It is delicious to know that one reviewer called John Keats’s poetry “drivelling idiocy”. It is more pleasing yet that Virginia Woolf considered James Joyce’s writing to be “tosh”. And surely no one can be uncheered to hear that when the critic Dorothy Parker read “Winnie the Pooh” she found it so full of innocent, childish whimsy that she—in her own moment of whimsical spelling—“fwowed up”.
And:
In the Victorian era, “reviews were seen as a kind of cultural hygiene, so there were high standards,” says Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a professor of English at Oxford University. Reviewers were not merely taking a swipe at an enemy but cleansing the sacred halls of literature. Not that this stopped them from mild grubbiness themselves. For example, one reviewer called a fellow writer’s work “feculent garbage”; the reliably robust Alfred Tennyson called yet another “a louse upon the locks of literature”; while John Milton (apparently having momentarily lost paradise again) described another as an “unswill’d hogshead”.
And:
One of the most famous poems of the Roman writer Catullus is a riposte to critics who accused him of being effeminate. “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,” he wrote, which means (broadly speaking): “I will sodomise and face-fuck you.” Not the sort of thing you see in the Times Literary Supplement these days.
But the comments later in the article about the effect of the internet on book reviews came to linger longer in my mind. The article argues that the risk of a social media pile-on has led to fewer scathing reviews.
I then came to read an article by Megan Nolan in the New Stateman and one by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic, both criticising the negativity of the online book-themed social media site Goodreads. They both cite the same examples in some cases, and make the point that many people on the site review books even without reading them.
At first, I was slightly taken aback at how this implies people use Goodreads: I mostly use it to see what people I know in real life thought of books, not to look at the aggregate scores and (seemingly aggressive) reviews of random strangers. I’m not certain why people would attach much weight to this.
And secondly, I thought about how this is a good example of the complexity of the influence of the internet on systems. According to these three articles taken together, the internet has vastly decreased the likelihood of a book being panned by a critic, making professional reviews less valuable as a result of them essentially becoming less discriminating. At the same time, it has drastically increased the likelihood of an amateur reviewer having a disproportionate effect through sharing opinions uninformed by the most basic facts.
It feels like that that might read across to other areas of life, too.
The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.
The influence of the evangelical church in on US politics is something that always seems fascinating and strange from this side of the pond. It’s not uncommon to see commentators here ask, for example, how the church can so strongly promote a character as obviously un-Christian as Donald Trump. The answer is always complicated.
But here’s an angle I’ve never considered before: what if you are a young Christian growing up in the USA? Your position in the ‘culture war’ is likely to be at odds with that of the evangelical church.
The No. 1 question that younger evangelicals ask me is how to relate to their parents and mentors who want to talk about culture-war politics and internet conspiracy theories instead of prayer or the Bible. These young people are committed to their Christian faith, but they feel despair and cynicism about the Church’s future. Almost none of them even call themselves “evangelical” anymore, now that the label is confused with political categories. “Sometimes I feel like I’m crazy,” one pastor said to me just days ago. “Does no one see that the Church is in crisis?”
Russell Moore’s article in The Atlantic provided some insight into these questions for me. Russell’s starting point for his argument is entirely different to mine—he’s a Christian, I’m an atheist, and we have vastly different views on many things. But this is a great example of an article that gave me insight, even while I didn’t agree with its approach. It’s useful to read things that challenge us, sometimes.
The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.
The rest of us, as a nation but also as individuals, can no longer indulge the pretense that Trump is just another Republican candidate, that supporting Donald Trump is just another political choice, and that agreeing with Trump’s attacks on our democracy is just a difference of opinion.
We can no longer merely roll our eyes when an annoying uncle rhapsodizes about stolen elections. We should not gently ask our parents if perhaps we might change the channel from Fox during dinner. We are not obligated to gingerly change the subject when an old friend goes on about “Demonrats” or the dire national-security implications around Hunter Biden’s genitalia. Enough of all this; we can love our friends and our family and our neighbors without accepting their terms of debate. To support Trump is to support sedition and violence, and we must be willing to speak this truth not only to power but to our fellow citizens.
Every American citizen who cares about the Constitution should affirm, without hesitation, that any form of association with Trump is reprehensible, that each of us will draw moral conclusions about anyone who continues to support him, and that these conclusions will guide both our political and our personal choices.
