the outlier
snowflakes, focus and frost fairs
hello,
I haven’t slept like this for a long time. It feels like it’s been a long month and now I’m pretty much caught up with work, I’m catching up with sleep. It’s also a pleasure to sit down and catch up with you all in this one way conversation we’re having, particularly to the barman amongst you who said hi in central London last week! It’s very cool to know people are enjoying this.
If you are enjoying it then consider a paid subscription! You get more stuff and will get yet more stuff in future so hit the little purple button.
One of you very kindly pointed out some lazy phrasing in last week’s letter which I corrected. I’m about to add audio narration so if you missed it or want to listen, it’s there for you.
the books📖
This week’s big project has been a final paid post which should hopefully get approved and finished soon. Until then, you can enjoy (and like and share) my National Gallery post and if you have the time, do visit them. Before working with them over the past few months I’m not sure I’d ever been and it really is a magical place. The food at their restaurant Ochre is also really good.
The feedback from last week’s hosting and keynote gig for UK Sport has been really good and could lead to some more events with them around the country. Spending the day around elite athletes, I realised I’ve missed these sorts of people and I’ve had a little exploration of why that might be below. I’d like to share the slides and the substance of the talk I gave too but I won’t do that in this letter.
Next week I’m back to boys’ literacy and I’m looking forward to giving them some Christmas reading to do. Lucky them!
for your interest
snowflakes, focus and frost fairs
snowflakes
Ages ago, I took an online quiz on the Guardian website to determine which UK political party most closely matched my opinions. I can’t remember much about it except it came back with no matches. At all.
While I like to think I am a unique and special flower (a snowflake?) I am not that unique. There are other people like me out there who think similar things. I don’t agree with my friends on everything, that would be very boring, but we do agree, at least directionally, on many things. I expect many of them would feel similarly to me about political representation.
This week I read something unusually perceptive about young men, Leah Carroll’s piece for GQ titled There Are a Lot of Men Like Luigi Mangione. For those of you who think being online is no fun, I urge you to spend some time on Twitter following the discourse and unhinged humour around insurance CEO-shooting suspect Mangione. His handsomeness, his abilities as an assassin and his reading list have all been pored over and while it is genuinely hilarious, what we’re here for right now are his politics.
Mangione is not your typical unhinged shooter profile. Rather than being a bedroom-confined, pornography-obsessed, pale and bespectacled gun nut, Mangione is handsome, intelligent, curious, socially conscious, from a privileged background and until he recently went AWOL, popular and sociable. Carroll points out that rather than being politically extreme, ‘on X Mangione followed personalities, politicians, and influencers who might, on the surface, seem to have little in common’, from Andrew Huberman and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to Edward Snowden and Elon Musk. She follows up by saying that while his politics are hard to discern,
Mangione’s media diet does help explain a certain young American male worldview that is unaccounted for in a conception of the country that divides everyone into either an MSNBC or a Fox News viewer or a Biden or Trump voter.
People too into their podcasts are easy to mock, it is inherently quite funny, but these podcasts, as we’ve seen from recent electoral happenings, are far more influential than everyone likes to think and so are young male voters. Whatever the reasons for Mangione’s alleged crime, and they seem to me personal and then political, what’s very odd is how normal he seems. Normal and invisible. One of his favourite quotes from his Goodreads, and it’s a very cliche Instagram wellness type quote these days, was from Jiddu Krishnamurti:
‘It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.’
Mangione might be profoundly sick himself. So too the people who cheered when they thought the crime was some sort of leftist, eat the rich type statement against the US’s horrible-sounding healthcare system. But perhaps the most indicting aspect of this strange story is that this not very radical young man, with all his qualities, intelligence and accomplishments, has no political home to go to.
As Carroll says, there are lots of men like Mangione. Right now, they don’t have many good options.
focus
Frequently I’m pulled at by my competing interests. Having all the possibilities laid out in front of you is undoubtably exciting and part of the adventure but sometimes, and it’s perhaps the athlete in me, I just want someone to put something in front of me and say, ‘Have at it’, like a trainer with a gym session. Try your best, then go and rest.
