The Vice President has responded by denying he was talking about us, calling the media “hysterical”. History tends to suggest that this will not calm things down. With US tariffs hanging in the balance — not to mention World War III — a distraction must be found to subdue the escalating dynamic. Step forward, Netflix’s With Love, Meghan. There could be no better time for the Duchess of Sussex’s “tips and tricks” on how to become a Californian domestic goddess to finally hit our screens.

In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard argued that when two sides get locked into an apparently intractable feud, unity can only be restored by finding a scapegoat onto which to load the mutual animus by proxy. But not just any “surrogate victim” will do: “all victims [must]… bear a certain resemblance to the object they replace”. To reestablish transatlantic alliances, then, ideally we need a sacrificial object who seems quite annoyingly American (to us), but also quite annoyingly British (to them). And who better than a barefoot Meghan Sussex? Rubbing pink Himalayan salt into British economic wounds, she talks about being “defined by growth” — but also seems to have a not-very-Californian addiction to bacon.

More from this author

Trying to forgive Ash Sarkar

By Kathleen Stock

The ostensible idea of the new show is educational. The Duchess will tell viewers how to become better hostesses by “elevating the ordinary”. This roughly translates as fiddling about with edible flowers and sticking labels on everything, written in elegant calligraphy. She wafts around an enormous Californian garden saturated with so much color that sunlight-starved British retinas can barely cope, gasping at heirloom tomatoes and inhaling various scents through delicately flared nostrils. Then she pads into someone else’s well-appointed kitchen, chops a few things up with a tiny knife, and produces aphorisms such as “rosemary is nice and grounding” and “the brightness of citrus helps so many things”.

She seems extremely keen on managing people’s “experiences”. When someone comes to visit, she wants to give them “a guest experience”; when people drop kids off at a party for Archie or Lili, she wants to give them a “parent experience”. Arranging chopped fruit on a board to resemble a rainbow, she begins with the strawberries, but generously gives the viewer permission to do “whatever feels right for you”. The mantra “Love is in the details!” is uttered several times. Sometimes it’s with a slight air of passive-aggression, prompting the cynical viewer to imagine terrible rows with Harry when he forgets to bring her morning cup of tea.

So far, so stereotypically Yank; but there are weird digressions from the template here too. As I watched, I started to think her time in Blighty had left her with more than a taste for our dry cured pork products and a trauma response to adverts for The Crown. Incredibly for an American showbiz type, she can’t actually pull off all the positivity and quasi-sincerity; she comes across as too self-conscious, and her energy too low. It’s almost as if she is one of us.

The first two episodes demonstrate this most starkly. In the first, her make-up artist and gay BFF comes to visit and she tries very hard to give him a guest experience. The repartee between them is turgid and halting, his gestures are nervous, and they both seem like introverts, dying inside. At one point, he rebukes her for assuming he has a counter in his tiny New York kitchen; at another, he looks at the stunning Montecito mountains and says the quiet part out loud: “I feel like this is all fake.” Hovering in the background, laughing and taunting the dead air between them, are the ghosts of Will and Grace. At times it feels as if she would rather be communicating entirely with labels.

But this is as nothing to the awkwardness between Meghan and fellow celeb “toddler mom” Mindy Kaling in the next episode. The gimmick is that they pretend to host a kids’ party together, minus the leavening presence of any actual children. Over the course of 40 minutes, Kaling’s natural perkiness and gifts for comic timing are slowly crushed into the black hole of Meghan’s earnestness. “I’m so glad you’re here, it’s going to be fun,” our hostess-with-the-mostess says near the beginning, a quick smile reaching neither eyes nor voice. By the end, Kaling is having to conjure up enthusiasm at the world’s least exciting party bags — mini gardening tools, seeds, and compostable pots; not a Haribo in sight — and Meghan, gazing off into the middle distance, is trying to imagine what would be happening at their fake party if there were real people present. “The kids are enjoying it, and then as the kids run off to play, at least the adults still feel they have had an experience too.” “Yes, which is what these are for,” says Kaling, gazing gratefully at her peach bellini.

It’s a mystery why the series starts with these shockers, because the following episodes are a lot better. One can only assume some high-up at Netflix decided this could only succeed as a hate-watch and so frontloaded the cringe. In later ones, our impeccably clad protagonist hosts close girlfriends on various confected pretexts — a Mahjong night, a beauty session — with whom she is much more at ease. The warmth and affection between them look genuine, and especially after a drink or three — more evidence of the secret British heart beating underneath the beige knitwear.

It is at moments like this that the series comes closest to managing what it was presumably always supposed to be: a feast for envious female eyes. It certainly isn’t a cooking show; there’s not even the vaguest pretence at offering recipes. “Who wouldn’t want this?” Meghan asks us as she surveys her bountiful garden, summing up the attitude she secretly hopes onlookers will take to take every bit of her gorgeous life. When she says she wants to show those living “in a little flat in London or small apartment in the city” that they too can have “some small piece of this”, she probably means: why not try making mint tea in a tannin-stained mug to the sound of traffic; or cut up some puny strawberries on a scarred old chopping board, so your toddler can turn up her nose, make sick noises, and chuck them at the cat? That way, you can gain even more clarity about by how utterly unlike your life is to Meghan’s serene and beautiful one.