This is painful advice to give and to follow. No one, including me, wants to lose friends or chill valued relationships over so small a man as Trump. But our democracy is about to go into legal and electoral battle for its own survival. If we don’t speak up—to one another, as well as to the media and to our elected officials—and Trump defeats us all by regaining power and making a mockery of American democracy, then we’ll all have lost a lot more than a few friendships.
Firstly, how can it possibly be that one of the tied favourites to win the next US Presidential election can be someone involved in a conspiracy which contemplated deploying the American military against its own people? How the hell did we end up here? How did the US elect someone like that in the first place? Why isn’t the idea of re-electing that person unthinkable? What does this mean for the future of the USA? What does this mean for the future of democracy?
Secondly, should we really be worried? Democracy and the constitution passed the stiff test posed by Donald Trump the last time; ought we not to be confident that the same tactics will fail a second time? Should we really be that threatened by someone contemplating something awful, but deciding not to do it? Isn’t the outcome more important than the contemplation? Is Trump really a threat to democracy, or is he just a very naughty boy?
Thirdly, isn’t it depressing that the ‘threat to democracy’ that Nichols cites has become such a common refrain? Not from Nichols, not even really from The Atlantic, but from—well—everywhere? The New York Times has used the phrase 590 times. The Times of London has used it 155 times. Even the bloody Financial Times has used it 216 times. Some of these uses are legitimate references others are not. Even as long ago as 2006, the transfer of ownership of ITV was called a “threat to democracy”—it wasn’t one. There’s no space left to amp up the rhetoric. Rage sells, and anger drives online engagement. The media hit peak rage too soon. The papers have cried ‘wolf’ once too often. And it means that if and when there’s a real threat to democracy, the rage and anger and language is just the same as when the threat was little more than tepid air. We need the reasonable voices, the ones willing to say “there’s nothing to see here”, “this isn’t a crisis”, and “it’s more complicated than that”—but they’re drowned out, because calm rationality is boring.
Fourthly, does the failure of journalism explain the failure of democracy? Can democracy survive without reliable information? Or in an environment where reliable information is drowned out by hysterics? And is there any route to improving any of this in the current environment? Or are we in a complete spiral of doom?
The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.
I’m predisposed to dislike Meta’s new social media app Threads. It’s years since I left Instagram and Twitter, and I haven’t missed either of them. I’m therefore unlikely to be convinced by something which seems to be a combination of the two. But equally, my lack of engagement means that I’m not well-informed, and my opinions ought to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Yet, Threads has been unavoidable in recent days, with acres of press coverage. In this post, I want to reflect on some of the things I’ve read.
I don’t feel particularly motivated to write about Threads, the Instagram-in-Twitter-form social network that Meta launched this week. It feels like a social network that exists to check a box for a company that owns a lot of social networks. But I do think it represents something about the moment that we’re in, where people are so desperate for a certain kind of experience that they will go from the hands of one billionaire to another, in hopes that will give them what they don’t feel like they were getting before.
It would be a bit rich of me to claim that I don’t feel motivated to write about Threads at the start of a blog post about Threads. But I do feel removed from it. I can’t imagine I’m ever going to join the service, and—in all honesty—I think the moment for this sort of short-text-based social media service has probably passed.
The thing that makes Twitter distinctive, Mosseri said, is that replies are given the same visual priority as the original posts. In a world where every other social network buries comments underneath posts, Twitter elevates them. And that encourages people to participate in discussions.
“The post-and-comment model is great,” Mosseri said. “But it really does not support public discourse nearly as well as the tweet-and-reply model. Elevating the reply to the same level as the original post allows for much more robust, diverse discourse.”
I fundamentally disagree with this: I think giving replies equal prominence to original posts fuels terrible discourse. It pits experts on the same level as conspiracy theorists. It encourages people to seize on the tiniest error, the most abstracted perceived slight, in any Tweet in order to ramp up engagement with the reply. It encourages attack, not discussion, and pile-ons (a natural by-product of giving responses the same prominence as original posts) squeeze out diversity rather than encouraging it.
