"I Look Inside Myself and See My Heart is 'Stack" Edition
Hello,
This week I wrote for the Spectator about NFTs and the Spectator World about the Capitol Hill riot. I also wrote a review of different energy drinks for the latest print edition of the Spectator World. Finally, I built my own conspiracy theory for my paying Substack subscribers.
Two cheers for London. As part of my trip to England, I visited London. Now, I have said a lot of bad things about the state of England and the state of London. Still, today I want to strike a note of positivity. With an hour to kill, I headed into the Tate Britain. (A bad name but it could have been worse. “Tate Classics”? “Tate Vintage”? “Tate Retro”?) What an hour! It could have been extended into a day. So much that was beautiful, and so much that was strange and interesting, from J.M.W Turner to Francis Bacon. And you can walk in for free! What an amazing privilege. We should not be too cool to appreciate that we are blessed to have easy access to such cultural gold mines.
The old country. I also visited Devon as I rambled round the country. Sidmouth is a lovely seaside town, full of picturesque cafés and shops, with the great grey sea rumbling on the beach. All that was strange, and a little sad, was how few kids there were. I felt young and I am 31 next week. Not only are people having fewer kids, I guess, but housing in such a nice place is too expensive for families. I mean no insult towards the old or childless (I am getting older and I am childless) but what will happen to such places? On the cliff, on one side of the beach, is a lovely cottage, sitting, bathed in sunlight, as the ground erodes beneath it.
Almania. A fascinating piece by Gavin Haynes about how a whole country became a victim of pyramid schemes:
In Tirana, I met a lawyer, Lazer Sokoli, who only managed to convince his brother not to sell his family home by threatening never to speak to him again. Months later, he was at dinner with the same brother and his brother’s friend, when a TV in a corner of the restaurant broadcast news of riots, as investors clamoured to retrieve their cash. “The whole place went silent. Not only had my brother’s friend sold his house but also his sister’s. He went crazy … it turned out he’d lost everything. He is now in Germany, working hard to make ends meet and trying to repay his sister little by little.”
Boys, ever so many of them. Alexander Larman pays tribute to Richmal Crompton’s Just William books on their 100th anniversary:
Crompton, an unmarried woman who never had her own family, managed to bring her child characters to life in the most memorable of ways. Chief amongst these is the objectionable Hubert Lane, William’s supremely loathsome nemesis. Crompton writes of him that he is a “large fat boy with protruding eyes, a superhuman appetite and a morbid love of Mathematics”.
Crompton’s genius lay in combining an acute appreciation of the young male mind with an acute capacity for social satire. (As a sidenote, I think Larman could have emphasized that the intentions behind Crompton’s Nazi-knocking “William and the Nasties” were good even if the execution was as clumsy as an Englishman on ice.)
Monsters become tools. Stone Age Herbalist reflects interestingly and unsettlingly on horror and prehistory:
If monsters can be prised from their ancient tombs and manufactured into tools, what then is the human form but a momentary geometry, inhabited by something ephemeral but doomed to sink and be compressed into mud, shale and sand?
Better dead than wrong. Ed West muses on tribalism and belief:
In the US there is today a huge gap in vaccine uptake between white Democrats and Republicans, but could it have gone the other way? What would have happened had the vaccine been approved in October 2020, leading to a Trump victory?
Dead teenagers. Patrick O’Flynn faces uncomfortable truths concerning violent crime:
…if black lives really are to matter and the deaths of black youths to be reduced then someone needs to start confronting the truth again soon.
A deep state. Jacob Siegel writes on government, secrecy and conspiracy:
The FBI has a record of hyping up threats and encouraging terrorists plots that it can then bust to justify its mission. Consider an ongoing case involving the plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. For months the plot was marshalled as evidence of the existential danger posed by Right-wing extremist groups, but those claims have unraveled as it turned out that the FBI had 12 informants inside the organisation accused of planning the crime.
You've got one year. Esther Manov reflects on culture, relationships and Paul Thomas Anderson:
As a young woman told me recently, for the educated millennial woman, it’s a bit odd to marry in your twenties; but once you hit 30, you’re suddenly “an unmarried 30-year-old woman”. Essentially, you’ve got one year.
Have a lovely week,
Ben