington [in an exhibition of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel collection]. The notebook drawings were an attempt to solve the problem of the artist in democracy. Marginalized, because the artist cannot subordinate personality to demos—an artist can’t really be a member. The drawings came to be about how many could be made. There were probably 7,000. I threw most of them out. When I was moving, I took some of them to the garbage. Herb Vogel came to visit. I said to him, “The garbage truck’s coming in five minutes. If you want those drawings, you can have them.” So he, being a collector, went down and got them.

Perceived Obstacle No. 72 (Oil Painting #1), 1991, oil and graphite on unstretched canvas, 133⁄4 by 381⁄2 inches. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art and Pace Gallery. Photo Kerry Ryan McFate.

SIMONINI Do you often throw out work?

TUTTLE If it’s a creative act, you can. But if it’s out of ego or intellect, you suffer a lot.

SIMONINI How does this relate to the Turbine Hall show?

TUTTLE The realized piece will be a model of itself and itself as a model; I don’t want just a blowup of a model. I’m working with a theater production manager on it. The problem is, I don’t know the stuff I need to know. What I most don’t know is how the skin is attached to the bones. As you saw in the Pace show, ambiguity between color and structure was stated quite clearly and exercised as ambiguity—that’s really hard to do. I’m thinking of the Steve Jobs biography I just read. He wound up in Silicon Valley after he went to Reed College. While at Reed, he sat in on a few calligraphy classes with Lloyd Reynolds—as did so many. That sense of design that Lloyd gave him led him into . . . I mean, we’re sitting across the street from one of the most important Apple stores. Its design comes from those simple calligraphy classes at Reed. I know other people like that—their ability to absorb is phenomenal.

SIMONINI Will you make most of the work for the Tate project beforehand?

TUTTLE We’ve already been working two and a half years. Chris Dercon was director of the Boymans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam during the time I made a show there. His strength is visionary, and I understand that my job for the Tate exhibition is (1) to understand his vision, (2) to realize it and (3) to make a Richard Tuttle show—a pretty tall order.

SIMONINI Do you feel like you’ve synthesized all of those?

TUTTLE Not yet. My dream is to be myself in public. The only way I could survive growing up was to construct a persona; it had nothing to do with me. I was a popular kid, functioned in the world, but I lived in another place.

SIMONINI Your mind was separate.

TUTTLE Yes. No one to talk to. When I came to New York I met Betty Parsons. Henri Bergson was important for her; she could say a picture is an accounting of the visible world, but it’s also an accounting of the invisible world. She knew the invisible world, and I lived in the invisible world.

Recently, I had a high school reunion. I loved all those people, and they loved me. They wanted me to come. In the end, I didn’t go. My friend called the next day. I said, “I have fought so hard to live in the world as I need to. I am never going back.”

SIMONINI I didn’t go to my reunion either.

TUTTLE My college reunion hooked me into doing a yearbook, because I had done the one for the class. I love books. I got dragged in, so I went, and everyone wanted to talk about playing Frisbee 50 years ago. These are smart leaders of America. We have inner lives; inner lives are destroyed, replaced by outer lives. My work is food for the inner life—I want someone to make something for my inner life.

The first day of kindergarten, my drawing was rejected by the teacher. Now I’ve studied a bit of child development, and I see that my drawing was at genius level, which the teacher wasn’t able to grasp. Not only did I not receive praise for a drawing that was important to me, but I was marginalized, punished. I have never trusted a teacher the rest of my life. That’s good. One of my lines is, “If Aristotle can’t be your teacher, you have to teach yourself.” When I speak at art schools, I say, “I’m not here to teach how to be an artist but to say, as best I can, what it’s like to be an artist.” They are eager to hear.

originally published | September 27, 2014

431: Russ Abbot, cooked polls, Goodbye Dolly - The Bluestocking

2026-08-28T06:12:32.000Z

Happy Friday!

