A hugely important article by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social on how an astonishing decline in reading books, brought about by the smartphone, is fuelling authoritarianism and threatens the greatest setback for civilisation since the fall of the Roman Empire. jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-o...

An absolutely fascinating conversation about "how to read a painting" with the brilliant Bendor Grosvenor

The great James Marriott and I discussed how to look at pictures, and had a go at deciphering Holbein’s Ambassadors. jmarriott.substack.com/p/how-to-rea...

The big tech companies are reversing the intellectual and political gains of the Enlightenment and returning us to a New Dark Ages of ignorance, rage and superstition - it's the most important story of our time jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-o...

The big tech companies are reversing the intellectual and political gains of the Enlightenment and returning us to a New Dark Ages of ignorance, rage and superstition - it's the most important story of our time jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-o...

My magnum opus - a unified field theory of why the post-literate society spells disaster for civilisation as we know it jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-o...

In the eighteenth century the rise of literacy precipitated the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history and helped to destroy the old feudal order in Europe. As literacy recedes a neo-feudal future looms. substack.com/home/post/p-...

My magnum opus - a unified field theory of why the post-literate society spells disaster for civilisation as we know it jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-o...

Great @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social piece that neatly counters the usual push back that, as this echoes past changes in communication things will be fine. Print *did* change society and how we think - so did TV, I think, fwiw - so just waving concerns away re smartphones + social media is foolish.

Good piece by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social on the violent nihilists of America www.thetimes.com/article/2d27...

I wrote this about the most boring and destructive trend of our time: the politicisation of everything. We are becoming incapable of seeing anything - art, TV, adverts, brands, food - through anything other than a political lens. There is more to life! www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

This is very good by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social

💊 Optimisme permanent rime souvent avec engourdissement, estime le chroniqueur James Marriott du “Times”, de Londres.

I suspect attraction derives from comforting thought that we can get back to a happy & uncorrupted mode of human existence, if we only eat properly and tune into ancient wisdom. Of course, that uncorrupted life never existed (£) www.thetimes.com/comment/colu... @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social is right

cannot recommend cultural capital enough as a newsletter

I often write disparagingly about the internet’s slide towards video but YouTube has also educated me in poetry, philosophy music and art Here is a YouTube education - a list of videos which form a kind of curriculum in the humanities and the sciences jmarriott.substack.com/p/a-youtube-...

I often write disparagingly about the internet’s slide towards video but YouTube has also educated me in poetry, philosophy music and art Here is a YouTube education - a list of videos which form a kind of curriculum in the humanities and the sciences jmarriott.substack.com/p/a-youtube-...

www.thetimes.com/comment/colu... Excellent commentary by #JamesMarriott. #Internet thralls confuse #liberty with #license, meanwhile egging #capitalism on to new lows. Coincidence that #BonnieBlue's grooming conforms to beauty tropes of #snatch-jawlined #influencers? @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social

“It may turn out that liberalism needed some restraints to survive” @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

@j-amesmarriott.bsky.social spot on re the Haidt "harm" justification around Bonnie Blue. Equally interesting: if pointed out that she's no more harming herself than many sex workers, whilst getting v well paid, it shifts to "well, then she must be harming SOCIETY" www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

On BBC Radio 4 yesterday @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social used a brilliant junk food metaphor to describe search results produced by AI chatbots, calling them "ultra-processed information, superficially nutritious but actually pretty empty." Listen at bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... (starts at 2:47:42).

Cultural Capital is always good, but this week's edition is outstanding.

My latest newsletter rounding up everything interesting I read in books and on the internet last week: the great cat massacre, Hunter Biden, Chinese diamond factories, the political gender gap and a reader poll on which is the best century jmarriott.substack.com/p/interestin...

