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NPR has a great profile of Sia, one of the most talented and fascinating songwriters of our age. On the verses she trips across syllables like skipping stones and chews vowels like gum — an affectation that’s spawned no end of affectionate memes. On the pre-chorus, she switches to the sloshed gutters of her low [more]
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This is Glasgow’s city of the dead, the Necropolis. It’s also a brilliant place to watch fireworks, which is what the people in the photo were doing last night. I love this shot, it looks more like I’ve stumbled upon some kind of ritual. [more]
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I’ve written many times about the “detransition myth”, the oft-repeated and thoroughly debunked claim that most trans kids who go through medical transition then change their minds. The short version: anti-trans groups tell you that 80% of trans kids detransition; the actual numbers show that 80% of gender non-conforming kids aren’t trans. Those kids aren’t [more]
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The New York Times has brought forward its planned cover story for next week to coincide with the US midterm elections. It’s a horrific story about the rise of neo-fascism and the real threat posed by white nationalism. White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any [more]
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In the final days of the Gender Recognition Act consultation, the (UK) Guardian newspaper published a one-sided string of anti-trans pieces culminating in an editorial regurgitating a lot of bigots’ tropes about dangerous predators. The latest criticism of it comes from an unlikely source: most of the US edition’s writers and editors. For journalists to [more]
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I’ve been trying and failing to persuade one of my friends that Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe is one of the greatest pop songs ever made, which of course it is. I was genuinely dancing to this when I played it this morning. Given that I was in a dressing gown at the time [more]
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Facebook is currently running an ad campaign telling you that it’s against hate speech. Facebook was simultaneously enabling advertisers to target people with an interest in “white genocide” just days after the Pittsburgh massacre. This is horrific. After selecting “white genocide conspiracy theory†as an ad target, Facebook provided “suggestions†of other, similar criteria, including interest [more]
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The second of my British Computer Society books was published as an ebook today. The print editions of the series (there are four books in total) will go on sale in a couple of weeks. Here’s the info: Writing for social media is different to standard business writing and it can be difficult to get [more]
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Law.com: Dozens of companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and The Coca-Cola Co., pushed back against recent attempts by the Trump administration to reduce protections for transgender people under federal civil rights laws. They instead stressed the importance of equality in a public statement released Thursday. The 56 companies include major financial institutions, tech companies and [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.
