[politics] Why Andy Burnham is no ordinary Labour prime minister … TIL, that Andy Burnham is the first Co-operative Party Prime Minister. ‘The Labour Party and the Co-operative Party are distinct organizations — but a pact agreed in 1927 allows candidates to stand on behalf of both parties. In practice, Co-operative MPs tend to follow the Labour line — but the party has a distinct focus on mutual ownership, community businesses, and credit unions. It argues for democratic control of services and businesses by the people who use them — and supporters say this program offers up real hints about how Burnham will now govern. ‘

[everest] Mount Everest, a climber known only as ‘Green Boots’, and the mission to solve a 30-year mystery … The haunting story of a climber who died on Everest and remained unrecovered in the mountain’s death zone. ‘Named after his lime-coloured Koflach boots, Green Boots became a landmark for climbers tackling the tricky north-east ridge route, accessed from the Tibet and China side of the world’s tallest mountain. Curled up as if napping, Green Boots is fully clothed and lies nestled under a small rocky alcove about 8,500 metres above sea level and just 350 metres from the summit. A red fleece is pulled up over his face; perhaps a final act as he succumbed to -30C temperatures and hurricane-force winds in a storm that was documented in Jon Krakauer’s bestselling book Into Thin Air.’

[space] Astronauts returning from six-month missions describe a persistent 'observer' sensation … A close look at a curious after-effect of extended space missions. ‘NASA’s own post-flight reflections from station crews describe the sensation in plainer language: home feels staged. Smells are too sharp. Gravity feels theatrical. The brain, which spent half a year recalibrating for a world without down, treats the familiar as something to be studied rather than inhabited. Returning astronauts describe walking into their own homes and feeling like they are visiting them. Some talk about being unable to put a glass down without watching their hands do it. The pattern shows up in oral histories, in memoirs, in flight surgeon notes. It is one of the quieter costs of long-duration spaceflight.’

[politics] Britain’s six prime ministers since 2016 – ranked! … On Boris Johnson: ‘He campaigned for the December election under the slogan “get Brexit done”, one an exhausted country fell for, even though his Northern Ireland solution was just another fudge. Boris hoped he was going to be a leader for a good-times Britain, that the UK would fall for his jokes and charm. Instead, the world fell into the chaos of the Covid pandemic that required strong and stable leadership which Johnson was unable to provide. Over the course of the next two years, his government was rocked with the scandals of dodgy PPE contracts and Partygate. Boris was even fined by the police for attending a party given for his own birthday. He tried to claim he had no idea the parties were taking place, even though he was setting the culture inside No 10.’

[truecrime] Inside CrimeCon's uneasy mix of fandom and tragedy … BBC News visits a true CrimeCon in Las Vegas. ‘Just steps from an arch welcoming attendees to CrimeCon 2026, there is a wall plastered with missing persons posters and a sign emblazoned with “8 Simple Rules for Being an ETHICAL True Crime Fanatic”. About a five-minute walk away, though, there is a merch store selling CrimeCon-branded gifts, shot glasses and $80 sweatshirts. Employees bark in the hallways, urging attendees to sign up for next year or join the CrimeCon Cruise. Some have really leaned into the theme. One woman wears skin-tight crime-scene-tape leggings, while a pair of best friends proudly show off their crime-scene-tape homemade bags – complete with blood-spatter fabric lining.’

[politics] I saw all Reform’s weaknesses on display in Makerfield – Farage should be worried … Guardian reporting the aftermath of the Makerfield by-election. ‘I have sometimes found them a bit standoffish about Farage, tending to see him as too macho and full of himself – one should always remember that undying bit of folk-wisdom, “Nobody likes a smartarse” – and also wary of his leaning into the ultra-right. This forms one half of Farage’s essential dilemma: as one Reform MP quoted in the Times reportedly said of Makerfield voters’ reaction on the doorstep: “We were either too racist or not racist enough.”’

[comics] Seth’s Media Diet … A looks at the books, TV and films the comic artist Seth consumes. ‘I collect old TV broadcasts with the commercials and station breaks still in them (there is a weird and obscure market for this out there if you can track it down). The ones I most collect are old broadcasts of movies. Most of this stuff is from the late ’70s or the ’80s or even the ’90s. During the time when people were recording tv on their VCRs (and were too lazy to edit out the commercials — thank goodness). I love the time travel quality these old broadcasts give.’

