these, huh, aren't very good statements

mum, master of the punchline, explains that she once annoyingly got caught carrying too many boxes of cigarettes when flying back to France! aren't the rules stupid and tight! how many boxes was she trying to bring back, compared to the 1.5 box per person rule? 14.

This is pretty obviously entirely the correct approach. The Government should not be intervening in judicial decisions, or setting policy on the basis of whether people are prepared to self harm in protest.

on the tramway in Nantes and a pretty old woman gave her seat to a very old woman so I gave my seat to the pretty old woman then a man gave me his seat then a teenager gave a man his seat and then we all laughed, aren't people fantastic

turning up in my bedazzled Rousseau t-shirt and asking if we're going to have a problem

I wish Lydia Tár was real so she could appear on one of the new CBS debate shows

I think the people who make a technology that makes nudes of children should be put in jail. this should not be in any way controversial

Was at a Christmas party with a load of clergy last night and as some people were leaving they found a person collapsed on the street outside so the Verger took over and called an ambulance and sent all the clergy away because "if they wake up surrounded by priests that'll just make things worse"

this is an incredible and very touching story but unsure what the BBC felt those weird AI images added to it?

feel very thankful that I got to be sitting next to my brother when I saw this headline, allowing me to act shocked and go "you came to London and didn't even message me??" before showing him this x

For my last Buying Power of the year, I wrote about one way to think about the divergence in consumer sentiment (bad) and behavior (free-spending) this year: It’s the YOLO economy, typified by the expanding popularity of services like Klarna and Affirm. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

is this "free speech campaigner Bari Weiss" or a different one? www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...

Rare footage of St Paul’s Cathedral testing its giant flamethrower

managed to get to the credits of Hades II last night without ever using casts, omega moves or lunar hexes, now kind of wish the game had a "Melinoe [regular street fighter]" achievement

managed to get to the credits of Hades II last night without ever using casts, omega moves or lunar hexes, now kind of wish the game had a "Melinoe [regular street fighter]" achievement

every single London-born child or baby with western French ancestry is currently on this flight, predicting the following hour of my life to feel around a decade long

this photo of our fun festive FT podcast Xmas quiz makes me laugh every time I see it

urgent news: man at Stansted wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Keir Starmer in the style of that famous Obama poster (??)

Funny animal videos no longer being trustworthy just fucking sucks all around. I love the wonder of animal behavior and what it says about the experience of being alive. It's because it happened in reality that it's so fun. It's not fun if it was just made up. There's no wonder there.

this is the greatest feeling, when the cord box proves its utility to a family member

As a former editor of Popbitch – and the proud owner of a legal letter sent by HarperCollins, accusing me of being "highly likely to cause serious harm to [their former star client]’s reputation both as an individual and author” – may I just say: GET IT RIGHT UP YE

FINALLY have time to actually look through all the film pictures I took in NYC instead of quickly going through them and: isn't this satisfying and nice

white guy outside Stockwell station with an England flag booing black people going in? good vibes! great!

ProTEct truSTed LocAL nEWS This isn't even designed to wind people up and hope they share it. It's just an exploitation of Birmingham Live's privileged position on Google Discover/Apple News. The whole point is to deceive people into clicking. An industry built on total contempt for its audience.

in this week's newsletter! an essay which is, in my objective opinion, quite good, on hitting six months without nicotine, getting over addiction, and the maddening search for pleasure: youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/oh-the-exh... [free to read!]

I took one for the team and I read the memoirs Nicolas Sarkozy wrote about his twenty (20) days in prison: observer.co.uk/news/interna...

it is DECEMBER 19 my out of office is ON if anyone asks me to do even one more thing before 2026 I will CRY

in this week's newsletter! an essay which is, in my objective opinion, quite good, on hitting six months without nicotine, getting over addiction, and the maddening search for pleasure: youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/oh-the-exh... [free to read!]

Boromir would own NFTs for sure

I took one for the team and I read the memoirs Nicolas Sarkozy wrote about his twenty (20) days in prison: observer.co.uk/news/interna...

oh wow The Roses, which you may have heard of as "that movie which got bad reviews" - it's not good! I'm not enjoying watching it! it's entirely unclear to me what I was expecting from it but here we are

oh, that's what i'd be like as an elected official www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/w...

MY 4-YEAR OLD: *calmly, while coloring a picture of the Grinch* If baby grinches die, we can eat them. If they’re clean. That’s ok

Even by my low expectations for Kemi Badenoch ‘violence against women and girls is something done by immigrants and nobody else’ has shocked me.

nah Italians are the same as the French I'm afraid, spent two months there and whenever I tried to speak (admittedly minimal/shaky) Italian people would look at me like I'd spat on their nonna

it was probably a mistake teaching him to read

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes! Yes! YES! YES!!!!!

Jennifer Lawrence is a menace

good morning! please send me your silliest/funniest/grossest "would you rather?" questions, for a hopefully entertaining thing, thank you

first sub 20-minute Chronos run in Hades II 😌

friend described Be At One as "recruiter core", perfect description, in awe

how did I not know that Sarkozy met his second wife when he officiated at her wedding as the local mayor en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas...

The kind of person who would rightly go 'sorry, are you insane? What does a kosher delicatessen in Golders Green have to do with the Gaza war?' going 'well, look, if someone from Afghanistan gets on a boat, you can't expect people not to start being racist towards black Britons', and vice versa:

at some point maybe will have to reevaluate but so far every single story like this is with ChatGPT specifically

IDEA I HAD WHILE I COULDN'T SLEEP LAST NIGHT: penpals and cultural exchanges for group chats

oh no no no, don't make me explain Patrick Sebastien to the Brits, nooooo he can't become politically relevant I don't want to explain him to foreigners it's embarrassing nonono

I know that everyone is like “oh the whole point of this is to destroy CBS, they actually want to run it into the ground” and I’m sure plenty of folks will be happy if they do but David Ellison and Bari Weiss don’t want that! they really think they’ve got something! they are just very bad at this

unfortunately I have become Laurence Fox on the question of water bottles with a fully removable cap, which is why I kept buying San Pellegrino 500ml bottles until they, too, finally caved, but I am here to offer some joyous news, namely that the Nestle bottles you get from McDonald's are still Good

Is Michael Gove attempting a very surprising return to politics?