I’m probably reflecting on this because of last week’s session spent with Olympic athletes. While I’m up there encouraging them to pursue the other sides of themselves, I envy their narrow focus. Life is extremely hard work for them but it’s also quite easy to approach. Wake up, try hard, go to bed. Monomania makes for a compelling and enviable narrative but it’s actually an easy choice to make.
It’s also probably counterproductive. The best athlete there was a broad, diverse young man, a double world champion with a computer science degree and a whole load of ambitions beyond his sport. He was the best case study for allowing athletes to be someone apart from an athlete but he’d only achieved outside of sport due to his success within it. Without his first gold medal, he explained his governing body would not have given him the leeway to pursue his studies. It was only his irreplaceability in a minority sport that gave him the freedom to be someone else and secure his future employment prospects. If the selectors had their way, he would only think about athletics, but he reckoned himself a better competitor for having other interests. Winning a second gold medal was pretty good evidence in favour of his dual focus.
But as a world champion he is by definition, rare, and he’s not only rare for his gold medals. He’s rare that he can focus at all. Tomiwa Owolade wrote last week that boys are having problems focussing:
The crisis of boys is to a great extent a problem of the internet […] The problem among so many teenage boys is not an excess of intense emotions. It is their sense of apathy. Their dopamine has been so tickled by Instagram and YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok, there is little left for anything else. Their motivation is ruined, their capacity to concentrate on texts in class is compromised. They are not angry. They suffer instead from acedia, an ancient term that describes a lack of energy in the world, drifting from one feeling to another, unable to find long-lasting satisfaction and contentment.
This is one of those statements I have no way of qualifying in the immediate term but I feel to be true. The drifting from video to video, with little to no real pleasure being derived, describes the sheer dullness of scrolling absently on your phone. It’s mostly not much fun but many of us do it anyway.
I suppose the possibility feels like the point. The apps deliberately resemble one arm bandits, fruit machines, with every refresh perhaps bringing some life-changing, or just really funny, little snippet to our attention. That’s perhaps what keeps us flicking ceaselessly into the void, amusing ourselves to death. To paraphrase E.E. Cummings, the hardest thing is to be focussed in a world where everything is calling you to distraction.
On the subject of focus, Henrik Karlsson writes,
‘As a person for whom narrow focus is against my instincts, the most remarkable thing about it is how rich it feels. My life these days is small and boring [but] there is another kind of color that can only be discovered three years down a writing hole. It is a subtle, nightly color; your eyes need time to adjust to the dark before you can see them.’
I’ve written a couple of decent things but I sometimes wonder if I really committed, in a way I know is commitment, what would happen. Would I see this subtle, nightly colour? Does it exist in British English? Perhaps.
What does exist in a way I can recognise is that sense of focus in a sporting context. I can remember endlessly kicking balls against walls, enjoying how they came back to me in different ways, playing games a spectator wouldn’t even be able to see. I was reminded of this kind of focus when I spoke to a young taekwondo athlete last week, who showed me how she was supposed to angle her toes in a certain way to kick correctly, a bit of colour that was almost totally invisible to me but obvious to her. If she couldn’t get it right, she wouldn’t be the athlete she could be.
That’s the kind of colour you can only see if you really concentrate.
frost fairs
Today I learned that there used to be frost fairs held on the Thames in London. Until the mid-1800s, the river would reliably freeze over each year, meaning market stalls could be safely set up for the public to peruse on the ice. It seemed to me with my modern experience of the river, pure magic.
a book
I finished Celia Paul’s Self Portrait and it’s one of my favourite reads of the year. It’s one of those books so full of meaning and resonance I might actually write something longer on it. (amazon / independents)
Then, after a second read, I’ve done some Intermezzo analysis, speaking about it in our Boys Book Club and with my TikTok subscribers. It split opinion in the BBC (not sure that will catch on) but I loved it second time round too. (amazon/ independents)
a listen
If I was a journalist, I’d want to make work a little like Marina Hyde. She’s one of the few I always read and I enjoyed her appearance on Adam Buxton’s podcast.
a quote
When I say that I am going to be terrified about starting the portrait of him, he says that I am the least terrified person he has ever met in his life.
– Celia Paul
lastly
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I’ll see you next time.