[epstein] ‘Seriously the best boss ever’: inside the world of Jeffrey Epstein’s assistant. … Examining the role of Jeffrey Epstein’s staff in his crimes, specifically his personal assistant. ‘For [Amos] Guiora, Groff is a classic case. If she was making appointments and booking flights, she was enabling: “All this shit can’t happen without her.” In that sense, she was just like the leaders in the Catholic church or the university administrators who put their loyalty to their institutions over their duty to a victim. The only difference was that in Groff’s case, said Guiora, “her institution was Jeffrey Epstein”.’

[games] Silverwolf- A Story About Text Adventures and so much more … This article defies classification. It’s about how a commune of women wrote text adventures in rural Ireland in the 1980s but also about mystery, transformation, identity, games as fantasy/alternate worlds, radical feminist separatism, retreating from modernity and then possibly… a milkshake duck plot twist! It’s genuinely extraordinary. Go read…

“The Ladies of St. Brides are difficult to understand,” a journalist wrote in 1987. “How much is hype is difficult to assess. …They say Jack the Ripper is serious but are they ever serious about anything?” The group’s former publisher suspects their primary motive was always financial: “I think, basically, St Bride’s were in business: they were doing it on a commercial basis, however un-commercial they may have looked!” But some of the school’s pupils in later years would come to characterize the group as dangerously earnest, with one describing it as a cult. “There was something sinister at the heart of it,” she wrote: “The founder was a remarkable person but was leading a fantasy life—we were living in someone else’s fantasy.” While much about the Games Mistresses would shift across their decades of fronts and personas, disconnection from the everyday world was a constant theme.

[cia] Timothy Leary—1960s Acid Guru—May Have Been Among the CIA’s Greatest Assets … This article presents a fascinating conspiracy theory the that 1960s Psychedelic era was a CIA-orchestrated operation, with Timothy Leary as its frontman. (via) ‘Leary himself said in an interview with journalist Walter Bowart near the end of his life that he was working as an intelligence agent since 1962. “I was a witting agent of the CIA” which, he claimed, had recognized him as “an important national asset.” Asked by Bowart to elaborate on whether CIA people were involved in his LSD-proselytizing groups in the 1960s, Leary responded: “Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people.” Leary continued: “I like the CIA!”’

[politics] What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat … How Noah Hawley caught hand, foot, and mouth disease by hanging out with billionaires. (archive link) ‘Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.’

[royalty] Stay Classy: Mummy’s Favourite … More on the venality of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and family. ‘With the Yorks?, a whole new set of rules appear in the royal playbook. Chief among them is that one should seek, when explaining a personal fault, to pay oneself such a large compliment that it effectively kills the perception of the fault as being a fault at all. This was initially crucial for the duchess as part of her rehabilitation journey, or what she calls in one of her many books her attempt ‘to rebuild the brand Sarah’. The duchess blamed her ‘over-generous nature’ for her money troubles (in 2010 she had told the ‘fake sheikh’ she could ‘open any door’ to royalty for 500k with a downpayment of 40k). Her ‘fault’ (if it was one) was to give too much to the people in her life and land herself in hot water (silly old me). Andrew tried to pull off the same trick during his Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis in 2019, seeking to explain the reason he’d felt the need to fly to New York and stay with Epstein for three days just to tell him they could no longer be friends. ‘I admit fully that my judgment was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable,’ he said, to the disbelief of the entire world.’

[people] “America Screams” with Vincent Price (1981) … Go watch a television documentary hosted by Vincent Price that explores the history of American amusement parks and roller coasters. (Internet Archive)

[epstein] Rich Brain … How Epstein’s emails reveal the super-rich’s obsession with preserving their wealth. ‘Something middle-class people may not realize is that an age of yawning inequality actually makes very rich people more anxious, too. Once again, you might imagine a liberating effect of extreme wealth. But that isn’t how it turns out to work. The cost of sinking into the below-ground becomes more unimaginable. The abyss becomes more terrifying. And, therefore, changes to the system, higher taxes, rising populist tides — all of it is terrifying. Wealth taxation, specifically, like the new proposal from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna for a 5 percent annual wealth tax on America’s nearly 1,000 billionaires, triggers especially visceral feelings. The billionaire class often takes it like a punch in their grandson’s stomach.’

