It’s Your Party and I’ll cry if I want to

This and that gets said about “what would David Foster Wallace say about our current era?”, the whole idea of the numbing addiction of ‘The Entertainment’ at the core of Infinite Jest being realised in the smart phone and all, but I reckon what he’d hone in on…

All this for a historically unpopular president.

Saw a Labour councillor boasting about the tariffs Starmer had negotiated with Trump, and have just seen this too. It becomes the only thing Keir’s fans can brag about: thus far, he’s managed to suck up pretty well to a fascist, he’s managed to make him bully us less than he bullies other countries.

Feel somewhat sick with sadness today, just totally low. Makes sense, I suppose.

developed an earth-shattering crush on Conan earlier this year so watched a bunch of his early late night shows, like a creep, and was really taken aback by how properly funny and *really* odd most of it was, the cultural mainstream has become so much more sanitised over the past decade or two

thinking once again about one of the all-time great newspaper mixups, when Dennis the Menace and The Far Side got their captions swapped

"But for many, and not only the young, politics is chiefly mediated through an anarchic and externally opaque torrent of short video, in which fraud is rife, critical thinking rare, and trust accrued through charisma and parasocial identification."

‘Robinson’s street movement is more likely to find electoral expression in Reform than any of the minuscule fascist parties. Labour’s approach to this electoral threat has so far been incoherent.’ James Butler on Labour’s problems, from the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

Still really, really fucking rankles me whenever people talk down Ta-Nehisi Coates. Marilynne Robinson or Rowan Williams can use an elevated register and even archaic diction and people accept it; a black guy does it — and he’s so good at it — and suddenly people think he’s getting above his station

It’s been dizzying going on that crawl from when Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time when I was a kid, the shock that these sort of abhorrent hateful views would get a mainstream airing, to all of this becoming the mainstream, the seeming inevitability that it’s all going to rise and take over

"the hard data suggests that the largest of the UK’s very real problems are no more being caused by mass immigration than they are by a group of charity fundraisers rowing past Great Yarmouth" on.ft.com/3IsyVVu @timharford.ft.com with his facts and reasonableness

Well yes it makes sense that he’s love all the gaudy golden pomp stuff, that’s Trump all over. He’d probably buy it all if he could.

Left “cancel culture” did not cause the current fascist attack on free speech, it is not them picking up the same tools, that’s an absolutely fucking nonsensical narrative and shouldn’t be entertained at all

think if you're broadly a centrist and were suuuuuper concerned about attacks on free speech from the left and so you decided to give the right a hearing then you need to realise you were taken for QUITE the ride (and don't really have anyone to blame but yourself)

“Racism is not a legitimate position” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, putting it as clearly and simply as it needs to be put.

!!!

Tell you something about Ed Davey (and this is me being needlessly vulnerable all over your feed): my dad would argue that David Cameron was definitely a good guy because he had a severely disabled son (who sadly passed away), which would have made him compassionate to the disabled…

Into writing that has a sort of light angled wryness of tone while still being capable of being “poetic” (ugly bland term for a beautiful thing; maybe I mean somewhat musical) and emotive — Patricia Lockwood, Hera Lindsey Bird, Pavement, Silver Jews. There’s not much in prose fiction like this.

Online is where an adult man who chooses a Japanese cartoon of a child as a picture to represent themselves will appear in your mentions to tell you that you are “cringe”

Why would your sectioning split Italy up like that. Can I just be done with the sectioning and choose Italy

Odd to read that Robert Redford was seven years older than Bob Woodward. I wonder how many actors have played real people who were younger than them.

You notice that the more paranoid the narratives that someone buys into, the more willing they’ll be to advocate for violence; and you notice that the apps make people very paranoid. So it goes.

Oh, that seems like something of a saving grace. Either way the horrors seem to continue.

I just think there are specific reasons why, however hard she tries, Kemi Badenoch is never going to get the votes of racists.

Wishing Naoise Dolan and Sarah Clancy safe travels as they bravely sail with the flotilla.

We’re in a weird spot atm I feel

This gets to something that as a former stand-up I recognized but couldn’t name. A 31 year old professional content creator baiting 19 year old amateurs into the format of his choice isn’t debate, it’s crowd work. It’s debate-shaped crowd work farmed for content.

When Princess Diana died, you had a lot of people turning up to the memorials and weeping along with others who’d had no real connection to Diana before her death; it became a sort of catharsis that allowed all other sorts of private grief to coalesce or sublimate in one collective grief, as such

I am looking for work! I'm a pretty good film/TV critic and feature writer, especially as far as animation is concerned. I have bylines at Variety, GQ, Empire, Vulture, IGN, I've done home entertainment, – editors can reach me at kambole[at]outlook[dot]com, below is an example of a piece I wrote:

Really liked this new LRB piece on Gertrude Stein — makes me feel silly for not having read her yet. You can see a lot of where (e.g.) Claire-Louise Bennett has come from; and she intensifies what it is I like so much about Ernest Hemingway (which I don’t find at all in, say, uh, Tom Clancy)

What’s interesting is that at some level these addled people still recognise that racism is shameful and wrong, and want to distance themselves from it. Part of fighting back has to be to refuse to indulge this absurdity and to call racism what it is

Drawings of the Moon by Galileo Galilei, 1610

Finding out Nietzsche really hated George Eliot’s books clarifies why I really hate Nietzsche

Byung-Chul Han:

The most poetic sounding train station on the entire London Underground network is “Burnt Oak”. Thank you for your time.

imagine getting qt dunked by ed davey. unrecoverable. you’re furious and he is serenely going down a log flume in bognor regis.

Online trads going to church for the first time and finding out it's not an IRL version of their personal Based internet club always cracks me up

Kemi Badenoch defects to reform

Buy these books people!

You know, while the “is he a groyper or a radical leftist?” debate rages on, one thing we can definitely say with the ‘if you read this you’re gay’ casing and all is that this killer was into that eerie irony-nihilist affect that’s been plaguing the internet forever, and which is only getting worse

I like being able to announce my return to the site with my most popular post here ever

Such a beautiful book. There’s such a tenderness, such a profound understand of what family’s actually are, all the challenges of pride and estrangement and warmth against thorniness.

Philip K. Dick predicted everything. We live in psychedelic futurism, and it’s as horrifying as any bad trip, except that you get out of those after eight hours or so

update: male loneliness epidemic solved

Guy Pearce and Annie Lennox join call to end ‘normalised horror’ for children in Gaza

God it’s just such a fucking good book

the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost