Naomi Alderman

@naomialderman.bsky.social

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I write novels (eg The Power, new novel is The Future), I make games (eg Zombies, Run!), I believe in not-getting-into-pointless-arguments-on-the-internet as an act of revolution. However complex you think things are, they're more complex than that.

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the News Agents podcast has been especially amazing recently Emily Maitlis reporting from the RNC, on JD Vance who called Trump "America's Hitler", on Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Russell Brand speaking there... ...has made me imagine a Watchmen-style comic about 2045, when they're all on trial.

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Naomi Alderman

for everyone who has been enjoying dyspraxia chat today (or is in any other way neurodiverse or different in your body): do read Susan Sontag's Illness As Metaphor every single illness and difference that we had no ready explanation for has always been interpreted as a character or moral flaw

(I met a neurologist at a party and told him I'd managed to forget how to ride a bike - which was quite upsetting for me when I discovered it, as it had been a VERY hard-won skill as a child - and he said "ah right that's diagnostic for dyspraxia. Non-dyspraxics really can't forget.")

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Naomi Alderman

Iaia of Cyzicus was a 1st century Greek artist, notable for being a woman artist who painted women’s portraits. Here’s a 15th century depiction of her in her studio, using a convex mirror painting a (very early) self-portrait (Boccaccio, De Mulieribus Claris)

I find the mysterious objects from Skara Brae… less than mysterious. They also suggest that they were having a fun, relaxed and respectful time in their functioning egalitarian community. (Girths. The choice of girths suggests respectful.)

I was at Skara Brae today, it is the most attractive the prehistoric lifestyle ever looks, with no sinister human sacrificey shit, functioning communities, rich pasture land, seas teeming with fish, handcrafts... People died at 40ish with severe osteoarthritis, they would have killed for ibuprofen.

it's particularly obvious reading Tolstoy re: how his characters talk about 'the peasants' and eg how ridiculous it is to provide education and schools for them because they'll get no benefit from it, they are just a different type of person to 'us'.

has anyone written about the US/USSR antagonism as "narcissism of small differences"? two enormous nations made up of many disparate states which overthrew a monarchy in a violent revolution and set up a government by and for the people, co-existing with an entrenched history of enslavement?

This is also what happens with the most ridiculous and offensive views on the other side of whatever debate you happen to be involved in. A few people think very ridiculous & offensive things and the rest of us panic and amplify them hugely, causing other people to start echoing their stupid ideas

What I think happens: there are a few people who are so thick that it is mesmerising & attention-grabbing in the way a terrible accident is. One cannot look away from how stupid they are. The more you think about it, the more of your attention it consumes, the more of them your brain thinks exist.

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Naomi Alderman

so there’s a very nice app called OneSec which introduces a pause before opening social media apps (and can eg redirect you to books or Kindle or whatever else you’d like to be sent to) and I personally felt today was a good day to install it. (Not affiliated. Just aware of the information crisis)

So much “voters” discourse is “first, assume the existence of someone much less intelligent than yourself and everyone taking part in this discussion”. A much lower stakes version playing out with prison reform in the UK, where there’s an imagined, incredibly thick bloc of swing voters.

This is the social media business model tbh.

I think a lot of people get into a bad space here because the people with power they actually want to yell at would never in a million years be on Bluesky so we end up yelling at people who aren’t that bad and it makes everyone pissy and weird

fundamentally we don’t expect the NHS to manufacture its own pens, cups or scalpels. some things are just more cheaply and efficiently done outside and bought in. not every economic interaction with the private sector is privatisation (or slippery slope to it).

It’s important to be able to differentiate because I suspect there’s going to be a lot of shouting about allowing the NHS to buy anything extra in from the private sector. if it’s still free at the point of use and it reduces waiting lists, it’s hard for me to see a good argument against.

there’s going to be a conversation about the NHS and the private sector in this parliament my view FWIW: some things need to be outsourced. eg private companies do scanning more efficiently than the NHS. buying that in is more like the NHS buying in pens or thermometers than true “privatisation”.

