-
For the second time in just a few months, my friends and I are mourning another life lost to suicide. Too many people are struggling with mental health and suicidal thoughts. If you’re one of them, please speak to somebody. The world is a better place with you in it, and can be a better [more]
-
The culture wars over trans people have made their way to the philosophers’ community, with some high-profile anti-trans people wrapping their views in philosophical arguments. Unfortunately, Luke Roelofs writes, those arguments don’t make sense. This is a long read, but it’s interesting if you’d like to understand why issues such as policing bathrooms are so [more]
-
Following on from my earlier post, The Times’ story about university places for care experienced people has grown worse. Something I didn’t spot in the original was the way the piece drew a distinction between “disadvantaged” pupils and “bright” pupils, as if the latter couldn’t possibly include the former. Again, the word choice is significant. [more]
-
This week, Scottish universities unveiled an important new initiative: people who’ve been in the care system will be guaranteed the offer of a university place if they meet new minimum entry requirements. It should double the number of care-experienced students to around 600 people. It’s designed to address some of the issues that don’t affect [more]
-
Yesterday I linked to a story about a man and a very strange sequence of events – please read it before reading this, or it’ll spoil the story for you. The story asked, “Is this the most gullible man in America?” but some readers are wondering if perhaps we’re the gullible ones too. The story, [more]
-
I read this at the weekend in New York magazine, and I was open-mouthed for most of it. It’s a story that starts bad, gets worse and then goes rapidly downhill from there. On March 7, 2015, Harvard Law professor Bruce Hay, then 52, was in Tags Hardware in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near his home, when [more]
-
A beautiful, sad piece by CJ Hauser in The Paris Review. There are worse things than not receiving love. There are sadder stories than this. There are species going extinct, and a planet warming. I told myself: who are you to complain, you with these frivolous extracurricular needs? [more]
-
I was having a bad day on Saturday so I went to the pub to cheer myself up. It wasn’t entirely successful. First, a young woman who’d been standing next to me at the bar heard me speak, turned, and stared at me with open disgust. A few minutes later a drunk thirtysomething man put [more]
-
A lovely piece by Leslie Jamison about attending weddings. Everyone talks about weddings as beginnings but the truth is they are also endings. They give a horizon of closure to things that have been slowly dissolving for years: flirtations, friendships, shared innocence, shared rootlessness, shared loneliness. [more]
-
I’ve written before about the toothless press regulator IPSO, which was set up by the press specifically for the purpose of not regulating the press. To take just one recent example, IPSO found that when The Times makes up quotes, doing so doesn’t breach the rules on accuracy. The ruling was on a story about [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
