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There’s a really nasty tone creeping into the press right now, with tabloids and local press following the police’s lead and giving ordinary people a kicking. We’re not quite at Two Minutes Hate just yet, but the trickle of “look at these stupid bastards” stories is starting to become a stream. A lot of those… [more]
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I wrote the other day about not finding any pleasure in the misfortunes of others, even if those people are horrible. But of course some people do, especially when the people are especially horrible. Take the rapist Harvey Weinstein: news that he had tested positive for coronavirus caused much merriment online and off; I saw… [more]
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Adam Ramsay in OpenDemocracy: In the wake of the Andrew Wakefield scandal and two decades of disastrous climate change denial, newspapers surely have a social responsibility to be calm and cautious when contradicting scientific consensus, not turn serious questions of health communication into flesh for bare-toothed columnists to spar over. Despite continuing to spread confusion… [more]
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The BBC has put together a page fact-checking the latest coronavirus-related nonsense circulating on social media. Today’s crop includes disinfectant-spraying helicopters (nope), a memo from Bill Gates (fake), video showing Turkish food parcels (old) and the official-looking text messages you may be getting right now (criminals). As ever, Snopes.com continues to bust bullshit (if you’re… [more]
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[The deals listed here are long gone but the recommendations are still good] I get quite annoyed by social media posts urging us all to be productive and/or learn new skills during THE END OF THE BLOODY WORLD but I also get really bored when I’m stuck at home and I find messing around with… [more]
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I’m normally a big fan of schadenfreude, the feeling of pleasure in others’ misfortunes. But so much of what I’m reading just now just makes me sad. For example, there’s no joy in seeing prime minister Boris Johnson admit to having coronavirus just days after boasting about shaking coronavirus patients’ hands; I’m just sad… [more]
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There’s been a really nasty outbreak of everything-ism over the Coronavirus and people’s reactions to it. A tweet from the comedy programme Have I Got News For You today was a good example: it captioned a photo of people queuing too closely outside ASDA as “natural selection in action”. The replies included lots of comments… [more]
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A fascinating piece in Mother Jones by historian Patrick Wyman. The fall of an empire—the end of a polity, a socioeconomic order, a dominant culture, or the intertwined whole—looks more like a cascading series of minor, individually unimportant failures than a dramatic ending that appears out of the blue. Carts full of olive oil failing… [more]
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Alex Andreou, writing for Politics.co.uk: I fully support Peter Hitchens and Brendan O’Neill’s inalienable right to be infected with a deadly virus. If they existed in a vacuum, I might buy myself one of those big foam fingers and cheer them on, as they march to the extinction that is the destiny of every dinosaur.… [more]
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Just because it’s the end of the world doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of stuff to laugh at. This, from the Mirror, had me in tears. Man had sex with a dolphin called Dolly for a year – and claimed she seduced him Almost every paragraph has a killer line, such as: “At first I… [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.
