Not sure if he's read some of my scripts

Refusing to take responsibility for my own catastrophic misjudgements and hugely selfish decisions over a course of decades.

👇🏻

It will be drug free births next...

The scientific/medical consensus now is that a lab leak is a possibility, but the likeliest origin of Covid-19 is still zoonotic transmission. Politicians have just claimed otherwise based on politicised intel agency assessments that are non-expert.

The even more unbelievable crime fact (which I learned relatively recently) is that burglary has fallen by more than 90% since the 1990s. Did anyone notice? Nope. Does anyone believe it? Nope. But is is true? It is!

People say "autism never used to exist" and then you go to the Natural History Museum and the exhibit has a caption like "Born in 1762, The Revd [name] was famously irascible, steadfast in his routine, and dedicated his life to collecting 25,000 rare beetle specimens".

regardless of the details I think it’s important to spin the Kimmel thing as a win Trump is weak, he’s unpopular, he massively overreached and inspired enough of a revolt that Disney had to backtrack immediately he wants to paint himself as an all-powerful dictator, paint him as a loser who sucks

The sheer fucking hatred of autistic people that has these people desperately search for a ‘cure’ for it.

Does this have anything to do with the time that Tylenol roasted Trump at the 2011 Correspondent’s Dinner?

Forgot about the gratuitous use of the R word in this

www.ticketsource.co.uk/stand-up-com... WEDNESDAY

"I'm cancelling your show ... for a week!"

I don’t like three-hour podcasts but I would make an exception for the full story of the most shameless grifter of our times and his journey from BLM to the far right

If you haven’t seen it The Kid Detective is up on the Channel 4 streamer and it’s a modern classic

they're not even bringing a knife to a gun fight. they're bringing one of those joke guns which fires out a hankie reading "Bang" except it doesn't read "Bang" it reads "he's right, vote for us", this metaphor doesn't work at all I know I'm just really fucking mad okay

I'm taking it as a personal insult that none of the Redford films I want to watch tonight are on the streaming platforms I pay for. Might write to my MP about it

The Coens had writer's block while writing Miller's Crossing. Their solution? To take a 3 week break and write Barton Fink, a film about a writer with writer's block. They then put in two references to it: the name of Tom's residence & the newspaper article about a hotel fire.

It just straightforwardly *insane* how much political chatter in the United Kingdom is about the next general election, an event that is a long way in the future, and how basically none of it is about 'uh, this policy agenda doesn't look adequate to the scale of the inherited problem'.

Valley view.

SEVEN turns 30 today and I wrote about it for The Guardian. One of those great movies where its imitators took all the wrong lessons from it: www.theguardian.com/film/2025/se...

on the one hand I get annoyed when they don't send me my book in translation, on the other I do not read a word of Korean, thanks Joan Elledge, to whom the parcel was for some reason addressed

The government is, y’know, the government. They could announce policies of their own in Monday’s papers, which the media would cover. But instead they just leave an endless news void, and end up chasing their tails trying to keep up with Reform on its strongest issue. It’s woeful.

Reform hold a press conference every Monday, for which they trail a policy announcement in that morning’s papers. Given Monday is a slow news day, that often means they lead the papers – and so the breakfast shows, and so they set the agenda for the week. It’s a good trick, but easy to counter!

Londoners! I'm doing the Chelsea History Festival on Wednesday 24 September at 6pm. Please come! chelseaheritagequarter.co.uk/chf/how-booz...

This is driving me crazy. I swear Kerry Shale used to do adverts going into Fraiser on channel 4 in the 90a but can’t find any evidence of it online

Not hard to understand the meaning of this for the govt: Don't do it apple.news/AwPM763CyRFy...

If mainstream politicians stopped to *think* for a moment they’d notice that. It might help if newspapers noticed it, too. Farage has shifted further right in the last few months than he has in a decade. And instead of calling it out, media is cheering it on and mainstream politics is silent.

So many ways in which that’s a terrible policy but one of them would certainly be “a Reform government suddenly discovering how many British people also have an Irish passport”

The annoying thing here is that the Lib Dems talk policy quite a lot and get ignored by the media, which is what Davey's stunts were a response to in the first place. I don't think he's addicted to stunts. I'm sure he'd love it if his policies got covered www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Yes, it’s got a share of codswallop in it. Of course it has, you have to write for the audience and this is The Sun. My point is that the corpse of the comms team is at least twitching and should be encouraged to keep doing so given the alternative.

Get someone who can orate out in front of number ten and this has the makings of a speech.

Someone should tell Stats for Lefties that it does have to be a particular 14 words to be “the 14 words”

seems like a bit of a deal-breaker, no

If your novel is set in the recent, pre-cellphone past and your plot depends on a dilemma that would now be resolved with a simple phone call, make sure the reader understands that by having a character say, "Too bad cellphones don't exist yet."

In addition to Katie's point, what these takes all miss is a lot of people on the centre and left...haven't actually left X. Continues to be startlingly to me how many people just don't *notice* the degradation of their media environment.

New apple update seems to be going well

Populist politicians, convicted criminals, foreign billionaires… are you getting it yet? these are NOT three separate threats. And we’re calling it iTrump

The problem with the Ezra Klein view of the world is it's based on the existence of a centre-right and centre-left willing to find common ground. Authoritarians aren't interested in common ground, just power.

Yup. We have formally entered the age of illusion.

Peep Show The Simpsons (early years) Bob’s Burgers The Office Nathan for You Thick Of It Seinfeld Friday Night Dinner The Armando Iannucci shows Parks and Recs

are you refusing to debate me? you’re just going to listen to other people and declare me to be “guilty” of some supposed crime? for shame, your honor

Ellen got a server at a restaurant fired for having chipped nail polish

Lib Dem Tim Farron MP tells party conference Reform UK "spent a lot of their time [at conference] giving a platform to people who think that the Covid vaccines gave the royal family cancer, to self confessed convicted racists, and worst of all, Lembit Opik"

Not what I was expecting to see on the bottom of my toddler’s shoe tbh

Newsom to sign five bills aimed at protecting Calif.'s large immigrant population from Trump’s mass deportation agenda — including a ban on face coverings for federal agents.

You know what didn’t happen? Pundits going on Gab, Parler, Gettr, or Truth Social to repeatedly say “no one cares about this site, you’re in a bubble, you forfeited your influence, things are awesome on the site you don’t use anymore, so awesome that I come here to tell you you’re dumb unlike me.”

A lot of American elites in business, media, politics, etc. use their Twitter feeds to gauge what the public thinks. Yes, still. It's all-too plausible that execs at Disney and some other companies really did believe The People loved Charlie Kirk and demand censorship of anyone saying otherwise.

So close.