[tv] ‘I wrote The Sopranos to get over my mother wishing me dead’: David Chase on his mob masterpiece – and his new LSD epic… David Chase interviewed by Stuart Heritage. ‘Chase is such good company that I could happily while away the afternoon getting into the weeds about MKUltra. But our time is running out, so I return to the reason why he’s here. The Sopranos is such a foundational show, shaping our culture in ways we no longer even notice, that I ask Chase what he considers to be its legacy. Fourteen seconds pass in total silence as he considers his answer. “Well, hopefully it’s that God is in the details,” he offers.’

[comics] Wizards of Leroy (And Wrico) Lettering … Todd Klein writes about a mechanical lettering technique found in 1940s and 50s comics and some of the letterers who utilized it. ‘It’s a slow and time-consuming method of lettering. You hold the T-square firmly in place with one hand while keeping the template against the top edge and sliding it to the right position with the other to ink each letter. Correct spacing comes by trial and error while watching the ink pen. It took me at least four times as long as regular freehand lettering. I lettered one story with it, and vowed to never do so again! (I made a font from it.) As with most things, if you practice enough, you’re bound to get faster and better at it. That’s what happened to Jim Wroten…’

[tv] ‘Would you like me to cry now?’: Louis Theroux on the manosphere, marriage and misunderstandings … Louis Theroux profiled. ‘in his memoirs Theroux recounts his brother’s best man speech, which drew comedy from a Twitter handle Theroux used, “Loubot2000”. “Its conceit was that I was a temperamental bit of hi-tech kit that needed a troubleshooting guide.” He quotes, “Congratulations on purchasing your new Loubot 2000! … The Loubot 2000 is highly introspective and may sometimes go into power-save mode. To restore normal functionality, try asking one of the following questions: was Jimmy Savile really a paedophile? What do Scientologists actually believe? Are chimpanzees dangerous? This should reboot the system.”’

[comics] Tatjana Wood, Award-Winning Comic Book Colorist, Dies at 99 (archive.ph) … NYT Obituary for the long-time DC Comics colourist – worth visiting for the lovely photo of her with the Eisner Hall of Fame trophy. ‘Karen Berger, who edited Swamp Thing, wrote in an email about Ms. Wood: “Her magnificent and evocative palette was a perfect fit — she was an integral part of the magic of that groundbreaking series. She loved coloring ‘Shvampy,’ as she called him in her thick, gravelly German accent.”’

[tech] How Nick Land Became Silicon Valley’s Favorite Doomsayer … Let’s catchup with the populariser of accelerationism. ‘Land can now hold court in the ballroom of a mansion where sushi and seltzer are being served. Clearly, these ideas, and the political energy they carry, have escaped containment. But now, having spread, the new reactionary thought seems to have lost some of its momentum. “Nobody knows where we’re going,” Yarvin said, on the stage. Land agreed, adding, “I think the thing is that muddling through is the world that we are now living in.”’

[moore] Alan Moore: ‘There Is Something Dark And Ugly Within The Heart Of Fashion’ … Alan Moore Interview from 2013 on Fashion Beast. ‘I met [Malcolm McClaren]; he gave me a choice of three films to make. The one that immediately appealed to me was ‘Fashion Beast’ a combination of the Beauty and the Beast fable and the strange and tragic story of Christian Dior. Malcolm gave me a couple of books on Dior, a few on fashion, just so I could acquaint myself with that world. He suggested Flashdance and Chinatown as other influences I might look at. It was a bit overwhelming at first, but I began to see what he meant. After that, he pretty much left me to my own devices.’

[comics] I have no mouth and I must scream at Black people: Scott Adams, 1957-2026 … Comics Journal obituary of MAGA commentator and Dilbert creator. ‘In an eerily prescient interview with The Comics Journal in 1988, Bloom County cartoonist Berkeley Breathed predicted the next big trend in newspaper comics. “You know who the syndicates are looking for? They’re looking for the dissatisfied stockbroker, sitting in his office right now, he’s about 30 years old, thinking how funny it is, there’s all these office things going on around him, with computers and stuff. And he can draw a little bit. A little bit. He’s got the gags in his mind because he lived them. He’s going to start drawing comic strips, and he sends the stuff off to the syndicate. Even though they’re badly drawn, it doesn’t matter because they’re all reduced down to sub-microscopic size. And they start the comic strip. I have seen so many of these come across my desk in the past five years…they hit fast, they’ve got a good gimmick, and they’ve probably got a hook that sounds good to editors.” The following year, Dilbert, not yet an office strip, made its newspaper debut on April 16, 1989…’

[comics] R. Crumb on His Controversial Work, the 1960s, and How He's Changed … Crumb at 82. ‘Crumb has not exactly adapted to these surroundings. Over 32 years in this village, he has not learned to speak French. And yet, he has no intention of leaving. “I’m kind of passive that way, I guess,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to die here. This is it. Die here with all my junk in this big house.”’

