Marguerite Moon

Artist/Photographer. Mom. Twitter Voyeur. Tweet Curator. she/her

[Qasim Rashid, Esq. @QasimRashid]

This piece is for men. Every time I write about how men systemically abuse women, my DMs explode with “Not All Men” complaints.

But a new study goes one step further, and demonstrates that empirically, statistically, and factually, it literally is all men. And the data is horrifying. https://t.co/HJiAOabPPi

[Marguerite Moon @MadameMoon]

@LH44Fanpage8 yet Vasseur called something that Charles did recently “magical” 🤯This farce race after race is so obvious & intolerable. How does Lewis stand it? He truly is built differently. Lewis’ & Charles’ starts yesterday show you all you need to know about their quality

[Marguerite Moon @MadameMoon]

@ScuderiaFerrari @Charles_Leclerc @LewisHamilton @peroniuk You don’t deserve Lewis, Ferrari 💔

[Marguerite Moon @MadameMoon]

@MONDOFERRARI_ Such a laughably melodramatic suggestion. Ham wants to win championships IN A CAR, not be team principal. So clear who can’t see the forest for the trees - diehard leclerc fans. I used to like leclerc, but his attitude towards team mates suck. Big fish in a small pond mentality

[Marguerite Moon @MadameMoon]

@fiagirly Knew he’d do it

[Linda Mamoun @mamoun_linda]

Literally impossible to imagine this headline above a photo of a white baby.

[Lethabo @CheetahPlains]

Cape Town has more Airbnb listings than Amsterdam, San Francisco and Singapore combined. Yeah, that place is gone and gone forever!

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Hamilton Insights @LH44_insights]

What If Ferrari Means It?

For months, the kind explanation for Lewis Hamilton’s season has been Ferrari incompetence. It may also be the convenient one.

Singapore. Lewis Hamilton has just switched to soft tyres and is lapping faster than almost everyone on the circuit. The alternative strategy he chose is finally working.

Then Charles Leclerc makes his stop and rejoins less than a second ahead of him.

“We lost two seconds that last lap.”

“I need to use this speed, mate.”

Then he makes the most reasonable offer a driver can make to his team. Let me try, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll give the place back.

“If I can’t pull away I’ll let him back past.”

“Copy.”

Nothing follows.

“Alright... I’ll back off.”

He started third and finished sixth. Leclerc started second and finished second.

We know this scene. We saw it at Spa and at Zandvoort. We heard it described at Monza, when Hamilton asked Ferrari to change its procedures so “the same situations can’t keep happening.”

They kept happening.

The usual explanation is that Ferrari is simply Ferrari: chaotic, slow, proud and allergic to change. I have made that argument myself. But even incompetence has a direction. A badly run team can still have a groove it slides into, and processes that keep tipping the same way because that’s how they were built.

So the question isn’t whether Ferrari makes mistakes. It’s why the consequences keep landing on the same side of the garage, and what priorities sit behind the decisions that put them there.

Let’s ask the question that keeps getting dismissed as fan paranoia. What if it isn’t incompetence? What if, at least some of the time, Ferrari means it?

Follow the cost

Start with who has paid.

Melbourne. Mercedes pitted both cars under the Virtual Safety Car. Ferrari left Hamilton out. He spotted it before the pit wall did: “At least one of us should have come in.”

Silverstone. A late Safety Car call cost him track position. Leclerc’s race was left alone.

Hungary. A pit-lane speeding penalty put Hamilton behind Leclerc. That one was his fault. But Ferrari didn’t ask Leclerc to back off and let the faster car through. Juan Pablo Montoya thought it should have.

Spa. Hamilton told the team he had the pace to attack Verstappen, who was a second up the road. Ferrari didn’t swap them. “If you’re Ferrari now,” Jolyon Palmer said on air, “it’s wise to let Lewis go through.” Leclerc finished second and Hamilton fourth.

Zandvoort. Hamilton caught Leclerc on fresher tyres. Ferrari called Leclerc in, and by RaceFans’ count he ignored the call twice. Hamilton waited. “Great waste of time there, guys.” Then: “Are you using me as a guinea pig?” Ferrari later admitted it had been willing to let Hamilton lose time.

Singapore. Hamilton’s alternative strategy depended on clear air. Ferrari protected the car taking that air away.

There’s a fair counter-argument, and it deserves a hearing. Sepang hurt both Ferraris, since both started on slicks. Strategy is guesswork under pressure, and every team gets calls wrong.

All true. But only one Ferrari was on the front row in Sepang, and only one was a realistic title contender. When a bad call hits both cars, the driver with the most to lose loses the most. And when Ferrari’s choices affect only one car, look at how often it is Leclerc’s.

Two drivers, two versions of “protect the team”

Look at how Ferrari talks about each driver when things go wrong.