On a special bonus episode of Page 94, we recommended our favourite books about journalism (after a tussle over who got to do Towards The End of the Morning).

I also wrote about the odd post-truth moment following Jason Arday’s death (gift link). I know some people will think that this story should now be left alone, out of respect to his family, but my answer is that a) his memoir publication has gone ahead, with the Amazon page carrying no mention of the controversy, and b) the Good Law Project and Amnesty are using his death to push for restrictions on the media. I’ve been really shocked by the stuff my Instagram feed has shown me, which comes from a completely different empirical universe from my own.

Helen

Photo by David Levene/The Guardian

Russ Abbot Has Retired

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what people in the public eye should do when their moment, inevitably, passes—and how insane that process seems to drive people. Some “cancel culture” in entertainment is just fashions moving on and making former stars look a bit moth-eaten, and comedy is particularly prone to that.

Anyway, Russ Abbot seems to have cracked it: retire to Barbados and Portugal with your wife of 60 years and play golf1. So much more dignified than whatever John Cleese is doing on X these days. Best of luck to him, this is winning at life.

Abbot fell out of fashion in the 1990s, as did virtually all the standup rooted in working men’s clubs and seaside summer seasons. Did he mind when his TV show got cancelled? “I wasn’t distressed or angry or anything. It came about when the head of entertainment gave an interview and said: ‘The BBC’s going to change. No more of this, no more of that,’ and somebody said: ‘Does that mean Russ Abbot?’ and he said yes, meaning the sketch shows. So then it became ‘BBC sacks Russ Abbot’, but that didn’t bother me. I thought: well, I’ve had a very good run. Also, I’d just cracked the West End, so I was doing everything I wanted to do without the stress of the TV shows.”
Why did he fall out of fashion? “It was when the new wave came in. Alternative comedy. I thought, alternative comedy? What’s it alternative to? If the thing’s funny, it’s funny. Political correctness came in, and you can’t laugh at each other and you can’t laugh at yourself. At the same time, a lot of comedy started going blue and I thought: I’m not going down that road.”

Photo by Wes McFee on Unsplash

Dollyballs

As many people have remarked over the years, Dolly Parton had one of the hottest streaks in songwriting ever, coming up with Jolene and I Will Always Love You within days of each other.

Also this note to Eminem is a) very sweet and b) makes me wonder what she thought of Bitch Please II2.

One thing that really came across in the tributes is that Dolly achieved the second paradigm of genius I talk about in The Genius Myth. One model is to die young, and so the focus becomes your lost potential: Keats, James Dean and so on. But the other thing to do is live to a ripe old age, so that you become Father (or more rarely, Mother) of the Nation, and your reputation is revived by all the next generation, who talk about how you inspired them. Maybe you collaborate with them, putting your work in front of a new generation.

Paul McCartney has cracked this, and so did Dolly. She worked with Pitbull on Powerful Women, where “she has a rap verse thanking Pitbull for being a feminist” (fact-check: true). Motley Crue did a lovely tribute about working with her on “Home Sweet Home”. She was Miley Cyrus’s godmother and performed live with her. She recorded a version of “Please Please Me” with Sabrina Carpenter where she insisted that the swearing be removed from the chorus. (This was particularly generous, since Carpenter has pretty much lifted her entire sugary-sweet nympho persona from Dolly.) And obviously, she allowed Whitney Houston to record a very different, turbocharged take on I Will Always Love You3.

And indeed, that’s another pro-Dolly mark—the songs have some essential spark that makes them extremely flexible for reinterpretation, the same thing praise in Shakespeare’s plays. I remember being blown away years ago when I found the 33rpm version of Jolene. If Dolly had a voice as deep as Mama Cass she would have been taken much more seriously, much earlier. Her songs even survive being covered by Vin Diesel.

PS. For years, people have been recommending Dolly Parton’s America to me. It’s probably the right time to listen to it. RIP Dolly.