[gaming] Bizarro World … A jornalist accidentally discovers his wife is a world-class Tetris player. ‘During a late-night phone call after business had quieted down at the station, he told me that any record in one of the more popular classic games – like Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, or Tetris – would always set the classic gaming world on fire. “It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.” What Flewin said next I will never forget. “Oh, my!”‘

[movies] Michael Mann: ‘I make films for a large presentation’ … Michael Mann interviewed on Heat 2 and more. ‘My ambition is to very strongly and effectively impact the audience with the story with all the tools at my disposal to transport them into this world for two, two and a half hours. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do since I was in film school in London and so it’s a diminution for any of my – or any number of other directors I can think of – to have our films be seen 16-by-9 on an iPhone. The full power of performance and expression is what I make films for.’

[politics] Beware the Liz Truss chatshow: viewers will require survivor therapy … John Crace watches Liz Truss’s new YouTube show so we don’t have to. ‘For her new Liz Truss Show, she appeared to have turned her utility room into a makeshift studio. No expense incurred. Though she did have someone to do the filming this time. Albeit a 12-year-old intern doped up on ketamine. I’ve seen better editing on my dad’s home movies from the 60s. We opened with a montage of Lizzy’s greatest hits. There she was being greeted by the queen at Balmoral. Huge mistake. She doesn’t seem to realise that the entire country holds her responsible for the queen’s death. The last photo we saw of the queen was of Truss being introduced to her on the Tuesday. Two days later she was dead. Case proved. It’s not hard to imagine the queen thinking: “You know what? It’s just not worth it any more. My first prime minister was Winston Churchill. Now it’s come to this…”’

[xmas] 1970: The Office Christmas Party … A wonderful TV time capsule from the BBC Archive about a Christmas party at a London advertising agency in 1969. It has a real Adam Curtis vibe to it and not surprisingly he wrote about it in 2010. ‘The old patrician world of British advertising was being dismantled and by now much of it had gone from the agency. The only real remnant of that old world in the film is Mary Crowley from Accounts (along with her unnamed friend from Wages). I love Mary Crowley, she is like a ghost from an older Britain haunting the new “on-trend” flash agency.’

[comics] The Common Man Is Coming into His Own … A look at how Jack Kirby’s Jewish identity was reflected in The Thing. ‘In important ways, though, Kirby’s work was intensely personal. “I told in every story what was really inside my gut,” he said in a 1990 interview. If his Jewish identity is reflected at all in his published work, it’s coded, inscribed as a subtext to be deciphered later. “My generation lied to survive,” Kirby told a group of fans in a 1972 conversationwhen he was explaining why he changed his name from Jacob Kurtzberg.’

[covid-19] Insane after coronavirus? … Patricia Lockwood’s demented experience of Covid-19 in March 2020. ‘‘The love of my life is now my enemy,’ I thought to myself, crawling out of the bedroom on hands and knees to take one million mg of Vitamin C, because what the hell else was I supposed to do – apply leeches? What kind of man would fake a cough while his wife was in the next room perishing? Hadn’t he discouraged me from going to the hospital? At the beginning of lockdown, had he not thrown away the empty detergent bottle I set aside for use as an Apocalypse Bidet, telling me I was being a lunatic? Look at him, I thought to myself evilly: fit as a fiddle and playing video games all day – though later, of course, it turned out that he was also delirious and had been playing the same twenty minutes of Skyrim over and over without ever progressing.’

[life] The life and tragic death of John Balson: how a true crime producer documented his own rising horror … A powerful, personal story about the health and ethical impacts of working on true crime TV in the UK.

‘As a producer, it was Balson’s job to persuade bereaved families to tell their stories on camera. “The thing about factual TV is that the raw material is just people, and your relationship with those people,” says McKay, who has also worked as a true crime TV producer. “That puts massive stress on the people whose job it is to organise and wrangle them.”