At Zandvoort, Leclerc didn’t follow the pit calls while he was holding his teammate up. Vasseur’s public verdict was that extending the stint had created “some confusion.” It would be cleared up in the debrief. He added that “you can always rewrite the race.”

In Singapore, under the VSC, Hamilton missed the pit entry after Ferrari called him in. Vasseur’s public verdict was this:

“It was entirely Lewis’s decision. We called him into the pits, but he didn’t come in... He would have finished P3.”

So one driver gets “confusion,” handled in private. The other gets a named, public verdict with a podium attached. Vasseur says his job is to “protect the hundreds of people in the team.” It seems that protection doesn’t cover everyone in the same way.

Who benefits?

Every good investigation eventually asks who gains.

Ferrari has spent years building its future around Charles Leclerc. It spotted him early, promoted him fast and stood by him through seasons when it couldn’t give him a car to win in. He is fast, brave and adored in Maranello. His talent is not in question.

But Leclerc has never won a world championship. Without a title, a driver’s reputation rests on comparison, and the most valuable comparison in the sport is beating a champion. Ferrari has paired him with two: first Sebastian Vettel, then Lewis Hamilton, eleven world titles between them. That isn’t a charge that Ferrari engineered anything in the Vettel years. It’s an observation about what those pairings are worth to a driver without a crown, and to the team that picked him.

Now think about what each outcome is worth to the institution.

If Hamilton wins the title, Ferrari gets its first drivers’ championship since 2007. It also gets something less comfortable: proof that the driver it backed for seven years wasn’t the one to deliver it. A newcomer would have done in two seasons what its chosen one couldn’t.

If Leclerc beats Hamilton, Ferrari’s long-term project is vindicated. The protégé has outscored the greatest driver of the era in the same car, and every decision Maranello has made since 2019 looks correct.

The champion provides the benchmark. The protégé collects the validation.

And here is where the possibility becomes considerably less comfortable. What if Ferrari is not merely hoping Leclerc emerges ahead? What if, when the opportunity arises, it is prepared to make choices that help ensure he does? Not by issuing some theatrical instruction to sabotage Hamilton, but through the perfectly ordinary machinery of Formula 1: strategy calls, track-position decisions, team orders and the allocation of risk. Every choice can have a technical explanation. The question is whether those explanations conceal a consistent preference.

Nobody needs to write that down. Nobody needs to give an order. An institution only has to know, somewhere deep down, which result it would rather explain.

The strongest argument against all this

It is Fred Vasseur.

Vasseur brought Hamilton to Ferrari. A Hamilton title would be his masterpiece. It makes no sense for him to undermine the biggest bet of his career.

That’s a serious objection. But it leads to a stranger question. If Hamilton’s success would be Vasseur’s greatest achievement, why does Ferrari keep making decisions that protect Leclerc’s position at the expense of Hamilton’s opportunity to challenge it?

Equality, the polite word for “no”

Look at the championship decision.

After Barcelona, Hamilton was 41 points behind Kimi Antonelli in the best car on the grid. Mercedes had won six of the first seven races, and the man who broke that run was Hamilton. Leclerc was around 81 points back, after two retirements in a row.

Ferrari chose equal treatment.

Equality sounds principled. But it’s never neutral when the two drivers are in different positions. When one has a real shot and the other a distant one, refusing to choose protects whoever is already at the top of the hierarchy. A team that won’t decide has already decided.

Vasseur’s position held all the way to Monza. “At one stage you have to take a decision, but I think it was too early to take a decision before Monza.” Too early at 41 points against 81. By then Hamilton was 76 points behind and Leclerc 112.

“It’s far too late. Many, many weeks too late.”

Here’s a simple test. Swap the names. Put Leclerc 41 points from the lead and Hamilton 81 behind. Does anyone honestly believe Ferrari would have waited until September?

Monza: “There are no rules”

At Monza, Hamilton finally said it.

After a first-lap fight with Leclerc pushed him wide, Leclerc said “we” had gone too far. Hamilton corrected him: “There was no ‘we’ in it.” Then he moved on from the corner to the team. The same results kept coming because the same procedures were in place. At Mercedes, there had been written rules for how teammates raced each other.

At Ferrari: “Here, there are no rules.”

That line explains a lot. A team with no written rules doesn’t run without rules. It runs on unwritten ones, and at Ferrari those were in place long before Lewis Hamilton arrived.

Then he said where they come from.

“Ultimately it comes from the top. It trickles down the decisions, and so it starts with Fred.”

And then came the line that sounded more like resignation than anger:

“There’s only so much you can say, so much you can push and shout from the mountain top.”

A year earlier he had used the same image happily. He shouted from the mountain, and Ferrari listened. By Monza, nobody was listening.

The meetings

A few days later, Vasseur met both drivers and reminded them of the “fundamental principles” of how he runs the team. He expected them, like him, to protect the team.

Both drivers. Only one of them had just named Fred on camera.

So the driver asked how Ferrari would stop repeating its mistakes, and the answer was a lecture on loyalty.