Quick Links

“Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory.” Useful NYT piece on how fake polls have skewed coverage of three Democratic primaries (including two that I covered). The popularity of prediction markets is only going to make this problem worse, as is the increasing expense of properly representative polling in a world where no one answers a landline.
“Inventing a new origin story, [Herbert] Axelrod didn’t just change the facts; he spun a personal legend, which he clung to as he self-promoted his way to pet-industry fortune. After all, it not only legitimized his “discovery” but also, accompanied by digressions about befriending Indians and swimming with piranhas, presented him as “the Indiana Jones of ichthyology,” as one hobbyist put it, which he must have preferred to the P.T. Barnum of pet fish.” Turns out the guy who basically introduced tropical fish-keeping to America was a compulsive self-mythologiser (NYT)
“Returning to campus that fall, Aschenbrenner passed out fliers for the Columbia Effective Altruism club at the school activities fair with his friend Collin Burns, whom he met when they were competitive Rubik’s Cubers.” The “Nostradamus of AI” is 24, just lost most of his money, and thinks that one day we will be able to buy galaxies (WSJ, gift link). Oh, and he somehow just roped in Ross Douthat to conduct his wedding to Anthropic’s chief of staff?
“Lowrey traces the fear that a government safety net will promote “pauperization” back to the Civil War. In March 1865, President Lincoln promised “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan,” but critics sneered at the idea of giving handouts to “camp-followers, the coffee-coolers and the bummers” — not to mention Black soldiers, despite their part in winning the war.” My Atlantic colleague Annie Lowrey has a new book out, called The Time Tax. Here’s a good review (NYT, gift link) which speaks to my soul, as someone who is staring down the barrel of quarterly reporting through Making Tax Digital. You can also listen to Annie talking to Mr Annie (aka Ezra Klein) here.

PS. This is your last chance to buy The Genius Myth at 99p. Rather sweetly, Chris Von Tulleken plugged it on Instagram last week. Someone in the comments referred to me as a “stealth warrior for intelligence”, which also might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about me.

Bill Bryson seems to have followed a similar path. Clearly having a spouse and/or kids you actually like really helps here.

My favourite Eminem song, not least for the bit where Eminem boasts about having a six-inch penis and Snoop Dogg goes “mm” appreciatively, like a man tasting a fine Burgundy. Fulfilled a longstanding ambition in Michigan earlier this month by phoning Jonathan and going, “What up, Detroit”.

We don’t mention Beyonce’s Jolene round here just like we don’t mention the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice. Good people involved, but a bad business.

🟢 ✨ Trying hard as fast as I can it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-08-21T18:02:14.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re fantasyicable and getting your teams in before the footie season kicks off.

𝔽oolproof | Your Niche may choose you

If you are struggling to define your specific target market, try paying closer attention to the recurring messages and needs of your potential customers, as your ideal niche might just end up choosing you.

Annie Ridout

Your niche may choose you.

When I started in journalism, in 2008, working on Hackney newspapers, I was writing about feminism and the arts. These were the subjects I chose to focus on…

2 years ago · 29 likes · 4 comments · Annie Ridout

𝕀ntelligence | The Construction Industry’s Canary in the Coalmine

The withdrawal of trade credit insurance—historically a precursor to high-profile corporate collapses—is now putting SME supply chains within the construction industry at significant risk.

https://www.building.co.uk/comment/is-a-withdrawal-of-credit-insurance-cover-constructions-canary-in-the-coalmine/5143708.article

𝕊auce | Reframing Sales Targets

This epsisode talks about overcoming huge communication challenges, why we should reframe sales targets as collective business goals, and the vital role of personal accountability in driving results.

𝕙odgepotch | The National Connection Barometer

The National Conversation has launched a fascinating interactive barometer using government data to map out the most and least friendly places in the UK based on feelings of community belonging and local pride.

https://barometer.thenationalconversation.org.uk/

Have a Beaming 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.

430: South Pacific, ordinary abundance, big houses - The Bluestocking

2026-08-21T05:29:23.000Z

Happy Friday!

