It's 9pm on a Tuesday and I'm wondering if I'm living through the most idiotic version of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I've been working on my silly little novel manuscript, thinking about what to pack, what to do in Mexico City. I've been stressing my silly little head about what has to happen at work this week before I head off. It would be pretty funny if after all of…
We got out of our heads. We ran every morning around the canal banks where the tree blossoms have already burst and dropped on the ground to look like cheap confetti. We bought a new video game and took turns smashing things on the screen. On Saturday, we watched The Passion of the Christ, which made me realise how much strange specificity is in the Bible story. The arrested Christ…
There's a healthy suspicion of novels where the substance of the characters' working lives is relevant and actually explored. The formulas of TV do permit it. Throwing around finance jargon in Industry or showing off the prowess of the medical consultant team in The Pitt is normal. For the novel, it's unbecoming to talk about work in the same way it makes you dull to turn to your dinner companion…
I sit on a works council at a tech company in Germany. One of the things we've been working on is killing the Performance Improvement Plan, and we've just managed it. In Germany (as in much of the EU), dismissing someone for underperformance is deliberately hard to do. The employer must issue two formal warnings at least three months apart, reassess the employee's capacity, and demonstrate that training and support…
*Spoiler warning: I spoil the plot of this 1950s pulp fiction novel early, often, and remorselessly. I picked The Silver Eggheads off a shelf of battered paperback pulp fiction in the Glasgow branch of Oxfam Books. Like all good pulp fiction, the illustration on its cover is absurd and confusing. A flesh-coloured humanoid with simple socket holes for eyes and a mouth, two-pronged grabbers for hands, ball-joints for knees and…
The words aren't coming and usually that's my fault. I wad up my sense holes with dopamine doped fluff and the ooze of it bungs up my brain. I lose the element of surprise so I can't write anything interesting at all. The writing I have done in the last week or so has been the drip drip of mucus out from the congested sinus and onto the page. Scenes…
For a week Berlin's been covered in ice. It's an inch thick on the roads and the bike lanes and the pavements, and it's been there so long it's black and mottled and hard like a mineral deposit. They don't grit or salt here. There's a dispute about who should do the gritting and the salting, between the city and the Ordnungsamt and the street cleaners they contract. Verdicts differ…
This is kind of a brave book. The direct desperation and lack of composure of the narrator combined with the omnipresent situating of events in specific locations in London reminds me of a very particular time in my life. In the way that good writing does it reminds me of the good and also the bad and shameful that I've pushed down as the mistakes of a younger, stupider person.…
We wanted to go see something; it was our first opportunity since we've been back in the city where cinemas are unlimited to us and where we've been like churchgoers there since the first winter we arrived. The pavements have been glazed with ice two, three times over, so we didn'd walk like we usually would. We took the bus and got off at Hermannplatz, walked up the sharpish hill…
I watched this with the in-laws at Christmas as part of a Richard Curtis runthrough. Coming after Notting Hill it was stark how poorly this film has aged in comparison. Perhaps it was never as good in the first place, but Hugh Grant is far more clearly a twat, Kristen Scott Thomas's character is written as a complete moron, and neither of these in the endearing ways that the writer…
Although LyseDoucet's [sic] habit of introducing herself as a background character with a huge wink to the stalls grated a bit after a while, I ended up very endeared to this book in the end. I remember live coverage of the war in Afghanistan on the BBC growing up, and the image of Lyse Doucet on some balcony with explosions in the background is strong in my mind. She's a…
I finished reading this book on a plane to Amsterdam and in the end, it felt right to be reading it in aviation-land. It's an airport read. I got what I wanted from it in that it gave a little bit of insight into the Russian media and political landscape of the 00s. I learned some new names and had my memory of others reinforced. That said, there's a bit…
I like a movie that gets out of hand like this. I'd forgotten until the opening credits that this was Ari Aster. Its marketing doesn't have the trappings of the horror genre because the setting doesn't have those traditional elements either. But this is definitely horrific, and effective. Its ideas are right on its sleeve but it still has interesting enough things to say about them that it works. There's…
Watched as part of a triple-kino weekend in dark, freezing Berlin. This one at Rollberg. Maybe that contributed to our dislike; we always resent walking past Passage and having to climb the hill to the ugly shopping centre. We both hated the ending. It was visually poorly executed and seemed like a reshoot, sound stagey, VFXey mess. It was also not really earned. Why is she tearing pages out of…
This went straight onto the Bad Smart People book list. I did find Midge in particular kind of absurd, like an even more extreme Thérèse Raquin, but I suppose we're meant to find her ridiculous.
We watched Bugonia. Spoilers to follow. We both suspected that she really was an alien at different points during the movie. When Teddy exploded in the wardrobe, I wondered for a moment whether either he'd detonated the vest on purpose in an attempt to kill the aliens on whatever ship he thought he was being teleported to, or she'd somehow triggered the vest to trick him. The latter theory was…
— The Europeans, [Housing policy, who does it best?][8] — Prof. Steve Keen, [Remedies for ridiculous house prices][1] — Prof. Steve Keen, [Remedies for ridiclous house prices][1] — UCL, [The demand for housing as an investment][4] — UCL, [The demand for housing as an investment][4] — Prof. Steve Keen, [Remedies for ridiculous house prices][1] — UCL, [The demand for housing as an investment][4] — UN, [Special Rapporteur on adequate housing][6]…
— Mind's 2025 Report
This really reminds me of being a certain age and experiencing the culture as remixed in Tumblr posts and usernames. It's kind of a series of poses in tableaux. It was made to be clipped, GIFed and posted to Tumblr with "ugh, this." as the caption. Which is to say, I like this short film and it reminds me of a much simpler time that I thought was complicated when…
At school I luxuriated in not trying very hard and doing alright anyway. Teachers called me "gifted" – a term that was, incredibly, written into education regulations at the time. They also called me lazy, insisting I had untapped potential if I would only apply myself. Now I'm thirty going on thirty-one, almost a decade into a career with which I have a fraught relationship. I want change, and to…
Here are some of the coolest posters I saw in the city this year. Here's the collection from last year.