Because his contributors were usually based in the US or the UK, Balson routinely worked 18-hour days across three time zones. “You spend all day looking at photos of dead bodies of people who have been murdered in gruesome ways,” says Rosy Milner, 30, a factual TV producer and former colleague of Balson’s from London. “You read about sexual abuse and crimes against children. And then a contributor in the US texts at 10pm, asking for a phone call. You book the Zoom at midnight and keep going.”’

[politics] Dominic Cummings: oracle of the new British berserk… Update on what Dominic Cummings is up to.

‘He recited his current favourite examples of state failure – fugitive terrorists using human rights law to sue the Ministry of Defence, deep-state officials murmuring of riots in the provinces, politicians who hide from responsibility behind the scripts of their civil service administrators. He connected this with his current favourite historical parallel: the crisis of capitalism, technology and ideology of the 1840s, which he compares to the revolutions in AI and “biological engineering” in Silicon Valley about to “smash into all our lives”.

Cassandra in tracksuit bottoms, then. And given the scale of this upheaval, the corresponding Cummings programme is remarkably precise, but limited. His great theme is, to put it facetiously, paperwork management. Government should be narrower, sharper, modelled after the administrations of Pitt the Younger (he speaks as if there is no difference between late-18th-century carronade procurement and modern bureaucracy).’

[politics] The race to succeed Sadiq Khan … It’s looking likely that Sadiq Khan will stand down as London major before the next election in 2028. ‘But friends of Khan tell me that he has privately indicated he does not plan to stand for a fourth term. Some attribute this to the strain of being the most heavily guarded person in the country after the King and the Prime Minister. “Hand on heart, had I known when I first began this journey what it involved for my family, I can’t unequivocally say I would have done this,” Khan reflected last year.’

[oceangate] So what was Stockton's motivation for his decision? … A thoughtful Reddit posts on the motivations and decisions that led to the Titan submersible implosion. ‘I guess the only thing that makes sense to me is the comment by another redditor that “it HAD to work.” He bet everything on it. Since switching to carbon fibre after the Fosset sub was built (started OG in 2009, and this was sometime around 2011/2012 I believe) – his entire business model revolved around being able to monetize submersibles.’

[tv] 10 Most Shocking Reveals From Netflix's OceanGate Titan Submersible Documentary … Fascinating documentary from Netflix that shows some of Stockton Rush’s movtivations. ‘Although they worked on the Titan, many of the engineers had little to no confidence in the vessel. This is best displayed by the testimony of Tony Nissen, the Director of Engineering, during the Coast Guard investigation. He asserts that Stockton Rush asked him to go into the Titan for a test dive, but he refused to go inside the vessel for a dive. Theoretically, if anyone should have had confidence in a submersible’s efficacy, it would be the head of engineering.’

[history] The hunt for Marie Curie's radioactive fingerprints in Paris … Wonderful story about the radioactive traces Marie Curie left behind in Paris where she worked. ‘”The lab was already decontaminated in the 1980s,” says Huynh. At the time, the practice in the museum was to “try and scrub off the contamination with abrasive sponges, and if radioactivity was then still detected, it meant it had sunk into the material, and they’d throw away the whole thing and replace it” with a copy, he says. The lab bench, for example, was replaced with a replica, Huynh explains. Today, weakly radioactive traces such as the ones on the chair and doorknob are allowed to stay in place, he says, and are considered as heritage.’

[bbc] 1959: The AUDIOPHILE's Quest for PERFECT SOUND … Go watch this wonderful short-film about audiophiles and the technology of sound in 1959. Directed by John Schlesinger for the BBC. ‘Do they like music? Or are they in love with equipment?’

[covid-19] What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick With Coronavirus … Five years ago, I remember reading Jessica Lustig’s powerful writing about caring for her very sick husband who had Covid-19. It was too much to blog at the time but the article has stayed with me.

I run through possibilities. I’m not so worried about CK getting sick. I can nurse her too. It’s if I get sick. I show her how to do more things, where things go, what to remember, what to do if — What if T is hospitalized? What if I am? Could a 16-year-old be left to fend for herself at home, alone? How would she get what she needed? Could she do it? For how long?

The one thing I know is that I could not send her to my parents, 78 years old and nearby on Long Island. They would want her to come, but she could kill them, their dear grandchild coming forward to their embrace, radioactive, glowing with invisible incubating virus cells. No. Not them. Someone else would have to take her, someone who has a bedroom and a bathroom where she could isolate and be cared for. Someone would. I lie awake at 4 a.m., on the floor, listening, thinking, wide awake with adrenaline.’