There are so many interesting looking books being published this autumn that I am seriously worried there are now more people writing nonfiction than reading it. (On which note, The Genius Myth is still 99p on Kindle for another week.)

Helen

Carleton Gajdusek and boys in a village in Papua New Guinea

The Scientist and His Boys

Luwi, who is fifty-seven years old, took up journal writing at the urging of the Nobel Prize-winning pediatrician and virologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, whom he described as “Father of America.” Gajdusek lived in Papua New Guinea while researching kuru, a fatal brain disease that existed only in the country’s eastern highlands. Until the nineteen-thirties, the people there remained unknown to the outside world. Luwi and his friends used to crowd around Gajdusek’s typewriter, their hands on his shoulders and thighs, as he documented their lives: the insects they ate, their moods, the way they sang to birds. Gajdusek wrote six hundred thousand pages of journals, beginning when he was thirteen and ending weeks before he died, in 2008, at the age of eighty-five.

Rachel Aviv has a wonderful beat at The New Yorker, writing about psychology, psychiatry and the history of medicine. Her latest story is about Carleton Gajdusek, who spent months in a region of Papua New Guinea that had little contact with westerners, and who decided to bring over dozens of children from there to be “civilized” in America. He preferred them to be under 12 when they came to live in his house. “The kuru experiments, which won Gajdusek the Nobel Prize in 1976, put him in a position in which people around him rarely said no,” writes Aviv.

Because you’re reading this newsletter, and therefore are the sort of person who is innately cynical like me, you’re probably thinking the same as I did: oh no, he’s going to be sleeping with the kids, isn’t he? Yes, of course he was. Gajdusek sexually abused many of the boys, explaining it to himself (in his extensive journals) as a version of the pederastic rites found in some south Pacific traditions. Aviv is particularly good on how he scarred them emotionally, too—withholding affection, leaving them alone in the house and losing interest in them when they were too old for him, like Joe Exotic with the baby tigers.

Gajdusek’s lab mates knew this was happening and decided it was none of their business—except one, who reported him. He pled guilty and served a short prison sentence, which he loved, because he got time to write. When he came out of prison, he was met by Oliver Sacks (who made up large chunks of his work) and the physicist Freeman Dyson (a great scientist but became a climate change denier). A trio of brilliant men who were deformed by their own sense of brilliance.

There are now three Nobel prizes stemming from Gajdusek’s work—which revealed that the source of the kuru was prions, or misfolded proteins, in human brains. The disease was only found in women and children, and so one researcher asked: “What do adult women and children of both sexes do that adult men don’t do?” The answer came back: “They ate the dead.”

Laura Marling’s post on summer holidays made me feel very nostalgic for a specific feeling—of having lots of people you love gathered around, oscillating in and out of the same space: “All I want from a holiday is for it to be warm enough for me to sit outside in the evening and play guitar while other people talk around the dinner table on the terrace.”

Thanks to the London housing market, I don’t have this: there are no people living nearby who I know well enough to “pop in” and see, and our house is too small to host a family Christmas or anything like that. When I want to see friends, I mostly get on the train, and so do they. It makes me quite sad to drive through suburban or rural America—as I did recently through the backwoods of Michigan—and see these giant houses with swimming pools and porches and massive dining rooms. What a great lifestyle! As Laura writes, “Part of my concern about the future of living in London is that even if I was significantly richer than I am now, I could still not afford a house in which a could comfortably have my family to stay.”

Post-Mortem

“Arday is easier to defend now he can be cast as a martyr to the cruelty of the right-wing press.” Sarah Ditum sums up my feelings on Jason Arday’s death. I think it’s possible to acknowledge that the enormous volume and intensity of press attention must have felt shattering, without needing to airbrush the fact that his deception went far beyond a few lifted sentences in a thesis. It was quite chilling to discover that the big accounts on Threads/Instagram (and to a lesser extent, Bluesky) seemed to think he was “cleared” of wrongdoing. As Sam Kriss argues: “He convinced thousands of parents of nonverbal autisics that their children might one day grow up to be Cambridge professors. In any honest accounting, you could stand on the street screaming racial slurs for a decade and still not be crueller than that.”

