Digital Digest Weekly #3
Caught on the Net 13.xi.23-17.xi.23
The Crown - series 6 (Guardian, Lucy Mangan)
In the manner of a Hallmark movie, Diana is marked for death at every turn – you know, just in case you are unaware of the fate of the most famous woman in the world and have forgotten the frenzy of grief that gripped the country thereafter. She is, in The Crown’s telling of it, a virtual saint: see her talk about landmines! See her play normal middle-class games with her beloved boys! See her fall in love with sweet Dodi Fayed!
Soon after the fatal car crash involving the then Princess of Wales in August 1997, I had occasion to visit Paris. I was billeted at the George V, a very posh hotel just up the road from the Pont d’Alma scene of the terrible accident. At a loose end one afternoon I went along to take a look at the flowers and messages stuck to the bridge. Many contained beseeching requests that the dead princess would somehow intercede to save sick and dying relatives. The new season of The Crown seems aimed squarely at that demographic.
Furniture Music (Nate Chinen, Substack)
“As a youngster, I associated jazz music with old people,” confides André 3000 around the 36-minute mark of this excellent interview with NPR’s Rodney Carmichael. “I’m just being honest: as a rapper, I just associated jazz music with old people and elevator music, because it had become that.”
Nate Chinen unpacks André 3000's flute album and finds it less diverting than your old bean bag, but almost as relaxing.
How Gaza and the British Right split London on Armistice Day (New Yorker)
On Monday morning, Sunak removed Braverman from her post and replaced her with James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, who until then had been leading Britain’s diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. He was replaced—to actual gasps from reporters in Downing Street—by David Cameron, who became the first former Prime Minister to return to the Cabinet in half a century. Cameron has not been a Member of Parliament since he resigned after calling, and losing, the Brexit referendum in 2016. King Charles promptly made him a baron, so that he could take up the job.
Politics in the United Kingdom feels so Byzantine that it helps to read an explanation aimed at a far-flung audience. This dispatch from Sam Knight for the New Yorker weaves its way deftly around the convoluted issues. I do not envy future graduates on history and politics having to unpick the tangled web of the current moment. Makes the Schleswig-Holstein problem seem like tic-tac-toe.
The Gender Debate: From the Gaslighting Era to the Culture War Era (Helen Lewis, Substack)
Now, particularly as a writer for an American publication, my biggest difficulty is separating my own criticisms of the excesses of trans activism from a wider conservative backlash that sees gender non-conformity as degenerate and disgusting, and would strip legal protections and access to healthcare away from trans people entirely. That informs how I write and talk now.
Helen Lewis delivered this speech at an event organized by “A Woman’s Place” to discuss the coverage of gender in the British media in the last two decades. She describes the arc that the debate has followed and argues that transphobic views should be challenged - and that journalism and activism do not mix.