[tv] Larry David Age Quiz … Can you guess which are the older pictures of Larry David? ‘When the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm aired in 2000, Larry David was 54 years old. For comparison, that is how old Paul Rudd is right now. But the benefit of looking older when you’re young is that it’s hard for others to tell the difference when you age.’

[history] Distressed 99 Foot Concrete Portrait of Ferdinand Marcos … More details here: The exploded bust of Ferdinand Marcos… ‘The bust was completed in the early 1980s when Mr Marcos was still in power, but fell into disrepair after he was overthrown in a popular revolt in 1986. He died in exile three years later. This is a real modern-era Ozymandias, the broken remnants of a statue to a powerful man who grabbed command by the throat and rode it until he was overthrown.’

[tv] A Lunch with Adrian Edmondson … ‘That understanding is really the triumph of Edmondson’s own career. He had some demons to overcome – including intrusive suicidal thoughts, which he was surprised to discover not everyone had. He has been saved – and thrived – as an actor and writer, by the two great love stories of his life. The abiding one is with Saunders. They have kept celebrity at bay, he suggests, partly by living most of the time on the edge of Dartmoor. He tells how one of their daughters came home from school one day in some distress. Kids in the playground had been insisting that her mother was the famous Jennifer Saunders off the telly, and she had been insisting that no, she was Jennifer Edmondson…’

[books] The Later Years of Douglas Adams … A look back at Douglas Adams creative struggles later in his career. ‘This time he had to be locked into a room with not only a handler from his publisher but his good friend Michael Bywater, who had, since doing Bureaucracy for Infocom, fallen into the role of Adams’s go-to ghostwriter for many of the contracts he signed and failed to follow through on. Confronted with the circumstances of its creation, one is immediately tempted to suspect that substantial chunks of Mostly Harmless were actually Bywater’s work. By way of further circumstantial evidence, we might note that some of the human warmth that marked the first four Hitchhiker’s novels is gone, replaced by a meaner, archer style of humor that smacks more of Bywater than the Adams of earlier years.’

[comics] The Funnies Have Gone Down, Down, Down … Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich discuss comics.

BOGDANOVICH: Is there a– I was gonna ask you that– do you think there’s an interesting parallel between movie setups and panels?

WELLES: Yes. I think the panels come out of the movies, and–

BOGDANOVICH: They came out of the movies.

WELLES: Out of the movies, and then have in their turn influenced lesser directors.

BOGDANOVICH: Hmm.

WELLES: But they of course never could have existed without the movies.

[books] What I’ve Learned: Stephen King … Some life lessons from Stephen King. ‘When I have a good idea, I just know. It’s like if you have a bunch of cut-glass goblets set up and you’re hitting them with a spoon. Clunk, clunk, clunk. And then one goes ding.’

[vending] A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world … A wonderfully written profile on the world of vending machines. ‘At 12.45am, a white-chocolate Twix dropped into the well of a machine in Blackfriars in London. At a taxi depot in Belfast, drivers on overnight standby thumbed in coins to buy keep-awake Cokes. Cans of sugar-free Tango slammed down in the surgeons’ staffroom at an Edinburgh hospital. Bottles of Mountain Dew, already long past expiry, turned another hour older inside a Covid-shuttered office in North Carolina. A Japanese accountant, several hours ahead of Europe and the US in a southern prefecture called Ehime, eyed the familiar choices in a cup-noodle machine by his desk…’

[relationships] Satanic Couple No Longer Has Shared Dark Vision For Future … ‘She and Dane hadn’t felt that first blush of unspeakable perversity and evil in quite some time. “As I became more interested in animal and human sacrifice, he started immersing himself more in his esoteric texts and dark arts that he says will unleash death and madness upon the world. So we really don’t have much to talk about anymore. We had planned on giving birth to the Antichrist someday, but he keeps trying to put it off by saying we have to wait until a blood moon rises on the winter solstice.”’