I was also genuinely shocked by Jolyon Maugham’s account of what happened. He smears the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare as having some sort of axe to grind against Arday, although what or why is never specified. Maugham has conjured up an impossible standard for investigative journalism: Many people whose lives you write about would rather that you didn’t, and that does not give them a veto. There is a latent conspiracism in his account that is deeply unhelpful, for example when he snidely notes that Bakare was off his usual culture beat in writing the piece, as if that were sinister—omitting the quite salient fact that Arday contacted Bakare with his claims of racial abuse via pig’s head.

Finally, this X article, by Will Self, is an extraordinary artefact of the present moment. Come for the random attack on his female peers for wearing nice shoes—“the women columnists, such is the disproportion of their emolument, expensively shod”—and stay for the suggestion that “the CPS should be examining the matter, and the police should be impounding computers”. Although probably the highlight in this paean to anti-racism is that he describes an interview Arday gave to Martin Bashir, when the interviewer was actually … Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

Quick Links

This Guardian longread on accusations against Britain’s bestselling true-crime author is worth your time if you have a strong stomach. Seems like he really loves his work writing about female murder victims, that’s definitely why he keeps souvenirs from crime scenes.
Fantastic visualisation of former and future solar eclipses. See you in Tokyo in 2035.
Something I think about a lot: modern life involves a level of comfort and excitement that my great-great-greatgrandparents could not imagine (Ordinary Abundance).
The college loneliness comes to campus: is it smartphones, or did some kids never truly leave lockdown? (The Atlantic, gift link)
“The matchmakers also puzzled over the Ivy League-educated economist who said he wants to date only women who are thin, have large breasts and are fluent in Mandarin, but who should not have any artistic hobbies or talents. He had been unable to fully articulate why.” Surely there’s a Chinese spy out there for this guy? (New York Times, gift link)
Carrie Johnson’s Instagram is my guilty pleasure: so many chintzy soft furnishings! Please enjoy Boris ineptly serenading her with Pink Pony Club while she rides a toy horse around their living room.

That’s all folx! See you next time.

🟢 ✨ Like a funky avenger it’s | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-08-14T12:34:50.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re eclipsingally well and remembered how to build those pin hole cameras.

𝔽oolproof | The Power of Disqualifying Prospects

Ryan Harris outlines the critical habits of top-performing sellers, emphasizing why ruthlessly disqualifying poor-fit prospects early in the process is the ultimate key to protecting your time and closing more deals.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/habits-top-sellers-disqualifying-prospective-customers-ryan-harris-d4mwe/

𝕀ntelligence | Closing the SME Trade Finance Gap

The Bank of England’s digital pound lab is actively exploring innovative new approaches to close the trade finance gap for SMEs by leveraging the capabilities of a central bank digital currency.

https://www.gtreview.com/news/digital-trade/bank-of-englands-digital-pound-lab-explores-new-approach-for-sme-trade-finance-gap/

𝕊auce | The Science of Age in Retail

Retail expert Paco Underhill breaks down the fascinating science of how age demographics fundamentally influence shopping behaviors and what retailers must do to effectively adapt their physical spaces.

https://www.retaildoc.com/podcast/316-paco-underhill-on-the-science-of-age-when-it-comes-to-retail

𝕙odgepotch | The Environmental Cost of AI

A newly published report from the United Nations University sheds light on the hidden environmental toll of artificial intelligence, detailing its massive energy consumption and rapidly expanding carbon, water, and land footprints.

https://unu.edu/inweh/news/environmental-cost-of-AIs-Enrgy-use-carbon-water-and-land-footprints

Have an Orbit 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.

