Night/Sunday Warning S2E13: Margaret Thatcher Atari game sent straight to landfill
Another instalment of weekly recommendations and miscellaneous items.
This is the weekly round-up of things I liked in the past seven days + extra content for paid subscribers.
6 Things I Actually Enjoyed This Week
1. ARTICLE
We’re still living in Margaret Thatcher’s world
by George Eaton for The New Statesman
I have huge problems with The New Statesman, which celebrated its 110th birthday this week: It’s been increasingly turned towards the centre-right by its long-serving editor Jason Cowley (who is far too comfortable and chummy with The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson, who should be his natural enemy) and is often actively anti-left. I think it should think quite carefully about its relationship to its history as it leans on its laurels and legacy now. But… I thought this piece by George Eaton about Margaret Thatcher’s legacy was good:
Every UK government since has dwelled in the shadow of this economic revolution. Rather than challenging the fundamentals of Thatcherism, New Labour sought to humanise it by redistributing income through tax credits and targeting pensioner and child poverty.
Blair boasted that his government would “leave British law the most restrictive on trade unions in the Western world”. Public investment was neglected in favour of the profligate private finance initiative and the City of London indulged as never before. “I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them,” Blair confirmed on the day of Thatcher’s death.
Twenty-six years earlier, in the London Review of Books, he wrote of the “tremendous danger” in believing that Thatcherism “is somehow now invincible, that it has established a new consensus and that all the rest of us can do is debate alternatives within its framework”.
2. ALBUM
TRON: Identity (Original Video Game Soundtrack) — Dan Le Sac
Apple Music | Spotify
Music to make you feel like you’ve been sucked into an arcade machine from the reliably brilliant Dan Le Sac:
3. CARTOON
David Squires on … Hillsborough chants and football fans’ fading memories
from The Guardian in 2022 but it should be republished every year.
See the rest here.
4. PROFILE
Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul.
Nate Rogers for The Ringer
This profile of Dril is wonderful but it left me feeling aggrieved on his behalf: Dril should live in the poster’s equivalent of Graceland with enough money to make any of his deranged visions a reality:
“I’m Paul,” he said, once he found me and after I began by asking whom, exactly, I could say I was speaking to.
Paul Dochney, who is 35, does not, in fact, look like a mutant Jack Nicholson. He has soft features and a gentle disposition and looks something like a young Eugene Mirman. It’s difficult to say what I expected to find sitting across from me, but it wasn’t this. Looking at him, you’d never presume that this was the person who made candle purchasing a matter of financial insecurity.
He opted to stick with water—not a terrible decision at the House of Pies, but also, I worried, a choice that theoretically allowed him a quick exit at any point. For a while, I got the sense that he might have been deciding how much to reveal to me in real-time, based on how the conversation went. But one thing he was clear about from the beginning: It was all right to end this game of living in the digital shadows.
“I mean, my name is already out there,” he said, acknowledging the fact that, after the doxxing, he had at separate points confirmed his name on both Twitter and Reddit. “It’s in my Wikipedia article. Maybe people need to grow up. Just accept that I’m not like Santa Claus. I’m not a magic elf who posts.”
5. PODCAST
Prominent Corrections S1E1: Rupert Murdoch
Apple Podcasts | RSS | Spotify
This is a self-serving recommendation but the first episode of the media podcast I’ve co-founded with Sasha Baker launched on Friday. I think you’ll enjoy it, even though the first episode is about Rupert Murdoch and the history of News Corp.
6. PROFILE
Kieran Culkin Bares (a Lot of) His Soul
by Eric Sullivan for Esquire
Kieran Culkin gives good quotes and Eric Sullivan got a lot from him:
All seven siblings tried their hand at acting at the encouragement of their father, but only Mack, Kieran, and Rory pursued it seriously. Of course, Mack broke through first, in 1990, with Home Alone. At ten, he became the most famous child actor in the world since Shirley Temple. “Poor fucking guy,” Culkin says of his brother. “He was little and having to try to accept that level of fame as reality.” At home, things remained relatively normal. It was the same at school. But the reminders of just how famous Mack had grown—the nosy people at the next table, the cabdriver who followed them home, the hangs at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch—became unavoidable. “Even at that time, as a kid, I remember thinking, That sucks for him.”
It sucked for the whole family. Paparazzi trailed them everywhere. News outlets reveled in any signs of familial discord, particularly during his parents’ bitter divorce. In 1995, Kieran, then thirteen, handwrote a note to the court requesting to bar the media from covering their custody fight. “Your Honor,” he wrote, “I ask you please to spare my family any further embarrassment by letting the press in the courtroom. It has already been hard on us and I see no point to it.” A judge denied the plea and allowed the reporters in. To this day, Culkin refuses to talk to Access Hollywood, because, he says, “they did a whole piece on my family in 1997.” Ditto with the New York Post, the outlet that taught him “the newspaper doesn’t always give you the facts.” He pauses. “Let me rephrase that. The New York Post doesn’t always give you the fucking facts.” But sometimes on the carpet, the outlets get to him, anyway. “They don’t always tell you who you’re talking to until after you’ve talked to them,” he says. “ ‘Who is that by the way?’ They’re like, ‘Access Hollywood.’ ‘Fuck! Just broke my own fucking rule.’ ” For years he’s been holding on to a dusty bag of a dozen or so 8mm home movies from his childhood, hesitant to hire someone to convert them because of the potential for a leak.
Updates, Corrections & Clarifications
None this week. Sorry, there weren’t as many editions; I’ve been recovering.
Beyond the paywall: bonus content including the micro-essay, the newsletters I nearly wrote last week and the bonus recommendation.
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