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Blog Post
December 16, 2022
As we approach the year’s end, the Links are going on a hiatus, until the first or second week of January—I’m heading up to Northumberland next week to have a Christmas in the wilds, with grandparent-childcare, vast amounts of wine and port and several books to take advantage of the familial support...
Blog Post
December 09, 2022
The eagle-eyed among you will notice something different about this week’s links. No, it’s not the novelty socks I’m wearing (I hope those aren’t visible); it’s the fact that the email has now moved to an online platform, as part of my efforts to keep onside of GDPR laws.
Blog Post
December 02, 2022
If this week’s links seem a little threadbare, you can blame the pestilence that has been sweeping through my household the last couple of weeks (thankfully, pestilence is an exaggeration: no one’s dropped off entirely yet). I’ve been spared, but the reward I’ve won from my immune system (or more li...
Blog Post
November 28, 2022
Happy belated Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it! We don’t have an equivalent celebration here in the UK—we’re much more likely to declare a public holiday for all the complaints we’d like to make, and to berate the people and institutions that have disappointed us, like Frank Costanza in Seinfeld...
Blog Post
November 18, 2022
When will I learn? Every time I take a week off, some corner of the world begins to crumble. Last time it with the UK economy and with it, the political careers of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. This time it was the digital world, first crypto (of which more below) and now Twitter.
Blog Post
November 04, 2022
I try to keep a generally optimistic worldview, but some weeks it really is difficult: we’ve got naked racism in the French Parliament, the UK running strong competition to the bottom of the barrel with its rhetoric on immigration and asylum seekers, from the backbenches, junior Ministers and the Ho...
Blog Post
October 28, 2022
I begin the links feeling very much like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. The UK has a new Prime Minister… again. And it comes after a week of chaos… again. Boris Johnson spent the weekend lying (yes… again), this time making claims about the number of backers he had like a teenager listing girlfriends...
Blog Post
October 21, 2022
When Liz Truss was elected leader of the Tory party, and thus slid into the empty role of Prime Minister, some friends I have a group chat with took bets on how long she’d last. Two of us, myself included, said she’d be out by December (though the rest all picked dates well before the expected gener...
Blog Post
October 14, 2022
So, I took a couple of months off the from writing the links for the first time since I started them about a decade ago, and what happens? Let’s see: Liz Truss becomes Prime Minister, and almost immediately the Queen died and gave the English around 48 hours to explore what peak English looks like (...
Blog Post
August 05, 2022
We’re losing legends at a frankly alarming rate: one week after I lamented the loss of Diana Kennedy, we open by lamenting the loss of Bill Russell. If you’re a basketball fan, Russell is to Jordan and LeBron what Thanos was to Loki: the big bad. We argue about whether LeBron (10 finals, 4 wins) or ...