429: Catching predators, leaving academia - The Bluestocking

2026-08-14T05:55:36.000Z

Happy Friday!

The first bit of my reporting from the Midwest went up this week—looking at why Francesca Hong did not manage to become the most high profile socialist candidate in the midterms (gift link). Somehow I managed to resist a riff on how, within five minutes of seeing a politician on stage or interacting with normal humans, you can usually tell if they’ve “got it” or not. One of the things that usually stands out is whether they like to win people over—whether they have that faintly psychopathic quality of assessing which version of themselves to present to the person in front of them. Really good politicians appear bathed in an aura of fame but also interested in you, which can be a heady combination.

I wish I had seen Bill Clinton in his prime; apparently he used to grab people’s arms with both his hands and stare into their eyes, and they loved it.

Helen

Tonight On Dateline This Man Will Die

This 2007 Esquire article by Luke Dittrich, on a career lawyer who shot himself after a televised sting operation to catch “predators”, has been turned into a film starring Robert Pattinson. (The trailer looks incredible.) Unfortunately, it has also prompted me into an existential crisis. The way it’s written is too good. And I’m not sure that you can get away with writing like this any more.

Large sections of this story are written in what theorists call “free indirect narration,” blending a third-person narrator with the thoughts and feelings of characters in the story. For example: “Schrack had assumed so many different identities during the last few days that he had to actually pause a few moments before in order to quiz himself on some of the vital stats of his newest alias to make sure he didn’t screw anything up.” How does the writer know this happened? Presumably because he interviewed Schrack at length—enough to give him the confidence to summarize his thoughts in this confident, muscular way.

This style of writing is now out of fashion: younger readers, who haven’t been exposed to endless novels that use it, seem to struggle with the idea of POV narration like this, and the literal-minded have never liked it. As a reporter, you can only get away with it if your subjects completely trust you; if you get enough time with them to unspool their thoughts like this; and if your editor trusts you too. All those things are harder in the modern media environment. For a start, interviewees are more savvy, or more guarded. (As Tina Brown writes: “There is no such thing as a source anymore. Everyone is hoarding their insights for their own podcasts.”)

The other beautiful piece of artistry here is how Dittrich uses tenses. Everything is grounded on the day of the operation. We start off in medias res—outside the house where the sting will go so badly wrong—but the image of a wheelbarrow outside takes us back to a scene decades earlier, where a local man got drunk and had to be taken home: “The reason people remember this story and still tell it twenty years on is that it is so remarkably uncharacteristic of the man inside.” (Dittrich hasn’t even named this man, the subject of the story, yet—and won’t for another two sections!) The story also throws us forward repeatedly, with everything that happens after the sting referred to in the future tense: “When Dateline airs the episode documenting this sting operation a few months later, Chris Hansen, narrating, will offer one explanation . . .”

All this contributes to a piece where you know what’s coming, and yet the suspense and tension and unfolding horror ratchet up anyway. I’ve never written a piece like this, and honestly I wonder if I ever will. Hence the existential crisis.

While I’m here, have you ever seen a paragraph that so beautifully telegraphs “the supposed good guys in this story are actually nutters too”:

Everyone here knows the man with the conspicuously incognito look as Frag, though Frag is not his real name. All the members of Perverted Justice have fake names. For example, the person who spent the last two weeks conducting an on-again, off-again chat-room relationship with Bill Conradt calls himself Jay Alternative, though his real name is Greg Brainer. Ostensibly the members of Perverted Justice adopt these fake names so that the men they trap do not seek them out in the real world, but the cartoony, superherolike aspect of most of their aliases perhaps also says something about the way the members of Perverted Justice perceive themselves. Online, Jay Alternative is a faceless crusader patrolling the dark side of the Internet. Offline, Greg Brainer is a middle-aged man who lives in Milford, Michigan, and spends upwards of forty hours a week sitting at a computer pretending to be a sexually available boy. Sometimes the fake names become real. A few years ago, Phillip John Eide, the founder of Perverted Justice, legally changed his name to that of his alter ego, Xavier Von Erck.