I read 74 books this year. I'm not reviewing them all; I don't remember them all. However, a few of them stuck with me for various reasons. Did nobody think to tell me about Doris Lessing? The name had a familiar ring, the kind of sound a name gets when it's called great, but only ever in the middle of a list of other great names. I can't really understand…
For the past few months the days have been long and dark. Somewhere in the middle there it snowed and it stuck for a couple of weeks, slowly hardening into sheet ice. We're through most of it now. Last week, in the courtyard behind the apartment the trees started to bud, and now there's sun enough to catch the green rippling along all their branches. Spring, maybe. In the dark…
Berlin has cash only bars, stickers to put over your phone's camera before you can come into the party, and a strong poster culture. The surfaces of the city are covered in a growing, shedding, and regenerating skin of posters. Most are good. Here are the ones I liked this year.
p8 p9 p10 p17 p32 p34 p38 p46 p50 p80 p90 p146 p172 p191
The world is enough to make you crazy. The city is enough to make you crazy. The building is enough to make you crazy. The way lint builds up on the desk right in front of you, given enough of everything else, is enough to make you crazy. I've deliberately contracted in the past couple of years. I've tried to become less of a jangly ball of reactive nerve endings.…
It feels like there's a lot of war going on. Whenever that happens I really feel my ignorance; it seems like if thousands of people are dying about something, I should understand what that something is. So here's what I've been reading lately about war.
Right now I am in England. It's the first time I've been back since we moved away to Germany and being here has immersed me back in some old themes... like the British class obsession. A little while ago I read Bright Young People, about a certain set of upper class enfants terribles who were the first of a kind of person that is now splashed all over Hello magazine.…
First here's [Sequel][1], which is one of those apps for tracking the stuff you watch and read and listen to, and the stuff you want to watch and read and listen to. I do a lot of that, and this app looks slick, but I probably won't switch to it because it's iOS only. For you, maybe that's perfect.
While I claim that the reason I haven't emerged as the foremost British emigré writer of our times because I simply don't have time between watching movies and drinking beer: Franz Kafka wrote stories on the side, at night, when he was tired. Enjoy this profile not of his literature, but his day job: ["I am more interested in his insurance affairs."][1]
I increasingly hate computers and the world inside them that my brain is trapped inside of. That said, here are some things about computers. Let's be practical, with [another resource][1] to get you to stop screwing up shell scripting. Once you've figured that out, why don't you train an AI homunculus to reflect your own neuroses back at you, and start a conversation? It's time for a [vibe shift][5]. The…
The church bells in this place, my god. They toll for 10 solid minutes every week night and for God knows how long on a Sunday morning. For a short time today there was a relentless tolling of the bells and a old timey horn honking at once. Chaos. This sort of thing is charming and atmopheric out in the countyside where the sounds have space to drift from afar.…
I was a real life, buck-toothed nerd when I was a child. I liked video games, didn't play outside enough. I spent a lot of time playing around on a computer. But I never built one. As an adult, I pay for the convenience of not having to be in one place to do computer things. I have been subscribed to Dropbox, iCloud, and many TV and movie streaming services…
Despite being a dictionary-reading, computer geek, gap-tooth nerd as a child... and mostly into adulthood, I never did do any PC gaming or building. I think by the time I would have gotten into that I harboured illusions about myself as a creative, artistic person, who probably ought to use a Mac. Thus, I used a MacBook from a relatively early age and never messed around with building the things.…
I think I've given up on systems that organise the world, even the world right around me. Even so, it's nice to dream about a way of living where everything is fast, smooth, organised... easy. That's why I still look at consumer electronic products and software even though I have long accepted none of them will make me happy in an enduring way. Picture then, a world where everything (everything)…
When the sun came out in Berlin, people started climbing into the canals in their inflatable boats. When I rode my bike over Elsenbrücke, I even saw them floating along the Spree in their dinghies, with a bag of beers and a fishing hat. One evening, I saw a lone paddle boarder in the middle of that wide river. It is the done thing, I learned. The Excursion 5 Schlauchboot…
I'd like to pour one out for BuzzFeed News, which was unceremoniously taken behind the woodshed this month. I have shared my thoughts about my time at BuzzFeed, much of which was spent with the News division, and most of which was motivated by that division. Now they've finally gone and killed it, the most worthwhile thing that media corporation ever did. I have a lot of fun and messed…
First, whimsy. I like it when people do something that could have been straightforward and to the point, but instead they inject a little bit of charming madness in there, the unpredictable human touch. Here is a band website that is old fashioned, simple, and yet deeply weird. Give it a minute. Here is a clock website that shows an excerpt from a book for every minute of the day,…
We are about to share a media experience together. Please switch off and put your phone away. Please switch off your smart watch and annihilate any other illuminated sources of time. Please strive to be entirely within the world created by the shared experience rather than in your own life or even your own body, whose use should be constrained to the sense organs need to consume the experience and…
We got a nasty letter from some lawyers. We had some lawyers send a nasty letter. Why are people so up in our business here?