Everything about the current 'debate' around this is dismal, not just morally but because it is so stupid. For example: It conflates asylum-seeking and illegal immigration (and sometimes with migration generally) It shows no understanding of why there is AS www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025... 1/3

My favourite year for oppressed literary masculinity was 2023 when the number of women on the Booker shortlist was smaller than the number of men named Paul

Morally awful, administratively impossible & expensive.. and politically, the reverse of Starmer's panicked conference speech. A govt completely at sea, terrified & incoherent, throwing basic principles overboard in desperation www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The reaction to the Panorama edit has been nothing short of hysterical. Yes the BBC has some impartiality problems. But its biggest isn't the one you think. New piece from me. open.substack.com/pub/goodalla...

@muhammadshehada.bsky.social chronicles the history of the decades-long siege on the people of Gaza.

Should Gibb be sacked? yes, obviously. He's an abomination of basic journalistic standards. His GB News channel spreads conspiracy theory & disinformation. His Jewish Chronicle newspaper spreads invented stories. He is plainly trying to undermine the BBC so it's as bad as everything else he touches.

"What draws readers to Guyotat and the other writers of the transgressive tradition is that they are candid about violence. Violence may not be the totality of life, but it is closer to the core of it than spurious humanisms would have us believe." Ryan Ruby on Pierre Guyotat in @thebaffler.com

No paywall. Nice bit of Hamlet and Pog. open.substack.com/pub/nedboult...

Immigration, indecency, and incompetence. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog. The ever-more indecent terms of the immigration 'debate' are another failure of Brexit, which links to the ever-more obvious incompetence of Reform in local government: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2025/10/immi...

Minority representation on TV causes outrage From the new Private Eye, in shops now.

In memory: Ian Hamilton Finlay, b. October 28, 1925

Sixteen detached blog posts on Ian Hamilton Finlay some-landscapes.blogspot.com/search/label...

Was especially excited to write a bit about the sleeper hit of this year's festival: Lucrecia Martel's Nuestra Tierra

Generative AI has made Amazon’s knockoff problem more inescapable than ever. Authors tell Rolling Stone it’s leaving them frustrated— and the internet worse in the process.

'Vote Reform to die horribly in a sovereign Britain increasingly cut off from the world'. Old people need to start understanding that Farage's immigration approach would directly impact the health service upon which they rely.

This is how you blurb

Israel still fires on Lebanon almost a year after a ceasefire. Some predict the same for Gaza My look at the Lebanon "lessfire" model, with interactive map courtesy of the @apnews.com graphics team apnews.com/article/leba...

Claudio Abbado, Luigi Nono and Maurizio Pollini, ca. 1970s.

I've never seen a word-to-insanity ratio like this before

This is a complete abdication of journalistic responsibility. A president posting something this insane and disgusting should be front and center in the news.

The most utterly crass, classless, tasteless, tacky, toxic, trashy, low grade, low rate, vulgar, vile, vain, vomit inducing, nauseating, nasty, noxious, bilious, boorish, brutish, creepy, corrupt, gross, greedy, sleazy and selfish human being - and he’s the President? C’mon America, seriously?

New post just out: "On the edge" On my unexpected week in hospital and five things I learnt about the state of the NHS. (Free to read) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/o...

Brexit eruptions. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog looking at Tory madness, Labour’s ‘blame Farage’ strategy, the Brexit impasse and a suggestion of a way forward, and the latest ‘reset’ news. Bonus feature: a feeble new Brexit metaphor: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2025/10/brex...

This is a great overview of the coming collapse. Seems likely there will be significant shock waves from it, tho' hard to tell how far they will spread. I'm not sure it will "delay AGI" tho', because AGI isn't really a thing, beyond being a thing that tech bros talk about.

BBC Archive just uploaded The Lonely Shore (1962), a surreal 15-minute short that takes the form of a scientific report from an abandoned and desolate future Britain. Written by Jacquetta Hawkes, an actual archaeologist, and directed by Ken Russell, an actual madman.

'like swallows beneath bridges, like starlings above clouds – points in time, and across landscapes.' 'Notes, Murmurations: The Notebook as Form of Rime' – Lisa Robertson on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notebooks (& on notebooks, note-taking, a lifetime of reading) draughtjournal.com/article/note...

discovering Coleridge's Notebooks

Anyone in the UK or who has access to iPlayer, Bryan Magee's series from the 80s The Great Philosophers is being repeated tonight on BBC4. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

Finally got my notes together on Schattenfroh and its companion book Innehaben. All comments welcome! open.substack.com/pub/jameselk...

New Substack post on Rolf Riehm: open.substack.com/pub/disgwylf...

This deserves more attention than it has received. Gove: "we were too anxious as a government to secure those deals in order to show that Brexit was working". Exactly as so many of us warned at the time, and as the government denied at the time. www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/country-and-...

The thing I'm "stunned" about is why this isn't the biggest domestic news item on every flipping platform bylinetimes.com/2025/10/11/s...

Most people seem to have missed who retweeted this picture of Farage in Gill’s office a few days after Gill began receiving his first bribes from Oleh Voloshyn (Oleg Voloshin). None other than…

I interviewed the brilliant Edward Wilson-Lee about his new book The Grammar of Angels. We explore the life of Renaissance occult philosopher Pico della Mirandola, and also the book's wider interest in magical language, the sublime, and the limits of individualism. open.substack.com/pub/mathewly...

I wrote on One Battle After Another, Thomas Pynchon and Paul Thomas Anderson’s California open.substack.com/pub/davidher...

These are some of the most extreme restrictions on immigration in years. We're told to see them as benign because they're less bad than Farage's far-right extremism. But they are still terrible.

Beaming up The Reading Experience: readexperience.net

🔴'The Most Powerful Individual in Britain' – Peter Oborne on Morgan McSweeney Peter Oborne’s exclusive Byline Times reporting exposes how Keir Starmer's chief strategist is driving a Labour Government towards defeat by the far-right www.bylinesupplement.com/p/the-most-p...

To celebrate the release of Alaa Abd el-Fattah from prison, the ebook edition of YOU HAVE NOT YET BEEN DEFEATED, tr. an anonymous collective, is available to download for free for the next week via all ebook platforms, including Kindle and Apple Books, until 30 September.

Now, more proof that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. How can western governments still refuse to act? | Steve Crawshaw

And to say once again: Maureen is co-responsible for the existence of both PLR & ALCS, so every writer in the UK & Ireland should give her 💐💐💐. And read her books!

Coming to 4K UHD 12/9 from Criterion Collection I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) 4K UHD #FilmSky #Criterion

Sky News says police are "overwhelmed by the numbers". Met coped perfectly well with 2x as many at the pro-Gaza rally, 5x as many at the anti-Brexit march, and 15x as many at London Pride. They're not overwhelmed by the numbers. They're overwhelmed by the ratio of violent thugs in those numbers.

'This book is a fine introduction to his [Josipovici's] fiction and his intelligence, as well as his style of engagement in non-fiction.' Jeff Bursey on Gabriel Josipovici's Partita / A Winter in Zürau, for @bigothermag.bsky.social Read in full here:⬇️ bigother.com/2025/09/10/c...

Is impartiality still a thing at the BBC? Asking for a friend.

Please read this. It was a lot of work and a foray into a new kind of writing for me.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

A contemporary riff on Bernhard’s “Woodcutters” tries to disentangle art from careerism—and gets knotted up in the process. @anathanwest.bsky.social considers “Happiness and Love” and the derangement of present-day literary culture.