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26 November, 2023

The Carters on the campaign trail in 1976. Getty 

A love affair for the ages

Rosalynn Carter, wife of former president Jimmy, “belongs in the first rank of influential first ladies”, says Jonathan Alter in The New York Times. Known as the “Steel Magnolia”, she sat in on his cabinet meetings and he frequently took her advice on politics, at times acknowledging that “her instincts were better than his”. Over their 77 years of marriage – Rosalynn died last Sunday aged 96 – the Carters were near-inseparable, from “learning to read the Bible in Spanish before bed to dodging gunfire in Africa after the presidency”. And they knew each other her entire life. They first met a few days after Rosalynn was born in 1927, when Jimmy’s mother – the nurse who had delivered Rosalynn – brought her toddler over to see the new baby. It was a love affair “for the ages”.

👗♻️ When Jimmy was elected, says Vanessa Friedman, also in The New York Times, Rosalynn declared that she would be taking her sewing machine to the White House – a canny recession-era message that the Carters would “prioritise economy and accessibility”. At the 1977 inauguration, she caused a sartorial scandal by wearing the same dress she had worn for her husband’s 1971 inauguration as governor of Georgia. This newspaper labelled her a “sentimentalist” for wearing the frock again. These days, “they call it sustainability”. 

THE FARMHOUSE This Grade II-listed farmhouse lies in the picturesque Suffolk hamlet of Boxted, with views overlooking the Glem Valley. The five-bedroom property retains many original features, including sash windows, open fireplaces, exposed timber and an impressive 15th-century parlour. It also has extensive gardens featuring a wildflower meadow, pond, tennis court and outdoor swimming pool. Colchester is a 17-minute drive, with trains to London Liverpool Street in 51 minutes. £2m.

Getty 

The “iPad kids” who think reality is a screen 

A friend of mine once saw her two-year-old goddaughter spot a butterfly fluttering outside the window, says Eloise Hendy in Vice. “Her tiny toddler hand reached out, and her thumb and forefinger made a sort of pincer movement.” At first, my friend was baffled, but then she realised: the child was “trying to zoom in on the butterfly”. This story stuck with me because, well, “it’s completely nuts”. The toddler thought the window – “or reality itself” – was a big screen. I remember a feeling of dread creeping over me with a terrifying realisation: “the human race was breeding and raising iPad kids”. 

I’m not the only one to notice. It turns out that Gen Z, who have spent their whole lives online, are worried too. In one viral TikTok, a young lad pleads with millennial parents: “You’re raising Gen Alpha, and they’re bizarre and terribly behaved.” He has a point. Gen Alpha – those born after 2010 – have grown up so “utterly subsumed by the digital world” that they’re “basically a different species”. Child psychotherapist Ryan Lowe points out that these young kids aren’t “playing or engaging with the world around them”, and, crucially, they’re “not learning the basic skills of patience and containing themselves long enough to manage something difficult”. If you have an iPad shoved in front of you the minute you start to fret, you’ll never learn another way to cope with even minor adversity. A lot of millennials have already screwed this up. “Perhaps Gen Z will be better equipped to parent in the digital age.” 

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Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon: more than just a “jumped-up Corsican tyrant”

“The Enlightenment on horseback”

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon was an opportunity to recalibrate the “old Anglo-American historical stereotype of a jumped-up Corsican tyrant”, says Andrew Roberts in The Sunday Times. Instead, the director has fallen back on portraying the French emperor as “a prototype for Adolf Hitler”. You can see why an 85-year-old whose outlook was shaped by World War Two might come to that conclusion. Napoleon and Hitler both enjoyed early military successes before coming a cropper with failed invasions of Russia. Many historians have argued that the Frenchman’s secret police, censorship and aggressive foreign policy presaged the horrors of the Nazis.

Look beyond those “superficial resemblances”, though, and you’ll find that Napoleon was “the Enlightenment on horseback”. His armies liberated Jews from ghettos – the very opposite of what Hitler did – and gave them civil and religious liberties. He reorganised French laws under the Napoleonic Code, reconciled France with the Catholic Church, and encouraged meritocracy. Yet rather than acknowledging any of this, Scott makes him out to be a brutish idiot who, for example, didn’t realise that Russia gets a bit chilly in winter. Scott could easily have done his homework. “There have been more books published with ‘Napoleon’ in the title or subtitle than there have been days since he died.” Instead, the man who “dragged country after country out of ancien-régime torpor” will live on in the popular imagination as a tyrannical oaf who threw food at his wife and didn’t take his hat off indoors.

