Category: Books

  • Himpathy for the devils

    I’ve just finished reading Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women by Kate Manne. In nine chapters, Manne elaborates on the many spheres in which male entitlement hurts women and girls. The entitlement to admiration that some men demand, for example, has led to the phenomenon of “involuntary celibates” (or “incels”) targeting women in violent acts.…

  • Understanding the “TERF wars”

    There’s a new and important academic work about the current anti-trans moral panic: TERF Wars, The Fight For Transgender Futures.  TERF is an acronym used to describe people who identify as feminists but whose feminism explicitly excludes trans women and non-binary people. The book exists because: Analyses of trans-exclusionary rhetoric provide an important contribution to sociology.…

  • Raging and mourning

    I’ve just finished reading How To Survive A Plague by David French. It’s a book about the AIDS crisis and the activist groups, notably ACT UP!, who fought an incredible battle against prejudice, ignorance and inertia. Many of the cover quotes describe the book as uplifting, but that’s not a word I’d use: it’s a…

  • Fighting talk

    Crossing gender lines is interesting. On the one hand you suddenly need to learn and live by rules and roles that other people have known their whole lives; on the other, you have to unpick and unlearn the rules and roles you internalised before your transition. Depending on your direction of travel you will either…

  • Unaffected doesn’t mean objective

    If you spend any time on social media you’ll know the power of the long quote printed on a photograph: the format is often used to elevate idiocy or to spread nonsense. A good example just now is of a Samuel Pepys diary entry about “gadabouts” in taverns spreading disease. It’s fake, and uses language…

  • Get a big discount on my bundled books

    How’s that for a headline? The British Computer Society commissioned me to write some books about effective writing, and this month they’re offering them as the Writing In IT Bundle with a whopping great discount. They even made a video! These books are designed to be practical and useful: you’ll discover how to optimise your…

  • Using coronavirus for a culture war

    Rachel Shabi in The Guardian: the key issue in the right’s current culture war is the lockdown, which is being presented as a freedom-sucking con – much like the EU. Mirroring the dynamics of climate denialism, those challenging the overwhelming consensus of global expertise cast themselves as lockdown “sceptics”. And cleaving to a rightwing populist…

  • Stuck in the Middle with You is warm, wise and sad

    I’ve written before about my admiration for the writer Jenny Boylan, aka Jennifer Finney Boylan: her memoir, She’s Not There, is warm, witty and often desperately sad. I didn’t realise she’d written another memoir, but when I found out about it I suspected it might also be warm, witty and desperately sad. It is. Stuck…

  • The Trauma Cleaner: an extraordinary book about an extraordinary woman

    I’ve just finished reading The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein. It’s often a very hard read – it’s a biography of someone who cleans up crime scenes and the homes of deeply troubled people, and who’s experienced terrible things in her own life; it goes to some very dark places – but it’s an incredible…

  • From the reading list

    I’ve made a conscious effort to stay off Twitter outside of working hours, partly because it’s full of terrible people and primarily because it’s a waste of time I could be putting to much better use by making music and reading books. Here are a few things I’ve read in the last few weeks that…