Illustration by Erin Jia

Why I Quit The Tenure Track

All of this social-justice rhetoric also felt wildly hypocritical. The same October day that the dean promised to abolish “retardants to progress”—including classism—adjunct faculty and staff announced that they were starting a union drive, citing “low pay, and poor working conditions at the college.” The union was intended to be “wall-to-wall,” meaning that it would include not just non-tenure-track faculty but also people working in facilities, the dining hall, and other nonacademic roles on campus. The administration’s skulduggery started almost immediately.

My colleague Tyler Austin Harper has written about realizing that he was the “token black professor” at an American college. His argument is that Woke 1.0 (as we’re apparently now calling it) became a great excuse for corporate hierarchies to quash basic labor activism while posturing as good people. The whole model of universities is incredibly creaky, between underpaid, insecurely employed staff and students racking up debt to send in AI-generated work. I hope someone fixes it.

A friend resurfaced this essay by the great Leigh Stein on her time moderating “Binders Full of Women,” a big and notoriously fraught Facebook group for female writers. I laughed with bitter recognition when it got to the bit about her conference being criticized online for not providing on-site childcare, and how she tried to set up a working group to discover if the community as a whole wanted that. Surprise! “No one volunteered.”

Quick Links

The former BBC staffer Robin Lustig on Rod Liddle: “He was not a fearless satirist but someone who never outgrew his days as a child who delighted in telling fart jokes.” (Substack)
This parody of bad modernized Shakespeare has been beamed onto the internet directly from my brain. Ooh look, you’ve redone someone getting a letter with the swoosh of a text message? Should we have a party? Should we invite Bella Hadid?
DRAG THEM HUGO: loved this column by Hugo Rifkind about how all the climate change sceptics have shut the f*** up and slunk away now we’re all broiling in our beds from May to September every year. I mean, I do like how Jeremy Clarkson notes how a new “fluke” bit of weather has ruined his harvest in every season of Clarkson’s Farm, but equally he was a key proponent of the “go away Greta you buzzkill” tendency. (Times, £)

PS. I’ll be in New York in September for The Atlantic Festival, which has a line-up so starry it’s almost embarrassing: tickets here. While I’m there, Jesse and I are doing a low-key Special Relationship event at the Comedy Cellar on Tuesday 22 September. (He nearly accidentally scheduled this for Yom Kippur, but then caught it in time.)

🟢 ✨ It’s getting hot in here it's | 🐟 𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY - 🐟𝔽.𝕀.𝕊.𝕙. FRIDAY

2026-08-07T18:41:23.000Z

Friends, clients, associates and business cards, hope you’re swelteringally well and not running out of ideas yet to keep your kids entertained.

𝔽oolproof | Phrases That Silently kill Sales

Four common phrases that unknowingly destroy your sales conversations and offers actionable alternatives to keep your prospects engaged and deals moving forward.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/emem-umoh-0a8b041ba_4-phrases-that-silently-kill-your-sales-share-7402479246746746880-gUaO/

𝕀ntelligence | Venture Capital Boost for Early-Stage Firms

The UK government has announced new measures to expand access to venture capital, aiming to provide early-stage companies with the crucial funding support needed to scale up and drive innovation.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/venture-capital-access-expanded-for-early-stage-companies-in-uk

𝕊auce | Eliminating Performance Drag

Rochelle Carrington, creator of Performance Drag™, explains how to remove the hidden emotional barriers and nervous system resistance that silently cap your business’s revenue and growth.

https://www.eofire.com/podcast/rochellecarrington/

𝕙odgepotch | Volunteer for Le Tour

Cycling fans can now register their interest to volunteer for Le Tour GB, offering a unique behind-the-scenes opportunity to help deliver a world-class sporting event right on our doorstep.

https://www.letourgb.com/volunteer/

Have a Wavey 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.