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Twitter informs me that it’s 15 years today since I first posted on the service. I don’t post there at all now; I’ve unfollowed everybody and locked my account, and unless there’s a change of ownership and a huge change in culture I don’t anticipate returning. It’s sad. For its first decade or so, Twitter… [more]
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I can barely believe it, but Carrie Kills A Man is a year old this week. That’s a year of going to amazing places, meeting amazing people and having amazing adventures, and I feel just as excited and delighted and pinching myself about it all as I did on publication day. Thanks to everybody who’s… [more]
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It’s Wendy Carlos’s birthday today. Carlos is one of the most influential electronic musicians of all time: half-artist, half-scientist, she is a pioneer without whom today’s music would sound very different. Her 1968 album Switched-On Bach introduced a generation to the synthesiser, she was an early creator of what we now call ambient music, and… [more]
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I’m deeply cynical about awareness days and weeks: while well intentioned, I think any Awareness Day also provides an easy way for people to pretend they’re part of the solution without actually doing anything – and in some cases, while being part of the problem. Mental health awareness weeks are a very good example of… [more]
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At the risk of sounding like those obviously fake stories that end “and everybody applauded”, I’d like to share a lovely little real-life movie moment that happened to me yesterday. I was bouncing around the flat with my youngest and, as I often do, I picked up a guitar to plonk away on it. I… [more]
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There’s a fascinating article in 404 Media about the shameful shuttering of Jezebel, one of the most important feminist publications online. According to the CEO of parent firm G/O Media, which acquired the site from its previous publisher, “our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s.” The… [more]
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The results of yesterday’s US elections make something very clear: attacking trans people, which Republicans did with great energy and at even greater expense, doesn’t work – and in fact such relentless demonisation of marginalised people may well motivate people to banish the bigots. This isn’t a huge surprise, because we saw the same in… [more]
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There’s an accidentally enlightening headline on the BBC report about blatantly obvious crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, who has been convicted of stealing billions of dollars by defrauding would-be crypto millionaires. The headline: “Everyone got duped by Sam Bankman-Fried’s big gamble.” But that isn’t true. There were lots of people pointing out that this emperor didn’t… [more]
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The hype around artificial intelligence tends to focus on extreme scenarios of Terminator-related apocalypse, but there’s a very worrying kind of AI that’s already causing a lot of trouble. It’s the use of AI tools to create realistic fakes. The same tech that makes Johnny Cash sing Taylor Swift, that pulls John Lennon’s voice out… [more]
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In 2013, then-London mayor Boris Johnson described an Australian political trick which would come to be known as the dead cat strategy. There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true,… [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.
