Category: Uncategorised

  • Watching women

    This is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever read. Gillian Frank and Lauren Gutterman, for Jezebel: How the ‘Girl Watching’ Fad of the 1960s Taught Men to Harass Women. In the spring of 1968, 21-year-old Francine Gottfried began working as an IBM machine operator at a data processing plant in lower Manhattan. Gottfried…

  • A calorific arms race

    This, by MM Carrigan in Eater, is a great bit of writing. It’s about the semi-mythical fast food buffets that are unimaginable now, “an arms race in maximizing caloric intake.” In the age of COVID-19, the fast-food buffet feels like more of a dream than ever. How positively whimsical it would be to stand shoulder…

  • What Dr Seuss didn’t say

    If you’ve been reading this blog for some time you’ll know that from time to time I get fascinated by online misquotes, which often go on to have a life of their own. As I’ve written before, the urinal trough in the gents’ toilets in Glasgow’s King Tut’s venue is engraved with a quote from…

  • Hundreds of Emilys

    This is heartbreaking, powerful and thought-provoking: Buying Myself Back, by Emily Ratajkowski. It’s about photographs and paintings and who can control images of you. And it’ll probably further damage your faith in human nature. Pictures meant only for a person who loved me and with whom I’d felt safe — photos taken out of trust…

  • Trans healthcare has been privatised

    Genderkit has collated the latest waiting list information for UK trans healthcare and it’s the grimmest read yet: there isn’t a single gender clinic for adults that has a waiting list of less than two years, and those waiting lists are growing ever longer. This image is telling: the only clinics without years-long waiting lists…

  • This is not OK. This is never OK

    Emma Thomas is an award-winning creative producer and director who’s currently sending out CVs in her hunt for work. So at first she was delighted when a potential employer got in touch. You can be sure this isn’t the first time he’s tried this. And there are many men just like him. To them, women…

  • Compromise

    Famous Moments in History, Reimagined By Centrists

  • Na-na-na-na Facts Man!

    This, by Annie Lowrey, is fantastic. You have met Facts Man before if you have spent any time online in the past half decade or so. He’s inescapable. He podcasts. He makes YouTube videos. He traffics in Medium posts. He burns up Facebook. And he loves—loves!—Twitter. What does he serve up there? Truth. Facts. The…

  • “Inappropriate enthusiasm is pretty much baked into my core personality”

    I’ve been reading Heather Havrilesky’s writing online pretty much since I first went online. This, on friendship in a time of Covid, is superb. In the past, whenever I met someone I liked a lot and admired, I was often too fearful to stick my neck out and assert my interest in becoming friends. I…

  • Human rights are never popular

    Many people have rightly celebrated the life and mourned the death of John Lewis, the US civil rights leader and staunch LGBT ally. Lewis was one of the original Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who refused to accept racial segregation and who engaged in very public protest. The Freedom Riders were very brave and very…