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No comments onAlex Pareene on the link between the profitability and ethics of newspapers in the Columbia Journalism Review: In retrospect, it seems inevitable that American journalism’s professional norms around fairness and ethics emerged at a time when newspapers and magazines were good investments for normal financial reasons. Safe investments attract safe corporate investors. Corporations like clear…
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What They Want, the Government Can’t Give
It wasn’t a surprise to me, or to anyone else in the UK, that residents of Grenfell Tower heckled their councillors and Tory politicians. And I wasn’t surprised when Prime Minister Theresa May cravenly refused to meet with anyone from the tower. But what is surprising to me is that even the Queen received criticism:…
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Mr. Corbyn, Please Stop Phone Scammers
My phone number was temporarily stolen last month. Rather than just tweet about it, I decided to write a letter to my local MP, Jeremy Corbyn, with specific suggestions on how to combat identity theft and phone scams. Dear Mr. Corbyn, In the last month, I have been subject to multiple identity theft attempts and fraud…
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We can’t afford your perfectionism
For a long time, I refused to pay for membership to The Guardian despite reading it multiple times a day. “Fifty pounds?!” I’d cry. “And for what? Shit I don’t need and junk mail? I’ll pay when it’s half the price and they fire Jonathan Jones.” I was being a dick. If The Guardian disappeared…
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Shootings, and how not to prevent them
In order to prevent yet more tragedies like the shooting at the Planned Parenthood centre in Colorado Springs, gun rights activists – and rightwingers in general – often suggest that we need to prevent the ‘mentally ill’ from gaining access to firearms. In fact, even Democrats and centrists say that, “I think as a state,…
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Austerity: The LARP
Everyone in Britain is playing a game called Austerity. Some are playing the game with enthusiasm and conviction. Some are playing with calculation and cunning. And others believe they are not playing, when in fact they cannot escape the game. Austerity is not a console game with expensive graphics, nor is it an addictive casual…
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Eternal Fundraising, Luxuries as Resiliency, Isometric Buildings
Mr. Miller Doesn’t Go to Washington, a bracingly honest story about running for Congress. It just astonishes me quite how much time candidates – and elected politicians – have to spend on fundraising. Hours. A. Day. I had written before about how crazy it is that we expect politicians to spend four hours a day…
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Worrying and Thinking
Over the past few years, I’ve been worrying over a knot of problems that seem to defy any straightforward answers, including: How can we use Google, Facebook, and Amazon’s services when we know they’re putting people out of work, centralising information, and often acting against our interest? There are no more jobs for life, so…
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The Phantom ‘Global Race’
There’s been a lot of talk from Conservative politicians in the UK about the ‘global race‘. This race, we’re led to believe, involves all the countries of the world. The winners are those countries that can compete the best, presumably by selling more things cheaper than anyone else can, by dint of working harder and…
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Does it Scale?
When I first heard about Occupy Wall Street, I had two conflicting reactions: I was happy that the incredible rise in inequality and the pernicious influence of corporations and vested interests on democracy was finally getting the attention it deserved – but I found the sheer lack of organisation painful to see. In particular, the…
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