Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure
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Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day: ' The Clear Channel Internet '. All of digital video — and by extension, all of social media — is poisoned. There’s been so much written about the Dead Internet theory lately, but that’s not what this is. It’s closer to the Clear Channel internet, where everything has been so thoroughly corporatized that nothing ends up in our feeds by accident anymore. At least, not…
ENGLISH LAW AND WORDS from France A duty to the public good Clients, public, applicants A split between what is, and should Golden threaded, lettered black Guide designers: lower, higher, Cold words of regulation track The limits to our built desire. Look your lot up, scroll the map. Read the rules, find what is meant. See like a cartographic State, Expect authority's consent. Common causes,…
Fintan O'Toole, Gulliver's Warning , New York Review of Books But self-pity is not dependent on any objective reality of oppression or injustice. It is proportionate only to one’s sense of having “deserved much.” The sense of injustice it feeds off is entirely about one’s sense of one’s own proper status. To put it simply, if you always travel first class but one day, for some reason, you get…
In April 2025, she texted her aunt, then-council boss Gail Connolly, asking for “any connections or direction” to look into for finding PA work. Six minutes later, Connolly responded: “Want to work with my team at Parra? We have a vacancy – PA to the Lord Mayor.” Sydney Morning Herald, 27 May 2026 Nepotism is one of the oldest forms of corruption and, we being modern, it offends our sense of…
Ryan Avent, Consider the Phone . We are all implicated. It’s remarkable to me how very clever people — research-driven wonky sorts and respected academics and savvy businesspeople — will engage in conversations about the rottenness of the information environment around us, completely certain that only other people are driven mad by it. That’s not how the information environment works!
Mina Tavakoli, Wish You Were Her . N+1. Had anyone ever expected to see Marilyn Monroe? The fantasist born Norma Jeane Mortenson — born with a drive to make the switch from human to icon, to cross the magic portal we sometimes call “celebrity” — invented a character she called Marilyn. Immortality of a kind ensued. Could a Monroe impersonator spirit that sleight of hand back to us? Beam us even a…
William Davies: Easy to join, easy to leave . London Review of Books. Crucially, however, while politicisation has continued to escalate, institutionalisation is at a low ebb. This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted. The left has failed…
Kaleb Horton was an American writer who died in September last year. He had an extraordinarily unique writer's voice, reviewing music, describing culture, and observing life in the 2020s. This paragraph, and particularly the last sentence, is one that keeps rattling in my head : You can’t help anybody when you’re exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of “I would love…
THE PROFESSION OF HERITAGE conservation puts 'significance' at the centre of what we do. Places that, as people say, 'are heritage', aren't necessarily important or valuable or beautiful or good, they're significant , which is a key distinction. Something, like a historical event or a social meaning, makes them significant, and we have elaborate rubrics and sets of criteria to checklist-test the…
' The Disappearance of the Public Bench ', Gabrielle Bruney, Places Journal To remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it. When seating disappears, our relationship with public space becomes more grudging and utilitarian. Benches are symbols of hospitality, an invitation to participate in the civic…