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Two very different but equally shocking stories in the papers today: The New York Times reports on the safety features missing from two Boeing 737 Max plans that crashed, killing dozens, while The Guardian publishes an extract from Beth Gardiner’s book about “dieselgate”, the car emissions scandal. The stories do have a common thread: corporations… [more]
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OpenDemocracy reports that the US anti-LGBT hate group Alliance Defending Freedom has been funding supposed “grassroots” organisations in the UK. In this particular case it has been funding groups that campaign against euthanasia; it also funds anti-abortion campaigners and other lovely people. Here are some interesting coincidences. The ADF works closely with another anti-LGBT hate… [more]
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There’s something missing from the ongoing coverage of homophobic, transphobic parents demanding schools cancel their inclusive education classes: any detail about what’s actually being taught. So hurrah for Luke Tryl, formerly of education watchdog Ofsted and director of the New Schools Network, who’s shared an example of the kind of thing these parents want to… [more]
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How’s your day going? Just after midnight, I saw The Economist tweet this. It turns out that the article was about Japan, and it has since been corrected with a less inflammatory headline. But as the writer Diana Tourjeé pointed out, “should trans people be sterilised?” is part of the regular media discourse on trans people… [more]
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There’s yet another worrying development in the parents vs education story: Conservative politician Andrea Leadsom says that parents should get to decide when their children “become exposed to that information”. Writing in the TES a few weeks ago, Natasha Devon explains why the “kids are too young” argument and two others are wrong. When it… [more]
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We told you so, #1. When religious groups protested about inclusive education in a Birmingham primary school, LGBT people said it was the thin end of the wedge. Protests have now expanded to more Birmingham schools who have abandoned their #NoOutsiders “respect everyone” lessons, and complaints have now been made to schools in Manchester too.… [more]
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BBC Scotland’s flagship news programme, The Nine*, appears to be making the same mistakes  that affect current affairs programming nationally and on radio: it’s trying to get on-air bust-ups instead of trying to inform its audience. I don’t know how much of this is deliberate – one of the channel’s aims is to create content… [more]
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MySpace, the leading social network from the pre-Facebook days, has accidentally (?) deleted more than a decade’s worth of music. Every piece of music uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015, some 50 million songs from 14 million artists, is gone like tears in the rain. This is an important lesson: digital does not… [more]
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Every Friday for more than two years, The Root has responded to reader emails and comments. Last week, it only replied to one. In a powerful piece of writing, Michael Harriot responds to a teacher who feels that “the rhetoric has grown increasingly anti-white, especially from the black community.” The email is long, but here’s… [more]
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In the aftermath of the Christchurch terrorist attack, every newspaper has been asking the same question: how did this happen? It’s a mystery. How could anti-muslim terror occur in part of the world where Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers ran 2,981 anti-muslim articles in a single year? Of course, Murdoch’s media empire isn’t just antipodean. He controls… [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.