[london] A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld … The story of the life and death of a London teenager who dies in mysterious circumstances. ‘A surveillance camera affixed to the Thames headquarters of the British spy agency M.I.6 captured sudden movement outside a building across the river. It was Riverwalk, where Zac had stayed that summer. The building’s façade featured curved balconies overlooking the Thames. At 2:24 a.m., the camera recorded Zac walking out of a brightly lit fifth-floor apartment. He went to one corner of the balcony, then to the other. Then, returning to the center, he jumped…’

[crime] How I Fell for an Amazon Scam Call and Handed Over $50,000 … An anxiety inducing article from a financial journalist describing how they were scammed out of a large sum of money. ‘Calvin told me to listen carefully. “The first thing you must do is not tell anyone what is going on. Everyone around you is a suspect.” I almost laughed. I told him I was quite sure that my husband, who works for an affordable-housing nonprofit and makes meticulous spreadsheets for our child-care expenses, was not a secret drug smuggler. “I believe you, but even so, your communications are probably under surveillance,” Calvin said. “You cannot talk to him about this.” I quickly deleted the text messages I had sent my husband a few minutes earlier.’

[blog] Diamond Geezer’s Saturday … A day in the Life from London’s best blogger. ‘1pm – Lunch is a very important part of my Saturday. I might head to the latest streetfood nirvana and try my luck with a spicy chilli dog, a twisted falafel wrap or a mini pistachio crêpe – Kerb at the Gipsy Hill Taproom is always a winner. Or I might just open a packet of Mini Cheddars.’

[wifi] Problems with the WiFi … “I’ve got problems with your Wifi. You’ve put a password on it…”

[comics] Wyrd Britain: Moorcock and Moore in conversation … ‘This video shows Michael Moorcock and Alan Moore engaged in a wide and free roaming conversation about Moorcock’s life and work that takes in his post-war childhood, his editorship of ‘New Worlds’, modernism and the modern author, Jerry Cornelius, being left wing in Texas and of course, due to the occasion, Colonel Pyat and the holocaust.’

[2023] John Crace on the Villains of 2023 … ‘Suella Braverman — First, we had her enthusiastic support of the Rwanda policy. The idea of sending small boats refugees to a country that has been deemed unsafe by the United Nations. So far, no refugee has yet been deported to Rwanda. So that worked well. Then she acquired a barge that turned out to be riddled with legionella. So far, only a handful of people have been housed there. It turns out that Braverman is good at talking about new ways to be unpleasant to foreigners, but less so at turning it into a reality.’

[podcasts] The Banksy Story … A BBC podcast chronicling Banksy’s rise to fame.

[books] Remembering Iain Banks: a prolific, terrific talent … A look at the legacy of Iain Banks. ‘Ten long years without a new book from him seems illogical, bizarre. After his rug-pulling debut The Wasp Factory brought him early notoriety in 1984, Banks averaged roughly a novel a year for almost three decades. Though he clearly relished switching up his approach to genre, consistent elements of his often swashbuckling style – notably caustic wit, a weakness for wordplay and unwavering socialist politics – made the annual ritual of catching up with the new Banks feel like an ongoing conversation. I miss it. I miss him.’

[comics] the SETH shoot interview … Long interview with Seth on Joe Matt and much more from Cartoonist Kayfabe.

[comics] Remembering Joe Matt … Memories from friends including Seth and Chester Brown. Seth: ‘It always struck me as funny when someone would read one of Joe’s comics and get angry. “What a jerk” they’d say, getting all worked up about Joe and his actions in the story. What amazed me was that they were reacting to the work as if they’d just watched a documentary about him. Totally forgetting that this was a work of art by a very calculating and smart artist who deliberately made the choices in the book that caused this reaction. Joe knew exactly what he was doing. He didn’t paint himself as a creep by accident. That was the point. He did everything on purpose. That weird obsessiveness of his made absolutely nothing an accident. Every line, every panel, every exclamation mark was carefully considered (too carefully considered!). He was a master cartoonist and the work shows it.’

[comics] Farewell to a Poor Bastard … Jeet Heer’s obituary for Joe Matt. ‘I got to know Joe Matt while I was working as a journalist in Toronto in the 1990s. I would occasionally write about Joe’s work and also that of his two cartoonist friends Chester Brown and Seth (who sometimes showed up as comic foils in Joe’s work). I had shown my wife, Robin Ganev, Joe’s just published graphic novel, The Poor Bastard. Robin delighted in the book as an accurate portrayal of the dating scene among young Toronto bohemians in the 1990s. Joe’s portrait of himself as a heel impressed her as an essentially accurate rendering of an all-too-common male type. As my friend the journalist Nathalie Atkinson notes, “Many women love Joe Matt’s comics-in part because he confirms everything we suspected.”’