Finding myself at a birthday party for much younger celebrants this weekend, I felt a wraith among the living. My life’s ambition to look like Michelle Pfeiffer had finally been realised — only it was the Stardust Pfeiffer, a 5,000-year-old …
How looksmaxxing went mainstream
Let’s start with some facts. Trying to look your best is a normal, even admirable effort. Caring for your appearance is a sign that you respect not only yourself but those around you. A culture of young people interested in …
Ballard predicted the collapse of the middle class
“…Cheap holidays, over-priced housing, educations that no longer buy security…
…[The middle classes] are the new proletariat, like factory workers a hundred years ago…
…Anyone earning less than £300,000 a year scarcely counts. You’re just a prole in a three-button …
Why shouldn’t AI write a film?
“This machine can produce a 5,000-word story, all typed and ready for despatch, in 30 seconds. How can the writers compete with that?” So asks Roald Dahl in his short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator, published in 1953.
The eponymous …
My day with the Burryman
“At every door in succession, a shout is raised, and the inhabitants, severally come forth, bestow there kindly greetings and donatives of money on the BURRYMAN who in this way collects, we believe, considerable sums of money to be …
My day with the Burryman
“At every door in succession, a shout is raised, and the inhabitants, severally come forth, bestow there kindly greetings and donatives of money on the BURRYMAN who in this way collects, we believe, considerable sums of money to be …
America has been hustled
“When you hustle you keep score real simple. The end of the game you count up your money. That’s how you find out who’s best. That’s the only way.” The lines come from The Hustler (1961) starring Paul Newman, George …
Joan Didion’s insufferable disciples
Joan Didion’s enduring popularity among today’s young readers is a somewhat mysterious phenomenon. So many visibly progressive, literary types seem to uncritically worship her. Really? I always think to myself, concerned that I’ve misheard them. Joan Didion, the National Review …
Read A Book – #SolutionsWatch
If you’re like the majority of the population in this post-literate age of TikTok videos and never-ending social media feeds, you don’t read books anymore. But you should. Join James for this simple and to-the-point edition of #SolutionsWatch on the …
Letby Truthers want a good story
“It was like staring at a Magic Eye picture,” Ravi Jayaram, one of the medics who first raised concerns about Lucy Letby, told the New Yorker. “At first, it’s just a load of dots… But you stare at them, and …
Keir Starmer’s favourite radical socialist
Modern politics is a business that obliterates the self. It turns its winning practitioners into one-dimensional media-facing personalities schooled for the soundbite and the photo-op. Yet plenty of voters, and news outlets with gnat-sized attention spans, still hanker for glimpses …
How ravers harmonised Yugoslavia
“Splavs”, ramshackle floating nightclubs, line the Danube as it winds through Serbian capital Belgrade. Many churn out bland, indistinguishable house remixes of chart hits. Some still purvey souped-up nationalist hits known as “turbofolk”, popularised during the wars which engulfed the …
Will Starmer discover his Romantic side?
Hungover with apathy, there was no champagne drunk in our household after last night’s theatre of the predictable. Starmer is in power, and the Tories are out. How did our politics become so dull?
Should there have been more dancing …
Democrats are hooked on Hillbilly Horror
When Hillary Clinton finally shuffles off this mortal coil, what words will she be remembered by? My money would be on her “basket of deplorables” comment delivered at a donor event in 2016. That was when she declared that half …
The mean girls conquering pop
Sabrina’s got that boy wrapped round her finger. Olivia knows she might sound crazy but she doesn’t care. Chappell is having a sexually explicit kinda love affair with a closeted woman. Billie is going to eat that girl for lunch, …