Welcome to the first edition of Ostrich Farm, a weekly newsletter about culture and politics.
In this inaugural edition (which will send to exactly two inboxes — mine, and my other one):
“If she smells mould, tell you her smell it too” — reflections on Kate Winslet as Chancellor Vernham in the regime (light spoilers, of which there are very few, really shouldn’t endanger your enjoyment of the show)
“There’s some evidence that astrology often appeals to people who lack critical thinking skills and want to feel special” — a number of thoughts I had while reading Adam Grant’s anti-astrology manifesto (and the need to revisit and rethink one of my arguments following a recent eclipse-related tragedy)
I loved HBO’s new satire, The Regime.
At least until episodes five and six, where it all got a bit shouty for my tastes.
I’d go as far as to say that in under four hours, this show did a better job of explaining today's cautionary tale of a political climate than all of my university-era political science classes combined.
Despite its relatively low IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes ratings, I think The Regime has at least mid sleeper hit potential (see: Idiocracy).
It reminded me a lot of Orwell’s Animal Farm and Glory by Noviolet Bulowayo, two books that feature talking, politicking livestock, and ask a lot of the reader in terms of suspending disbelief.
We're introduced to a Chancellor Elena Vernham who “took the tiny party her father founded and transformed it into a monster” (a prophecy for Ivanka?) and we adore her immediately, because, well, she’s Kate Winslet, but also because nobody, historically, has ever been able to resist lighting so holy.
Vernham is both Lady, and Lord. Giant portraits of her face hang from every available wall, à la Sadam Hussain, Bashar al Assad, and pretty much every other problematic leader in at least the last hundred years.
She performs ‘If you leave me now’ Marilyn Monroe slash Marnie-style at her Victory Day Party, where she also tells the US CEO of a cobalt-hungry company to accept her terms, or: “Hold China’s co*ck while they piss all over your shoes.”
Vernham also delivers a creepy daily address, signing off with an overly familiar: “I bless you all, and I bless our love, always.”
Out of curiosity, I looked up Trump’s closing words on the speech he made on January 6th. They were: “God bless you and God Bless America. Thank you all for being here. This is incredible. Thank you very much. Thank you.” The word “love” was used 14 times during the speech.
Oh, and The Chancellor also regularly speaks to dead father’s decaying body, which is encased in glass. (We’re lucky Winslet was cast instead of Barry Keoghan.)
An interesting thing about this casting is the choice to make our dictator a woman, who, incidentally, doesn’t respect other women.
A quick and not at all scientific Google search around “how many dictators have been female” has folks reaching 3100+ years back to Chinese Empress Wu Zetian, and OP doesn’t seem 100% sure of the accuracy of those accounts.
Will Tracy of Succession worked on this, which lends itself to the theory that Vernham is to fascism as Logan Roy was to capitalism — “a composite of various IRL oligarchs.”
Her hypochondria could be a nod to Hitler (a “lifelong hypochondriac” with a “dread of cancer”); Stalin (a “fidgety hypochondriac suffering from chronic tonsillitis, psoriasis, rheumatic aches”); Jon-Il (a “vain, paranoid, cognac-guzzling hypochondriac”); or Putin (a fairly obvious press release circulated and widely picked up by publications of questionable authority in 2022 claimed Putin is “a hypochondriac trying to embalm himself with botox”).
The Husband, aka Nicolas “Elena is very persuasive” Vernham, is brilliantly played by French actor and screenwriter Guillaume Gallienne.
“Sounds a bit chewy for a fashion mag, doesn’t it?” Nicolas replies in EP01 when asked by a Vogue journalist about his wife’s government’s surveillance of private citizens.
In this scene, Gallienne’s flawless portrayal of the ruling classes’ self-promotion, stiff upper lip policies, and devaluing of the popular media reminds me all at once of of Prince Philip (On his visit to a Caribbean hospital in 1966: "You have mosquitoes. I have the Press."); King Charles ("The Prince has been prescient in identifying charitable need and setting up and driving forward charities to meet it," said a 2004 report on the now King’s daily activities), and again, Donald Trump (“The FAKE NEWS media ... is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”).
I could keep playing spot the IRL geopolitical parallels for days, but I’ll wrap this up with a final thought: Do we think it’s an accident the name of the place our beloved dictator forcibly occupies is called “Westgate”..?
“Land of the sugar beet. Stunning place,” says Chancellor Vernham to Zuback when he says he’s from Westgate in EP01. Cut to EP03 — “Everybody knows it’s an occupation.” I also see Putin parallels in the Chancellor’s refusal to call a spade a war.
Listen, of course horoscopes aren’t “scientific”.
But are they really “harmful,” as organizational psychologist Adam Grant asserts in his recent Substack ‘We need to talk about astrology’?
I’ve always thought of astrology the same way I think about tarot, palmistry, psychics, and some forms of journaling and meditation. I like how Gabi Abrao (@sighswoon) puts it — astrology is more like a Rorschach test for revealing what’s top of mind for you.
Or bottom of mind, so to speak.
Which is to say, we all contain multitudes. Sometimes, it’s difficult to know how you think or feel about something without a prompt; the right cliché; or a tiny nudge in any direction, really.
A psychologist I know talks about the idea of patient-led (or patient-centred) care; an approach that involves actively involving patients in decision-making processes around their own treatment.
Isn’t this a little bit of what checking your horoscope in the morning can provide? A moment to pause and consider a cliched pearl of wisdom — no less true just because it’s widely applicable — and set a decisive intention about how you’d like to care for yourself that day?
Here’s what mine said this morning: “Boundaries are non-negotiable today. You have every right to create them.”
A fairly harmless reminder, no?
Beneficial, even.
Or so I thought.
Then I thought harder.
What are the makers of the two astrology apps on my phone doing with my data? I checked their Privacy Policies. Realised I do not in fact know how to scan a Privacy Policy for red flags. Learned how to do that. Didn’t find any.
I guess the cognitive space occupied by remembering to read my silly little horoscope three mornings out of seven could arguably be better put to use thinking about to convince Taylor Swift not to take thirteen-minute flights on her private plane, but other than that, I’m with Liz Plank on this one: “What’s the harm?”
Here is something I do know: Somebody with the intellectual capacities and reach of Adam Grant could definitely be putting their time to better use then disproving the scientific validity of daily horoscopes. Which, by the way, are just one branch of astrology.
Yes, but, astrology is a gateway drug to conspiracist thinking..!
“It can open the door to the hard stuff,” says Grant, citing research suggesting “people who believe in astrology are also more likely to think the Holocaust didn’t happen, the earth isn’t spherical, and 9/11 was planned by the U.S. government.”
Anecdotally, this tracks.
As a card-carrying member of the yoga community, I saw Covid-19 conspiracies spread like wildfire — especially among colleagues and acquaintances who still used Facebook.
BUT: If you’ve been liking posts about being an Aquarian and suddenly find yourself on the Sacred-Feminine to f*ck-Modern-Medicine pipeline, I’d argue that’s more the fault of Big Tech’s cheap algorithm tricks, and less of your lack of “critical thinking skills,” as Grant backhandedly implies.
(Before a masterfully executed backpedal with “I know that’s not you.” Must be suuuuper fun to argue with this dude.)
And look, astrology isn’t “scientific”, as Grant astutely observes.
Not anymore, anyway, but it sure used to be.
Before Newton published the universal law of gravitation in 1687, people studied and believed in different laws, and those laws were astrological.
Because people believed the earth was the “center and bottom of the universe, it was fitting that inferiors should be ruled and governed by superiors — the heavenly bodies,” explains American historian Lynn Thorndike in his 1955 essay titled ‘The True Place of Astrology in the History of Science.’
Thorndike reckons these astrological laws were pretty scientifically obtained, for their time: “Astrology certainly applied mathematical method to natural phenomena. Geometry and trigonometry, sines and chords, were needed to trace the courses and to find the positions of the planets.”
From this view, astrology was probably the most comprehensive scientific documentation of its time.
It was only when one of it’s foundational principles — aka, ‘the position of the stars and planets affect what happens to nature on earth’ — was replaced by Newton’s law — that we realised the position of the stars and planets are a result of the force of gravitational attraction between celestial bodies, as a result of their relative distance and mass.
Then we figured out that every object with mass (like planets and stars) attracts every other object with mass. The bigger the mass, the stronger the pull. Newton also said that the farther away things are, the weaker the pull. This is why planets orbit stars and moons orbit planets – they're being pulled by gravity.
Since the most popular branch of what we now call “Astrology” is about how the positions of stars and planets might influence our lives, Newton’s law disproves this, because Newton showed that gravity works the same way everywhere in the universe, regardless of where stars and planets are. This means that the positions of stars and planets don't really affect what happens here on Earth in the way astrology claims.
But the idea that astrology needs to be scientific or else it’s “harmful” is a bit of a false binary, no?
I haven’t got a PhD in anything, but it feels like astrology — like rewatching Friends — should probably be viewed and enjoyed within the context of its time.
I don’t know anybody irl who plans their life based on the cute cliches their astrology apps send them every day, but I know a lot of people who are inspired and motivated by astrology-led aphorisms — none of which are half as harmful as spending five minutes on Twitter, imho.
Like in marketing, we’re more open to receiving messages when we believe they’ve been personalised for us individually. I’d argue the messages being sent out by the astrology community are usually not that bad, right..?
UPDATE. Well, a known astrology influencer apparently tried to kill her whole family because this week’s solar eclipse was going to trigger total spiritual warfare resulting in the apocalypse. I think we’d get more value from focusing the conversation here about big tech’s failure to regulate conspiracist content in service of pushing up daily active users so they can charge more for advertising, and it’s evident that astrology can indeed be a gateway drug to the aforementioned conspiracist content. Both things can exist and be true. I’m suggesting we might all get further by villainising the systems that feed these negative patterns as opposed to fixating on the content itself. I did, however, write the above before this tragedy occurred, and would be lying if I said I wasn’t sitting here reconsidering every word. I watched The Antisocial Network last week (it was brilliant; shoutout esp to the animation team <3) and it made me realise how vulnerable we all are. Our drive for connection can make us crazy. Zuck is profiting from his desire for it. Musk is a victim of it. Nobody is immune. At the end of The Antisocial Network the people who were involved in the early days of 4chan all have the same advice: real-life connection trumps online connection. Pun unintended, but apt. It’s going to be a fascinating year for those interested in how algorithms are influencing elections. The TikTok ban came just in time, and Instagram’s auto-limit on ‘political content’ went anything but unnoticed. Say, where will the vast majority of American voters be getting the entertainment and conspiracies they need to inform the future of the free world this November? It’s anybody’s guess, much like it might be anybody’s cake to have and eat too. As long as they’re white, male, and based in SF.
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If you read any of this, thank you so very, very much.
Any of the following next steps would genuinely make my day, maybe month <3
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