Tattoos, filthy jokes and quiet prayer

When I accepted Channel 4’s invitation to spend four nights with former prisoners in a decommissioned jail, says Peter Hitchens in The Spectator, I confess, I was “truly afraid”. The building is filled with “low arched doorways” and “narrow, tunnel-like cells”. It oppresses the spirit, and encourages “miserable, lonely thoughts”. It was all very well to know that the ex-prisoners were reformed, but “I am an annoying person at the best of times”. My plummy voice alone is “nowadays close to a provocation”, and my opinions are just as unpopular among the criminal classes as they are in “Blairite salons”. Plus, there were “dark corners” hidden from the cameras, where “I might easily have ‘fallen downstairs’”.

But off-camera, my fellow inmates showed me “much generosity and kindness”. Whatever my opinions and background, however posh my voice, they appreciated that I had “volunteered for an unpleasant experience in the hope of finding out more than I knew”. One, “the fearsome, multi-tattooed Chet”, told me it was a good thing that I, who would normally have “crossed the street to avoid him”, had now met him and heard what he had to say. I read the Bible to my cellmate Tom, and very late one night, after hours of quiet conversation, a “very devout” Muslim called Akhi and I prayed side by side. Not since boarding school have I spent so much time in the “compulsory company” of so many men, heard so many filthy jokes, or gone to a gym. It was “squalid, dreary and lonely”, and I could not wait for it to end. It was also “funny, moving and, like so many grim experiences, pretty strongly religious”.

Banged Up: Stars Behind Bars is available to watch on Channel 4.

Ophrys apifera: disguised as a bee. Getty

Darwin’s “little darlings”

By 1862, says Sofia Quaglia in Nautilus, Charles Darwin had travelled the world and encountered a vast array of incredible wildlife. But he couldn’t stop thinking about something that seemed, by comparison, “terribly minute”: orchids. He was fascinated by the dainty flowers – “my little darlings”, he called them. He couldn’t understand how a single family could vary so widely, with upwards of 28,000 species worldwide. And he saw in their intricate forms a “vast landscape of the forces of selective evolution”. Orchids, Darwin said once, “have interested me as much as almost anything in my life”. It’s no coincidence that the first book he published after On The Origin of Species was the rather less snappily titled On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects. 

Orchids are “brilliant at diversifying”. More than 70% of species have developed the ability to grow out of tree trunks and branches, rather than soil. The others have found ingenious ways of getting their flowers pollinated. Some have evolved to mimic the mate – or the favourite meal – of their preferred pollinator. “Ophrys apifera orchids look and smell like female bees. The Hammer orchid eerily resembles a female wasp.” The Satyrium pumilum goes one further, imitating the scent of dead animals to tempt in fruit flies. Others bundle their pollen into little sticky packages, so that no grains are wasted when the pollinators fly off. As Darwin once wrote to a fellow botanist: “The beauty of the adaptations of parts seems to me unparalleled.”

Swift performing earlier this month. TAS2023/Getty

The infectious joy of Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is the “best thing that has happened in America in all of 2023”, says Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. The 33-year-old’s Eras tour has transformed the economy of every city it has visited, resuscitating downtowns that were “battered by the pandemic”. The six nights she played in Los Angeles in August brought with them a “$320m local windfall”; the first 53 nights of the tour boosted US GDP by $4.3bn. Foreign leaders have begged her to bless their land with her economic magic – and not just Canada’s Swiftie-in-chief Justin Trudeau. “Thailand is back on track to be fully democratic after you had to cancel last time due to the coup,” a party leader in Bangkok wrote to the star on X (formerly Twitter). “We all look forward to welcoming you.”

What Swift really brings, besides tourist dollars, is “joy”. Social media is awash with videos of fathers and daughters dancing at her shows. When she played in Seattle in July, the stomping was so heavy it registered on a seismometer as equal to a 2.3-magnitude earthquake. For 17 years she has been growing up with her fans, sharing their stories in her songs. “It’s a relationship.” And we should be thankful she isn’t a worse influence on the millions of girls obsessed with her. “My life doesn’t gravitate towards being edgy, sexy, or cool,” she told an interviewer. “I just naturally am not any of those things.” Pressed for what she is, she said: “I’m imaginative, I’m smart and I’m hardworking.” Quite right. “Onwards to further greatness, Taylor Swift.” Keep reminding everyone it’s good to be alive. “Because it is.”

“There are two kinds of great men: the little great men,
who make all those around them feel little; and the great
great men, who make all those around them feel great.”
GK Chesterton

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