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Naomi Alderman

I’ll say it before and I’ll say it again, the most tangible manifestation of the problem with how the streaming services see art is their complete aversion to differentiating between any of it.

People in Orkney really hate the cruise ships. Of course they’re good business. There are two coming in today and every shop is getting ready for a massively busy day. On the radio a woman was complaining that “every year in spite of the portaloos one of them defecates on our prehistoric sites”.

@twigtechnology.bsky.social we’re coming to Skara Brae (again 😂) today/tomorrow - any recs on timing to miss the cruise ships? (Also I think you and I had a good chat last year at Skara!)

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Naomi Alderman

Good. Because anyone telling you that our broadcasters should ditch their out of date funding models and emulate the sexy 21st Century streaming platforms clearly hasn’t looked at how all those sexy 21st Century streaming platforms are getting on right now.

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This really is terrifically good - as I knew it would be the minute @naomialderman.bsky.social first mentioned it - not only deeply considered and accessible, but Naomi is an excellent presenter, do have a listen if you get the chance: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

The Third Information Crisis by Naomi Alderman - Mapping the Inner World - BBC Soundswww.bbc.co.uk Our third crisis: digital communication.

What I am delighted by (apart from all the many things I am delighted by in having a sane policy on prisons) is that this is the thing that will actually keep people in prison safe, women in prison safe. Not the trans panic rhetoric the right try to use to deflect from their failures.

The Daily Mail's hardline approach to prisons has utterly failed. Now it tries to shame the people cleaning up the mess its allies have made iandunt.substack.com/p/whisper-it...

Whisper it, but we might be about to see a rational prison policyiandunt.substack.com Amid ruins, a glimpse of hope

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Naomi Alderman

OMG.

Instagram is a boasting machine that routinely makes me feel terrible when I look at it and yet I am also then drawn to look at it again.

re: changing your life. I tell you, sometimes everyone needs an imaginary friend. Dumbo's feather. The evil ventriloquist dummy whispering in your ear. I used to say that I was led out of Orthodox Judaism by Buffy the Vampire Slayer but it turns out I did that myself.

if you loved someone's writing and you now find out that their sexual ethics are awful to you... I just want to say that it says nothing about you that you loved their work and nothing about you that you learned from the work. if the work 'changed your life', consider that you did that yourself.

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Naomi Alderman

The new Superindendent is a smooth operator - but is he TOO smooth? Rayner has her suspicions, but her attention is diverted elsewhere when a local property developer disappears on a night out...

doh of COURSE it wasn't an LP sleeve...

The thing that is fascinating about this is: so it wasn’t about getting Brexit done. Brexit like other culture war topics is just a proxy for general discontent, desire for a different story about ourselves, the country.

Little data point that seems to be being ignored in the rush to bang on about the scary rough boys. Reform got 4m votes. That’s much more than the Brexit party in 2019 (600k) but roughly the same as UKIP got in 2015 (3.9m).

I’m experiencing a tremendous sense of wellbeing

Honestly the only reason to dismiss the theory that Rishi Sunak is a Labour mole who has gone all out to destroy the Conservative party is that a Labour mole would surely be worried about breaking their cover:

Tories split over timeline to elect leader with Sunak hoping to quit by autumnwww.theguardian.com Some senior figures in party fear appointment of interim replacement for ex-PM could present Nigel Farage with an ‘open goal’

This situation, eg, is not tremendous. Vel D’Hiv was absolutely an atrocity committed by the apparatus of the French state.

Yeah. I am no expert in French politics but Melenchon has a whole section of his Wikipedia page entitled “accusations of antisemitism”. Which is never an AMAZING thing for a leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world eh.

BTW, I'm pleased that NR lost in France. But it's pretty tough to celebrate the ascendancy of a guy who called French Jews “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest” in a 2017 speech.