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I really like Kirsty Strickland, one of Scots media’s more interesting columnists: she’s funny on Twitter, incisive on politics and occasionally devastating on Medium. Here, she writes about how grief is part of Christmas for so many people. Because for all the joy that Christmas can bring, its braying decadence and opulence can also [more]
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I’ve been writing a lot about “discovery” recently, the way in which apps attempt to find things you might like based on what you’ve liked before. But the best discovery is when you find things that aren’t just based on your purchase history or listening history. For example, over the last couple of days [more]
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This, from the Daily Record and Sunday Mail, is really alarming: the UK government is running a “psyops” propaganda programme from a mill just outside Auchtermuchty. The stated aim is to fight terrorism and Russian political interference, but it appears to be fighting the UK government’s local political enemies too. On the surface, the cryptically [more]
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I’m a big fan of Laurie Penny, and this piece about a cruise with cryptocurrency speculators is incredible. It’s not a tech story but a human interest one, and it reminds me very much of David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (posted here under a different title, “Shipping Out: On [more]
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In the aftermath of the social network Tumblr banning all explicit content, some writers have considered the wider implications. The reasons for the bans are pretty clear – for example, Tumblr has a problem with illegal content and it’s easier and cheaper to ban all potentially problematic content than to moderate it – but the [more]
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There’s an interesting opinion piece by an unnamed member of MassResistance, part of the anti-LGBT movement that suffered a landslide defeat in its attempts to repeal trans rights in Massachusetts. It includes a telling admission of something that’s widely known but rarely written down. The rallying cry of the pro-family groups trying to repeal the [more]
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I’ve had the misfortune to share airtime with writers from Spiked magazine on a few occasions now. I’m not a fan: the magazine is reliably on the wrong side of any issue you care to think of, rushing to the defence of the world’s worst people. I fear that giving them airtime helps legitimise often [more]
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Speaking at the Hollywood Reporter Women in Entertainment gala this week, comedian Hannah Gadsby spoke about her problem with “good men”. “My problem is that, according to the ‘Jimmys,’ there are only two types of bad men. There’s the [Harvey] Weinstein/Bill Cosby types who are so utterly horrible that they might as well be different species [more]
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There are some truly terrifying numbers in a new survey on behalf of the End Violence Against Women Coalition [PDF document]. The study, of around 4,000 Britons, found that: 33% people think rape isn’t rape if there isn’t physical violence; A third of men think rape isn’t rape if the woman had flirted during a [more]
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To borrow from Oscar Wilde, it would take a heart of stone to read about the fall of Milo without laughing. Milo, if you’re lucky enough to be unaware of him, is a vicious right-wing troll (and former Telegraph journalist) who managed to build a very lucrative empire by saying and doing hateful things. “Feminism is cancer” [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.
