Convenience Big Store: Taking a leaf out of Lenin’s book

5 October, 2022

In the headlines

Liz Truss has defended her economic approach in a speech at the Conservative Party conference, insisting that "whenever there is change, there is disruption". It's an odd way to frame things, says The Economist's Anne McElvoy: "to most voters, 'disruption' suggests trains not running or services failing". Elon Musk has decided to buy Twitter after all, says the FT. The tech billionaire says he'll pay $44bn, the price he initially offered in April before trying to pull out of the deal when the company's stock market valuation tanked. A £40,000 restoration of Great Yarmouth's quayside should only involve trees with "very small fruit", council officials have decided. Their reasoning, says The Times, is that apples, pears and plums could become slippery or be used as "missiles" by marauding children. "Core blimey."

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Lenin: a believer in chaos. Shepard Sherbell/Corbis Saba/Getty

Taking a leaf out of Lenin's book

"The worse, the better" is an old Leninist creed, says The Economist. For things to improve, the thinking goes, they must first become so dreadful people are driven to action. Lenin stole the idea from a 19th-century Russian novel – What Is to Be Done? – that Martin Amis called "insuperably talentless" but also "the most influential novel of all time". Lenin read it five times in one summer and named his manifesto after it. And today its core message has gripped Britain's leaders. "The nihilistic cynicism that shaped Russia's miserable 20th century now rules British politics."

By the logic of this "Leninist fervour", Liz Truss's catastrophic start is really a good thing. "Cheerleaders applaud the chaos." The Telegraph's Allister Heath, who called the mini-Budget "the best I have ever heard", insists that market turmoil is part of a "necessary transition". Yes, he says, the result may be "traumatic" and might "trigger a vicious global recession, higher unemployment and bankruptcies", but things need shaking up. In other words, "ends trump means" – as any good Leninist knows. Well, that's Heath's view. But voters might not be so keen on the "creative destruction being pursued in their name" – they have energy bills and rising mortgage rates to worry about. For Truss and her allies, people living comfortable lives simply don't understand the need for radical change and must be shaken out of their torpor. "The worse, the better."

On the way out

Fashionistas are ditching trainers. The new look is to pair formal shoes with informal outfits, says Grace Cook in the FT: loafers, boots and brogues with tracksuits, hoodies and baseball caps. With billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos wearing Nike and Converse, and city slickers sporting bright white trainers with their Savile Row suits, Gen Zs have adopted the opposite approach. As one trendy shoemaker says: "Their parents are wearing trainers, so kids are rebelling by dressing like their dads once did."

On the money

A batch of Elon Musk's texts made public as part of a lawsuit offers a "rare unvarnished glimpse" into how money changes hands in Silicon Valley, says The Atlantic. It's not as sophisticated as you might think. When the Tesla billionaire decided to buy Twitter, venture capitalist Mark Andreessen sent him a "tossed-off" direct message offering "$250m with no additional work required". "Thanks!" Musk responded. He later asked Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison if he'd consider investing. "Yes, of course," Ellison replied. "A billion… or whatever you recommend." Easy peasy.

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Art

These are some of the winners of the 2022 Drone Photo Awards, including salt harvesters, two polar bears in an abandoned Soviet weather station, and a flock of flamingos. First place went to Armand Sarlangue for his snap of a fissure in an Icelandic volcano. See more of the pictures here.

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Britain's weed laws should roll with the times

A group of police commissioners at this week's Conservative Party conference argued that cannabis should be reclassified as a Class A drug, putting it on the same legal footing as heroin or cocaine. "It's an outrageous suggestion," says Niko Vorobyov in The Guardian, "and totally out of step with the rest of the world." Even among relatively conservative countries, the UK is an outlier. Right-wing politicians back legalisation in Israel – and in the US, "once the world leader in the 'war on drugs'", marijuana has become so normalised that last year Washington state announced it would give away free joints as part of a Covid vaccination drive.

"Why are we still so backwards?" Studies consistently find a small link between heavy cannabis smoking and mental illness, but "no widespread effects" on society at large. And while the number of tokers – "and the strength of what they're smoking" – has risen sharply since the 1960s, rates of schizophrenia in Britain have remained the same. Cases of psychosis aren't up in Canada since legalisation, and the "vast majority" of weed smokers live "sane, productive lives". More than half of Britons support legalisation. And the UK is one of the leading exporters of medicinal cannabis, while "bizarrely denying it to its own citizens". As the world changes around us, our political and media establishment will look more like "out-of-touch dinosaurs".

Noted

If you're in west London, take a trip to Leinster Gardens in Bayswater and examine numbers 23 and 24, says The Spectator. They are "completely false frontages". The five-storey constructions – replete with columns, balconies and sash windows – are there to disguise the open-air section of Tube line that runs underneath the road.

Books

Reading while hot: Kaia Gerber. Instagram/@kaiagerber

Novel-toting It Girls have powered a whole new literary genre, says Bustle: "Hot Girl Books". There are a few essential criteria. First, the characters must be "thin, cis-gendered, bookish women who are having a ton of sex" (think Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation). Then, they must be emotionally fragile, as in Sally Rooney's Normal People or Conversations with Friends. Finally, the author must have some kind of "cult of personality": Eve Babitz, whose memoirs are essential Hot Girl reading, is renowned for once playing a chess match against Marcel Duchamp fully nude.

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It's "480 Otis", a big favourite in this year's Fat Bear Week in Katmai National Park, Alaska. The annual competition, in which the public votes online for their top tubby male, kicks off at 5pm today. Otis is the bear to beat: he once ate 42 salmon in a single sitting, and won the title last year, as well as in 2017, 2016 and 2014. Put your vote in here.

Quoted

"Tradition is tending the flame, not worshipping the ashes."
Gustav Mahler

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