Nobody announced a gag order. But look at what came next. A great relationship with Leclerc: “Nothing lingers.” Full backing for Vasseur. After Sepang, a defence of the strategy department whose call had just sent him from second to eighteenth. And when asked whether Ferrari’s structure needed changing:

“There are changes I would make but I am not going to talk about what those are.”

That sounds less like a man whose concerns have been resolved than one who has learned where the line is.

Hamilton’s forgiveness is not Ferrari’s alibi

This is where the argument usually gets shut down. Lewis himself says the team is united. Lewis defends the strategists. Lewis backs Fred. So who are we to question it?

We’re the people who don’t work there.

Hamilton has every reason to say what he says. He has a car to develop, engineers to keep on side and a contract to honour. A driver’s public loyalty is a professional necessity. It isn’t a verdict on the team.

Hamilton can forgive Ferrari as often as he likes. He has to, because he goes back into that garage every Friday. We don’t. His diplomacy doesn’t oblige anyone else to accept Ferrari’s explanations, and his silence doesn’t mean the questions have been answered. It may only mean that the one person entitled to ask them out loud has stopped.

That’s exactly why someone else should keep asking.

Sepang: owning the story

Sepang showed who gets to own the story.

Hamilton put the car on the front row. Ferrari sent him out on slicks while Verstappen and Antonelli, the cars he was racing for the win, started on intermediates. “My heart just sank.” P2 became P18. Then he drove back to third, one of the drives of the season.

Ferrari’s social media announced: “Strong drives from both LH and CL today.” Leclerc’s fourth place got its own post: “Still not over that drive from CL.”

Asked whether we had just seen Hamilton at his best, Vasseur praised the drive and then added: “Don’t be extreme in your opinion.”

On its own, that’s trivial. In context, it’s revealing. Hamilton’s recovery became a team effort, while Leclerc’s result stayed his own.

So, what if?

I can’t prove Ferrari wants Lewis Hamilton to lose, and I’m not going to pretend I can.

But look at what I can see. A team with a clear interest in one result over the other. An equality policy that protected the existing hierarchy exactly when the championship demanded it be challenged. A driver who said publicly that the unwritten rules came from the top, followed by meetings and then silence. Two drivers who didn’t follow pit calls: one got “confusion” and a private debrief, the other a public verdict. And a list of decisions, from Melbourne to Singapore, that keep costing the same driver.

Maybe each one is innocent. But a theory that needs every single call to be innocent is starting to look less like caution and more like faith.

So here’s the challenge.

Show me the comparable occasions when Ferrari asked Leclerc to give up a meaningful advantage for Hamilton. Show me the urgency with which it protected Hamilton’s strategy when doing so inconvenienced the other car. Show me that the principle Ferrari calls equality survives contact with a decision that might favour Lewis.

Until then, the question stands.

Lewis has stopped shouting from the mountain top. He has been reminded of the principles. He has changes he would make and won’t name.

Don’t be extreme, Fred said.

Fine. Here’s a moderate question: when did Ferrari last choose Lewis?

[Marguerite Moon @MadameMoon]

@LH44_insights @_HenryMill Excellently argued. Articulating the emperor-without-clothes situation perfectly. Leclerc is the weapon Ferrari keep shooting itself in the foot with while they have their actual championship contender & realisor on a winning platter but won’t support him

[F1 TROLL @f1trollofficial]

Ferrari moment

[Marguerite Moon @MadameMoon]

@MONDOFERRARI_ For Ham’s initial strategy to have worked, Ferrari & leclerc should’ve let Ham pass when he was faster. As Ham did for the team when roles reversed

[ً @FER44Rl]

When Lewis Hamilton said, “Let’s not waste time,” he was told to “hold on” to his position but when Charles Leclerc said, “Let’s not waste time,” his teammate was expected to give up the position. Remember this race.

[Earth Hippy 🌎🕊️💚 @hippyygoat]

THIS SPEECH WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY…

Any country that sides with the US will forever lose its credibility to speak on human rights and international law.

[Conspiratorial Templates @mynamehear]

Can't believe the president who scheduled a public execution didn't win the Nobel Peace prize

[UtianⒼ @UtianG]

I wonder what's pissing Trump 🇺🇸 off more 🤔

1. Losing
2. Losing to a woman
3. Losing to an Indian woman
4. Losing to an Indian woman from South Africa

🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦
🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦 🇿🇦

[Kyoko W.P. @kyokoTHEpoet]

We’re not asking for much

[Out of Context Human Race @NoContextHumans]

I’d be interested in this

[Gerhard Kemp @GerhardKempICL]

Imagine saying this about Navi Pillay, who represented Robben Island prisoners (incl. Mandela) during the darkest days of apartheid, who delivered justice for genocide victims in Rwanda, who is still pursuing the cause of justice while mediocrities like Joel here is posting bile.