I wrote this about the genius of Barry Lyndon, my all-time favourite film which is unique among historical dramas for really getting the strangeness and distance of the past www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

Barry Lyndon is almost unique among historical dramas in unblinkingly confronting the fact that the preindustrial past was an alien world; intensely formal, rigidly hierarchical and arbitrarily violent. (£) www.thetimes.com/comment/colu... Another good one by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social

I really loved this conversation with the EconTalk podcast about how to read and why. In an age of infinite digital distractions books remain the greatest information technology ever invented. Nothing else even comes close. open.spotify.com/episode/3VS2...

I have James VI and I on the brain at the moment, but the guy - the first king of the whole of the British Isles! - buried five of his children and died in his 50s. Three of them died before they were two.

Very good column this - ultimately we should view the past with considerable horror. It wasn’t better, we should not wish to return to it. It was a bleak, scary place.

I wrote this about the genius of Barry Lyndon, my all-time favourite film which is unique among historical dramas for really getting the strangeness and distance of the past www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

"..the most important and the most interesting thing that we're living through as a society right now..." I think James is right. The post-literate society is causing the dissolution of shared realities with many unpredictable consequences, in politics and beyond

I spoke to the New Statesman about the dawn of the post-literate society. A culture of reading is rapidly being destroyed the advent of addictive screen slop. In my view it is the most significant cultural and political and crisis of our time www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAVs...

I spoke to the New Statesman about the dawn of the post-literate society. A culture of reading is rapidly being destroyed the advent of addictive screen slop. In my view it is the most significant cultural and political and crisis of our time www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAVs...

The Times have allowed me to print the distilled essence of my life philosophy - I wrote this about why everyone should be a pessimist. www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

I didn’t have a great deal of hope for this column, but it turned out to be a damn good read.

The Times have allowed me to print the distilled essence of my life philosophy - I wrote this about why everyone should be a pessimist. www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

History is slower than we sometimes think — a fact obscured by the human preference for drama and by the tendency of historical distance to collapse long-past events into illusory proximity. (£) www.thetimes.com/comment/colu... Another interesting one from @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social

For years I have nurtured and refined this list of books which I have mentally filed as "novels you absolutely can't go wrong with if you take them on holiday". I've shared it with many friends over the years but this is the first time I've published it: jmarriott.substack.com/p/absorbing-...

For years I have nurtured and refined this list of books which I have mentally filed as "novels you absolutely can't go wrong with if you take them on holiday". I've shared it with many friends over the years but this is the first time I've published it: jmarriott.substack.com/p/absorbing-...

Continuing with his favourite topic, another fine piece by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social on the necessity of reading:

This is a great piece by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social on the importance of reading. tinyurl.com/ms66muuu I confess I am far from unbiased on this topic. tinyurl.com/yrzm389t

Writing is the most reliable (and often the most painful) method our species has devised of transforming half-formed notions and stray fancies into rigorous, logical thought. (£) www.thetimes.com/comment/colu... Very good again by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social

In the US in the Fifties it was possible to watch “a regular TV programme… featuring Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and WH Auden”. (Kenneth Tynan's 1960 review of said programme)

I'll take "made a great point"

There is a lot of nostalgia for the "end of history" moment at the end of the 1990s but a lot of the ills of modern society can be traced to that era of complacency and spiritual vacuousness www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

There is a lot of nostalgia for the "end of history" moment at the end of the 1990s but a lot of the ills of modern society can be traced to that era of complacency and spiritual vacuousness www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

“ #ChatGPT and #Claude have got really quite good at writing. As they improve, will they make human writers, even highly skilled ones, as obsolete as typists?” A conversation between @ianleslie.bsky.social and @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/t...

When English literature had a different place in society @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social www.newstatesman.com/culture/book...

‘TV - its inanity, its lack of deep context, its weird juxtapositions of the trivial and the serious - precisely anticipate[s] the smartphone.’ https://www.thetimes.com/article/63b131e6-3457-44be-820e-29c9ab2804fe V good 👏🏼 now, @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social, the world is too fast. How do I get off?

Yet another example of the enormous social and economic costs that Tech companies have been allowed to impose on others in pursuit of their own profits