Suggested reading

Prince Harry: the millennial's millennial

By Poppy Sowerby

But the thing is, it doesn’t work. Alongside his work on scapegoating, Girard is now best known for his theory of “mimetic desire”. He thinks wanting something is just coveting whatever others already have, with no independent appraisal of its value. Most or even all human conflict stems from robotic, envious grasping at what other people want, allegedly. Peter Thiel is a big Girardian, as is Vance, or so they say. I’ve always thought the theory was far too simple. Blatant thirst-trap programmes such as With Love, Meghan are its reductio ad absurdum.

Of course, it’s true that desires can be generated via exposure to others’ desires. Wanting to try what others are already enjoying is a reasonably efficient heuristic, based on the assumption there is something genuinely enjoyable there that I might like too. But it has a limit: just ask toddlers, nonplussed by parental rhapsodising about strawberries, and unswayed by the preferences of peers. Adults, too, have minds of their own, at least sometimes; which explains why populist politicians such as Trump and Vance try to work out what those minds want, then give it to them. If anything, progressives seem more Girardian in spirit, assuming that if policies are presented with enough desirable surface glitter by celebs and influencers, our magpie minds will get onboard with the trend.

But sometimes, the more it seems someone wants you to want something, the easier it is to resist. In With Love, Meghan’s case, the desperation is palpable and it’s counterproductive. The only things worth envying in her life are the odd things here and there that seem real and unforced: her friendships, her love for family and dogs, her appreciation of nature. All the rest — the Le Creuset, the crystal glasses, the perfect blue sky, the irritatingly upbeat music — left me happier than ever with my food-spattered compost bin, my dishwasher-scratched glassware, and the iron-grey English sky. As the woman herself might say, it turns out that my viewing experience has been defined by growth.

The cream of American journalism was not much interested in slathering itself over the Maxwell story last summer. They were more invested in tone-policing each other’s language, or playing the game of labelling their colleagues racist following the murder of George Floyd.

Star byline American hacks are so much grander than their British cousins. They are celebrated, and become celebrities. In Britain the successful journalist is the one who has enough money to (finally) fix their boiler next month. Maybe, after nearly losing their mind several times, and surrendering all their hair to a stress-related-disorder, they scratch together the words for a political thriller that nobody reads. If they’re really, truly successful they move to America. In the land of the bald eagle, the British accent — even if it’s a Welsh one — makes them sound attractive, funny and clever.

American journalists want to be liked. They think of themselves, in the good guys busting the corrupt guys Watergate tradition, as ethical. British journalists would certainly like to be more ethical, but deep down I suspect that many of them would still hack a grieving mother’s phone if you gave them a promise from an editor and the assurances of a lawyer.

Anyway, all those battles over racism in the US press in 2020 did have one major consequence: a flock of big American journalists fled their perches at the biggest papers and magazines. Famous old classical liberal journalists like Andrew Sullivan exchanged berths in the mainstream media for new homes at the subscription newsletter service Substack. And the consequence of that move is to make US journalism resemble British journalism — albeit the British journalism of the 18^th century.

Substack was founded in 2017 by Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi, and Hamish McKenzie. Each is a parody of the Silicon Valley tech bro, a type that in my imagination eats cicada tacos for lunch and speculates on the impact of Bitcoin on developing economies after dinner. Ultramodern then. But Substack, an online platform that provides writers with the infrastructure to send newsletters to paying subscribers, isn’t modern at all. It’s a throwback. Best, Sethi and McKenzie’s use of new-ish technology is retrieving and reviving an old form of publishing: the 18^th century literary periodical.

More from this author

Twilight of the centrist dads

By Will Lloyd

In the 18^th century there were no hard borders between philosophy, journalism, memoirs, confessions, sermons, travelogues, ephemera, satires, screeds, and squibs. London publishing was like one of those pictures of a murky pre-Cambrian swamp, swarming with colourful oddities and crudely formed clusters of life. There was little distinction between fiction and non-fiction; personal prejudice was indistinguishable from social critique. There was, thank God, not a data journalist in sight. Objectivity was less important than fantasy.

The most popular form of all in this period was the periodical literary essay, which survived well into the 19^th century. These short essays were driven by personalities. Like Substack’s top newsletters today, they were sold to the public on the reputational strength of superstar writers who were not above satirising each other.

There was Richard Steele’s Tatler (1709-11), a breezy gossip rag, and Joseph Addison’s Spectator (1711-12), which spied on politicians in coffee houses. Dr Johnson published The Rambler (1750-2) and The Idler (1758-60) as homes for his most meandering, self-conscious essays. The periodicals were about taste, war, history, manners, and fashion — the news in other words — but through a lens that was semi-fictional. The writers usually performed a character. So, Dr Johnson was not Dr Johnson, but “The Rambler” — a man with his own peculiar notions, his own unique, desultory angle on the world. The most successful periodicals, and this is the case with Substacks too, were defined by the character of the writer and the strength of their voice.