What comes after Twitter is a much more fragmented landscape. Many social-media sites command significant audiences, but no single platform can do what Twitter once did. A journalist can make a big bet on one platform, or they can try to hedge and be active on Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Substack, and, as of this week, Meta’s Threads—give or take a dozen more. But who has the time? And besides, you don’t get the same reach. TikTok and YouTube command enormous but typically niche audiences.
I’ve written with boring frequency on this site about the BBC’s promotion of Twitter. This is, in my view, the wrong approach for myriad reasons, but the more the social media landscape fragments, the more unsustainable that approach becomes.
Imagine a 2024 Presidential election fought between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Suppose Biden continues to campaign on Twitter, but that Trump restricts himself to Truth Social, safe in the knowledge that he won’t be banned or fact-checked and that his messages will find their way beyond the network anyway. Would the BBC continue to promote only the platform used by only one of the candidates? Self-evidently not. Would it promote Truth Social? No chance.
And so, the era of free promotion of a particular network ends… surely. We presumably revert to “Campaign X said Y”, rather than “Candidate A posted on social network B”. The latter has never made sense for the BBC anyway: it’s no more logical than saying “Party M has posted a press released on media repository N”, which has never been a thing.
Threads won’t benefit (in the long-term) from the free promotion that built Twitter.
This stood out to me because I well remember, in the days I was on Facebook, the frequency with which “escaped zoo animals” were reported in connection with any number of news stories. I remember this because I briefly parodied it in an email to partners after arranging rabies vaccinations for an individual bitten by a wild animal abroad.
This is a long-standing and easily disproved item of fake news which could reasonably cause unnecessarily fear among readers. Even all these years on, Meta hasn’t got a grip of this simple stuff. The idea that Threads will be a reliable source of anything, or a place for informed discussion, is clearly not rooted in reality.
My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no one. It launched as a content graveyard and will assuredly only become more of one over time. It’s iFunny for people who miss The Ellen Show. It has a distinct celebrities-making-videos-during-COVID-lockdown vibe. It feels like a 90s-themed office party organized by a human resources department. And my theory, after staring into its dark heart for several days, is that it was never meant to “beat” Twitter — regardless of what Zuckerberg has been tweeting. Threads’ true purpose was to act as a fresh coat of paint for Instagram’s code in the hopes it might make the network relevant again. And Threads is also proof that Meta, even after all these years, still has no other ambition aside from scale.
If you look back at every era of the internet, towards the end of each, you’ll see a whole pile-up of forgotten apps that tried to swoop in and bring back or replace something that was dying or dead. Myspace tried to bounce back with a redesign. Vine was going to be resurrected as Byte. BeReal was marketed as a way to recapture the simple fun of Snapchat, etc. But it doesn’t really work that way. Our tastes change. We move on. And then suddenly we can’t imagine ever going back.
I’ve wrongly predicted the death of Twitter an embarrassing number of times. I even did it earlier this month. I think Broderick might be right that it’s the class of services that is fracturing and dying, not just Twitter specifically. And that bodes ill for Threads.
People are never going to be as concerned with privacy stuff as they are with I want to be where my friends are. I want to try something new and interesting and see if it works. And if that initial experience is easy, fun, and intriguing, the potential to hook a new user and turn them into a quality repeat customer is very high.
It’s fair to say that Warzel’s overall impression of the prospects for Threads is less positive than this brief quotation implies. But this quotation stood out for me because I think Warzel is right.
Warzel’s words reminded me that I often overhear people talking nonsense about Facebook spying on them through their phone’s microphone and inserting related adverts into their feeds. Yet, none of them have deleted the app or left the service… even when they genuinely believe they are being covertly surveilled.
Privacy is not a big deal to most people, which probably works in favour of Threads.
It’s probably not in their favour that when I think of ‘Threads’, I think of this:
The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.
This is a bit of a cheat because I read it in the paper LRB rather than online. John Lanchester’s article on the pandemic is well worth reading for both its detailed analysis and its snark about our wholly unable Prime Minister.
It isn’t always possible to draw a straight line from someone’s personal life to their public works. Johnson’s private life is his business. But one thing you can say about a man responsible for at least nine pregnancies by at least four different women is that he is prone to wishful thinking. That wishful thinking is the common theme in the government’s failures from spring 2020 to autumn 2020 to now. Johnson doesn’t want certain things to be true, so he acts as if they can be ignored. That strategy has worked for him in domestic politics. It was at the heart of his advocacy for Brexit. But it doesn’t work in economics, and it doesn’t work in dealing with a pandemic.
