Absolutely. All power to him and to Safechuck and Robson and Jackson’s other victims. It’s loathsome the way Jackson’s reputation keeps surviving.

Muriel Spark, the Driver's Seat book cover. Painting of a woman's head and shoulders. The woman has black hair, a red and white striped top and a green scarf.

In this month's subscriber essay, James Bailey explores her bleak masterpiece of a life's descent into an "anguished shriek of bloody despair", making comparisons with "giallo horror at its grisliest".

Low Culture Essay: James Bailey on The Driver’s Seat by #MurielSpark

buff.ly/XihJN5p

A final plug for this piece in @currentaffairs.bsky.social on the bleak banality of late-night talk shows. 👇👇👇

Jesus fucking Christ on a bike!

This man will be the death of hundreds. If not thousands. Or even millions.

Anyone in politics or journalism who was ever mentored by Mandelson, or who ever owed him a favour, needs to be hounded out of public life. Urgently.

A still from the show Elementary. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) in a sleeveless white top with round black buttons, and Johnny Lee Miller as Sherlock in a dark suit and light grey shirt buttoned-up to the neck.

Just watched my 154th and final episode of Elementary. Despite its flaws - some dull/daft cases (hazard of all procedurals), some dropped story threads and disappearing characters, Liu and Miller were always great, and great together. Probably my favourite version of the Holmes/Watson partnership.

Negative Reaction (the Dick Van Dyke one) is my favourite

Has-beens want to watch the world burn. Are we surprised?

The idea being briefed out that there is information too sensitive for the Prime Minister to be told in the case of appointment to a senior diplomatic post — possibly *the* most senior diplomatic post — is fucking ludicrous.

I always think of opening paragraph and follow-on line of Orwell's Decline of the English Murder for a very obvious version of this kind of surprise. Yes there is information, but there is also the magic of writing there. Your shelves are filled with similar

www.george-orwell.org/Decline_of_t...

The choice of what is the most likely correct next word is the antithesis of writing, which is the ideosyncratic assembly of words and their associated meanings into a whole that could not have been assembled by anyone other than it's author. Expression is one of the most magical thing we have.

I think one of the pleasures of reading is surprise. Functional writing is, of course, about the right things being in the right place. But for all other writing, the main thing that makes it feel good is surprise. It works by making connections you yourself would not. An average cannot do this

This is a really odd argument because I think at the heart of it, there is a deep misunderstanding about what writing is for. I write to communicate my thoughts and ideas, and to bring people along with me, which AI cannot do for me because it isn't me.

Keir Starmer says it is unforgivable he was not told Mandelson failed vetting PM says he is ‘furious’ and did not know security officials had recommended that Mandelson be denied clearance

Doesn't matter how furious you are, Sir Keir. The buck stops with you, that's the price of leadership

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Fisher's hauntology is quite some way from Derrida's hauntology. Neither would have liked the way in which the term now gets used to mean sophisticated nostalgia, but Derrida's concept is certainly not that.

The man who saw the future: the legacy of cultural theorist Mark Fisher Touching on everything from late-stage capitalism to Pulp, the work of the late writer is proving increasingly influential. Now a documentary on him is looking to live up to his ideals

This is an odd piece on Mark Fisher. I don't think there's any real sense in which *Capitalist Realism* was ignored on publication, and the article ends up inadvertently suggesting that Fisher was simply a populariser of Jameson and Derrida. www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ap...

Awful people

I absolutely loath them.

Dielman still the worst movie ever made, though.

When the tragic tech bros finally admit they've lost, and AI is all-but entirely abandoned, remembered as a hugely embarrassing international technological misstep which will never be repeated… Where will all the money have gone? Who do we need to hold upside down to get it all back?

Looking forward to Hacks returning. Smart and Einbinder are fabulous together.

But you‘d know the running time…?

Side image of a small turtle held between fingers and facing right. The ground color of the head, limbs and shell is a dark gray. The edge of the shell has a series of red spots and the lower shell (plastron) has a orangish tinge.

From yesterday, a hatchling Painted Turtle (Chrysemys picta), found in an open field hundreds of feet from a wetland. This tiny turtle overwintered in the nest, waiting for spring rains before emerging from the egg (note the white egg tooth). #herps #turtles 🌿

I just got an email from my university informing me that they're expanding the role of AI. There's a "Learning Technology Innovation Centre" to "help faculty explore and apply AI in support of their teaching—from ideation to deployment." "ideation to deployment" ffs This is all so depressing.

Without saying your age, post your favourite film that released the year you turned 18

Apropos the thread below...

I think the distinction between "I don't know [x]" and "[x] isn't/cannot be known" is a really crucial one

And I worry a lot of people are losing the ability to distinguish one statement from the other

Appreciate the beating the hell out of ICE stuff on Daredevil this season, just wish the show itself were not so dull.

Directly under your thread, there's this perfect example of superb night time lighting