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The thoroughly repellent Richard Littlejohn has written yet another anti-trans piece in the papers. It’s not significant in itself; it’s the usual bile from a man who rails against “vicious trolls” while being a vicious troll. But it’s significant because it’s been published five years since another Littlejohn column was implicated in the death of… [more]
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This is superb journalism, very frightening and quite clearly the tip of an iceberg. Observer:Â 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach. The short version: one company surreptitiously and unethically gathered data on 1/3 of US Facebook users and used it to precision-target them with political messages on behalf of the… [more]
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There’s a fascinating piece by philosopher Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books about sex, sexuality and entitlement. It’s wide ranging and covers everything from “incels” – self-proclaimed “involuntary celibates” who believe they can’t get laid because women are evil – to LGBTQ people. The core question is whether anybody is entitled to sex,… [more]
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There is a long and noble tradition of giving people a right good kicking in print, but it’s rarely done as well as this. Writing in Current Affairs magazine, Nathan J Robinson sharpens his stiletto and gets stuck into Jordan Peterson, a rabble-rouser who alternates between stating the bleeding obvious and making completely unhinged claims… [more]
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I don’t find Ricky Gervais funny. I thought the US remake of The Office was much better than the original, largely because he wasn’t in it: I couldn’t shift the feeling that his portrayal of a boorish, charmless arsehole wasn’t acting. I’ve been proved right many times since. Writing in Vulture.com, Matt Zoller Seitz takes issue with… [more]
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This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but an algorithm. In the New York Times. Zeynep Tufekci describes YouTube’s radicalisation problem. No matter the starting point, it recommends increasingly extreme content. YouTube has recently come under fire for recommending videos promoting the conspiracy theory that the outspoken survivors of the school shooting… [more]
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If you think we’ve got problems with fake news now, wait until deepfake is mainstream. The Guardian: Show a neural network enough examples of faces from two celebrities and it’ll develop its own mental model of what they look like, capable of generating new faces with specific expressions. Ask it to generate a set of… [more]
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Metro asked me to write about International Women’s Day from the perspective of a trans person. There’s no method to this madness, no reason for it. Men aren’t from Mars, women aren’t from Venus, and nobody’s made of slugs, snails or puppy dogs’ tails, let alone sugar and spice and all things nice. The only… [more]
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Good news for anybody stuck in 1818: The Sun and The Times have both shared the incredible revelation that according to “snowflake students”, the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus should be pitied. Here’s The Sun: Next the snowflakes will be telling us that The Metamorphosis wasn’t really about cockroaches and that… [more]
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Secondary ticketing – the sites ripping off consumers by charging enormous fees on top of industrial scale ticket touting – is in the news again today. We need more transparency about their charges, apparently. That’s true: the sites use every trick in the book to hide their fees, which are ridiculous. There’s a huge service… [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.
