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Something that you might not be aware of is how much newspaper, magazine and website publishers rely on affiliate marketing: if they link to a shop selling product X and you buy product X via that link, they get a small fee. Those revenues are particularly important during this coronavirus lockdown: the other big revenue… [more]
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The Conservatives are working on their exit strategy. Not how we’ll exit the lockdown; how they’ll shift the blame for their failures onto others, such as the NHS. For example: Care homes are not run by the NHS. Care homes used to be run by councils, but years of funding cuts have seen that provision… [more]
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The official UK coronavirus death toll will crack 10,000 today. The real death toll, which unlike the official figures includes those who died in care homes, those who died at home and those who had not already been tested positive for COVID-19, is much higher. The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine has published a good… [more]
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At the time of writing: 101,000 – total global deaths from Covid-19 8,958 – total UK deaths from the same virus, excluding hundreds more in care homes The UK has nearly one in ten of the global deaths from this virus despite being one of the most recent countries to get it. Today’s daily death… [more]
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Here’s Cambridge Police on Twitter this morning. Let’s play a little game. It’s called “show us which specific part of the emergency coronavirus legislation details which supermarket aisles are essential and which ones are non-essential”. There isn’t one, of course. Shops are allowed to sell anything they have in stock, and you are allowed to… [more]
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This is doing the rounds on social media right now. It’s funny, but like the best political jokes it has sharp teeth. How many of the people standing outside clapping for the NHS on a Thursday evening voted for a party that’s stripped the NHS bare, refused to pay staff properly, refused to consider its… [more]
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There is a campaign just now asking people to save newspapers. The gist: many are threatened by coronavirus-related advertising collapse; without them, especially plucky local ones, democracy will be under threat. The first stage is to ask the public to support them; the second, to demand government help. Byline Times isn’t entirely sold on the… [more]
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There’s an interesting article in The Scientist, the magazine for life science professionals, that includes a good round-up of the current research into trans people’s brains. There are lots of fascinating questions: for people who transition to identifying as a binary gender different from that assigned at birth, “we still also don’t know whether male-to-female… [more]
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Eleanor Penny, for Novara Media, on “bathroom bills” and anti-trans scaremongering: It seems to matter little that all this has been repeatedly debunked as statistical nonsense or swivel-eyed conspiracism. They aren’t really propositions to be proved true or false – they are ways of telegraphing disgust. Of signalling to those who fall outside normative conceptions… [more]
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Net magazine, originally know as .net, is closing after 25 years. I cried at the news. Not just because it’s putting some lovely, talented people out of a job, but also because .net has a special place in my heart. It’s the magazine that gave me my break into journalism nearly 22 years ago, the… [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.