Whether any of it was true or not was beside the point. The 18^th century politician, diarist and letter writer Horace Walpole can be found moaning somewhere that journalism was full of “nothing but lies, every one of which fifty persons could contradict and disprove”.

As James Boswell, Johnson’s biographer and a periodical essayist himself with The Hypochondriak (1777-83) announced: “We may be in some degree whatever character we choose.” The periodical writers were offering more than information to their readers. They offered their public a fantasy persona to read about. If the Mail Online sidebar has taught us anything about human nature at all, it is that people enjoy feasting on the lives of others. The ups, the downs, the pratfalls, the implosions, the HR-bothering opinions. Objective news cannot compete with fleshy human drama, or splenetic POVs — the key insight shared by Substack, which is full of writers feuding with other writers, and the literary periodicals.

Suggested article

Oxbridge is killing journalism

By Justin Webb

One critic of Substack has described America’s digital media ecosystem as a “feudal structure”. Here “highly charismatic knights” — like say, Matt Taibbi, who has an enormous Substack following — are the winners who take it all. An interesting idea, but it would be difficult to find a time when this wasn’t;’t true. Public taste in the 21^st century is as unpredictable as it was in the 18^th century. Then, as now, those who invested in writing and publishing looked for safe returns and backed pedigreed racers. At the top of the industry, whichever century you choose to look at, you will always find a blessed, golden circle of proven champs.

For every Dr Johnson selling out his Rambler and Matthew Yglesias with his tens of thousands of Substack subscribers, there will always be a dozen writers sinking into penury, disgrace and madness. The age of the literary periodical was the age of Grub Street too. This semi-mythical area of London was immiserated and impoverished, garrisoned by a cast of indigent poets, semi-literate dead beats, half-professional plagiarists, their tarts and the bailiffs who were out to hunt them down. William Hogarth could have spent his entire career drawing endless versions of his The Distressed Poet (1737).

Ambition was the evil star that burned over Grub Street. The vast surplus pool of writerly labour drove wages down (a painful phenomenon that anyone who makes a living by their words will recognise immediately). One writer summed it up with true journalistic melodrama in 1758: “there is no Difference between the Writer in his Garret, and the Slave in the Mines;… Both have their Tasks assigned to them alike: Both must drudge and starve; and neither can hope for Deliverance.”

Only the names have changed since then. Today’s starving journalists live in overpriced flats in London’s Hackney or Brooklyn’s Williamsburg. They dream of topping the Substack leaderboard; they’ll be lucky to crank out five listicles a day for Buzzfeed. Even at The New Yorker — the journalistic equivalent of Mount Olympus — just the other day the junior staff were threatening to go on strike. Outside Anna Wintour’s house they chanted, “Bosses wear Prada, workers get nada!” Wintour could sack them all right now and replace each and every one of them before breakfast tomorrow.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the mental agony of journalism has always been something that journalism refers back to. (Here’s a Substack about that by Freddie de Boer, who is very much in the winner’s enclosure of the platform.) “We should not find it astonishing,” wrote Max Weber years ago, “that so many journalists have gone off the rails or have otherwise lost their value as human beings.”

Suggested article

Given my time again, I wouldn't choose journalism

By Sarah Ditum

Journalists today — largely due to recency bias — imagine that they have it harder, and that their careers are that much tougher, due to the ruthless competition fostered by Substack, or other platforms like Twitter. They might feel like they need to talk about their mental health (fair enough), but they — I hope — have never been paid for their articles with loaves of bread, like their ancestors in Grub Street often were.

Johnson’s Rambler, just like the discussion around Substack across the American press, served as a meta-commentary on the struggles of journalism itself. The world is endlessly competitive writes Johnson, who rose from the depths of Grub Street to the top of his profession: “Every one wishes for the distinctions for which thousands are wishing at the same time.” There is only ever a scarce supply of fame, so success necessarily entails victory over others. Otherwise, all that remained for the failed writer was, as Johnson put it in a poem: “Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.”

Substack is taking American journalists — and inevitably, British ones — back to Johnson’s world. It is not very hard to imagine a scurrilous Rod Liddle newsletter, once he has finally nuked himself in the pages of The Sunday Times. Perhaps the most promising development for Substack on this side of the Atlantic is Joshi Herrmann’s Manchester Mill. Hermann is using Substack to create a thoughtful, ultra-local, story-driven paper that serves Manchester alone. Barely a year old, it’s already better than any local newspaper in Britain.

Still, if there’s any lesson in the similarities between Substack and the literary periodicals, it’s that trends run in cycles, not straight lines. Substack won’t last forever, even if it is generating a flurry of attacks on it from envious, non-Substack writers now. It will be lame eventually. That’s what happened to the periodicals.

In Barchester Towers (1857) Anthony Trollope pokes fun at a moth-eaten country squire who possesses a complete set of Dr Johnson’s periodicals. He yacks on about how The Idler is superior to anything produced before or since. In forty years there’ll be a hack talking about Substack like that, and another hack taking the piss out of them for it.