I listen to quite a lot of speech radio, but without wanting to disappoint Auntie, I have been a bit of a BBC Sounds refusenik. It’s a stupidly named service with a hard-to-navigate app that has never seemed relevant to my life.
Yet, when searching for something completely unrelated online recently, I discovered that Jon Ronson had made a radio series for BBC Sounds, which has also had an edited run on Radio 4. The series began in November, and despite being a fan of Ronson’s work and therefore presumably within the target market, the Beeb’s marketing didn’t reach me until after it had finished, but the whole series remains available.
Once I knew it existed, I enjoyed this series. Each episode investigates the ‘origin’ of a particular aspect of the ‘culture wars’, which sounds tedious, but with Ronson’s gentle humour and humanity, it becomes a collection of interestingly strange and moving tales.
The relationship of the USA to guns is one that always feels difficult to grasp from a British perspective. This chilling Atlantic article from Nicole Chung describes her experience of a receiving a text from her 13-year-old daughter in the middle of the morning telling her that she is sheltering at school as there is an active shooting threat.
I was in high school when Thurston and Columbine happened, which means I was in high school before it occurred to me that I could be shot in my school. This knowledge is something that American schoolkids of all ages live with now. My 13-year-old has been participating in shooter drills since she was 3 years old—though when she was younger, her teachers couched them in vague, less frightening terms. I remember the day she came home from preschool and told me, “We practiced what to do in case someone is in the school who shouldn’t be.” She described her teacher locking the doors, turning off the lights, and herding all the students into a small bathroom, where they were told to sit still and stay “very, very quiet.” “It was hard. We weren’t very quiet,” she admitted.
This is one of those articles that just stopped me in my tracks.
There isn’t a line in Manuela Saragossa’s FT story that isn’t worth your time, but this one particularly spoke to me:
The meds were to treat schizoaffective disorder, a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar, the worst of both terrible worlds. In Steve’s case, his illness manifested as persistent delusions, mania and depression.
“It’s just in your mind,” I would tell him, uselessly, after an episode, once the volume had turned down on the recurring, persecutory thoughts that tormented him. “My mind is all I have,” he would rightly reply.
This is a moving and direct account of living with a partner with severe mental illness, and coming to terms with his untimely death. In another universe, I’m a psychiatrist: I came very close to applying for specialty training in psychiatry, before opting for public health. I don’t think I would have been all that good at it, in retrospect.
I take a multivitamin on a daily basis. I do this despite knowing that the evidence shows that it’s unlikely to do me any good, though I’m healthily sceptical of the evidence that suggests it’s actively harmful (I think that this effect might reasonably be explained by confounders). I suppose my own behaviour is more of a habit than anything.
With that in mind, I was delighted to come across an article discussing this very topic in The Atlantic, written by none other than Professor Paul Offit, a well-respected paediatrician. In fact, as it turns out, the article is an extract from his book. In the extract, he gives a little of the history of the vitamin supplement history, and sets out the research evidence on the topic. But, more than that, he tells a truly engaging story, and leads one through it almost by hand. It’s a really great read!
My recommended read this weekend is “The Undertaker’s Racket” written by Jessica Mitford and published in The Atlantic.tic. It’s a very well-written article describing the funeral business in the United States. It’s fascinating, shocking, and intriguing all at once, without ever being ghoulish.
It wasn’t until after I’d finished the article that I realised the date on top of it – this was originally published in 1963. It was written to promote the release of Mitford’s book, The American Way of Death, an exposé of the industry’s practices which caused a huge stir when it was published.
At over fifty years old, I think this may be least timely article I’ve chosen in this series to date, but it’s most definitely worth a read this weekend.
My recommended read for this weekend is an article from The Atlantic about in-flight medical emergencies. I have read quite widely around this subject over the years as it’s something I find interesting. Yet despite the fact that I didn’t feel that I learned an awful lot that was new from Celine Gounder’s article, I found it very absorbing – and not a little shocking in parts. It’s well worth a read.
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