ahhh this is all so good! read the entire piece!

oh god I've completely lost it at this

I don't object to shows and films ripped from the headlines but I simply have zero interest in watching any kind of fictionalised version of the Sarah Everard case

One of my favourite poems about war and political elites is Kipling's 'Mesopotamia'. Blair being in the news has me thinking of it again.

(North) London people, today I visited a fantastic new bookshop by Parliament Hill ☕️ great coffee 🥮 stellar pastries 📚 excellent selection of books And you can walk on heath and swim after.....

Next little teaser… (full album drops on June 19th).

I hadn't realised, really, that QT was in its death throes.

CBS made it official today and fired Sharyn Alfonsi. This is after Alfonsi revealed that the network and Bari Weiss hadn't responded to her for months as her contract expired. It's also after Alfonsi was cheered at last night's Emmys, while Bari was called out by a kid for destroying the network.

'Longtime tech journalist and documentarian who has never worked in traditional broadcast news.' www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/b...

Paying a subscription to use Meta products is patently absurd for the average user. Which Meta obviously knows. From a content perspective, they offer nothing that's worth paying for. These are predatory subscriptions plans clearly aimed at businesses that are dependent on these platforms.

“If I’m getting you a six-figure book advance, I don’t want you to be putting it into ChatGPT,” said a top literary agent. “Go to the fucking library.” nymag.com/intelligence...

Wrong to the point of malpractice

Buzzfeed and Amazon MGM are taking her character and using it for an AI-assisted animated series. This is insanely awful.

End of an era for @simoncalder.bsky.social at the Indy, but this looks like a cracking job for him at the Telegraph, which is lucky to be getting him. Simon is properly old-school: really knows his stuff, a great communicator and an absolute gent.

May Mamdani in his Arsenal outfit inspire some better Eid etiquette in the guys I saw at prayers this morning wearing pj trousers

The waits between seasons doubled in last 10 yrs — & this piece doesn’t get into it, but when execs also demand shorter seasons, in some cases way too short, the end result = audiences that just don’t engage with shows/characters the same way. www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/w...

The Tony Blair of 1994-2005 had a tremendous sense of the public mood and changing nature of society and economy. This reeks of someone who is spending far too much time in a gilded world and giving little thought to how they curate their information environment.

I wrote about the books that are inspiring so many heated takes right now, and how they allow us to question where we are and what our feminist ideals have become. www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-...

Congratulations to Anakana Schofield, author of 'Martin John' and 'Bina,' on today's publication of 'Library of Brothel.' It won't come out in the UK until early2027 (annoyingly, but I'm sure Penguin has a good reason for this). Looking forward to this. www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/555536...

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Dust motes dancing, 1900

Pick a Bond villain from the pictures you already have on your phone.

LONDON: You're invited to Trafalgar Square for a joyful day of food, culture and community at Eid on the Square, the next in our series of community events on the square. Join the celebrations 30 May from 12–6pm. Everyone is welcome. www.london.gov.uk/events/state...

Every year I marvel at what Jami has built here.

Tolkien would be absolutely thrilled about this lol

Newspapers on bank holiday Mondays are the best because they’re full of absolutely insane weird stories that are deep dive pet obsessions of the reporters* that would never be allowed in the paper on any other day of the year. *this is the permanent london centric model

Fabulous clarification in today's Observer. Stonehenge!

Hamish McKenzie is a smart tech/media exec but he is not the right person to host Substack's new show

Just sent in the final changes. I've done a whole 'nother book! Pre-order now! There'll be a tiny drawing of Henry Scampi in it!

In which we learn that a list of best books, ranked in order of excellence, should have been less elitist. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

I'd forgotten about this. Luhrmann was riffing on Mary Schmich's 1997 column 'Wear Sunscreen,' which holds up. If it seems twee at points, it's because it inspired a whole bunch of imitations. www.davidpbrown.co.uk/poetry/mary-...

'Tis my favourite time of year: Explaining to eye rolling elders that non-white people do, in fact, need to wear sunscreen

Just finished Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s not very original to observe this, but holy cow, it’s a masterpiece. It’s at once a very serious book about war and PTSD/trauma, and extremely funny, compassionate, and joyful. What an omission that it wasn’t in the Guardian best novels list

half the tickets are gone for the June 16 Outsiders Arts Club, by the way! you can get yours here, and maybe buy this piece? or another one? or both? outsidersartsclub.com

Three of Gerard Richter's 'Cage' paintings

Out and about + seeing so many schoolkids today leaving with writing all over their shirts. One of those random traditions that brings me an odd amount of joy.

It is, finally, the right season for this Larkin poem.

I talked to the head of the Commonwealth Foundation and to one of the accused writers in the Granta AI scandal — & also had the past 15 years of the prize run through Pangram, which flagged only four stories as containing AI: all from this year and last. [gift link!]

One of my favourite bits of publishing misinfo is that there are people in the industry who believe 'And Other Stories' (the prestigious publisher) and '& Other Stories' (fashion brand owned by H&M) are owned by the same guy (I wish)

Granta is getting a lot of (imo deserved) heat over the CW short story prize but I think it's being missed here that they just *publish* the winner - the competition is run by the Commonwealth Foundation and judged by judges the foundation picks! www.thebookseller.com/news/commonw...

What a tone of voice... One simple answer to this overblown drama: the Nobel prize winner for 2026, László Krasznahorkai. It makes it much easier to put this pathetic travesty into perspective. It's what is being bandied about as no longer writable or readable – "literary fiction". Read him.

The details here are terrifying. The manifesto, the weapons, the age of the attackers...how can kids have this much hatred in them? www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/u...

Genuine question: what exactly are we all doing.

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and Lin King have won this year’s International Booker Prize with TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE! Congratulations to both author and translator! This marks our second International Booker win in a row, following the success of Deepa Bhasthi’s translation of Banu Mushtaq’s HEART LAMP in 2025.

I’m marking undergraduate creative writing at the moment, so reading the supposedly AI story ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ was a familiar experience. I've been reading it, in their work, all week. It makes you despair, but it's also fascinating for what it tells us about literary fiction as a genre.

Gross. www.thebookseller.com/news/bolinda...

I'm all for audiobooks but I'm sceptical that this kind of pop up will catch on. And I really, really wish that Audible wasn't owned by Amazon. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/s...

I'm a park bench plaque connoisseur and this is the first one I've ever seen in code. If there's an Alan Turing out there who can decrypt it, let me know.

magnificent second mention for plumber: "local pipesman"

The one American I'll read on British food is Helen Rosner because her column this week about a new Brit pub in NYC is just delightful (for a US audience, so the Cornish legend stuff is laid on a little thick) www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

White....said that in his experience, allegedly abusive men only rarely sued women for violating NDAs because the optics were so poor. "I would think he may have come to the conclusion he has nothing left to lose.” www.vulture.com/article/neil...