Saturday Night/Sunday Warning #13: The 'Matt Just Sacked Matt' edition...
Normally this weekly bulletin is just for paid subscribers but number 13 is lucky for everyone this week. In celebration of Matt Hancock having cocked up and cocked off, enjoy...
Welcome to this week’s edition of Saturday Night, Sunday Warning, a weekly email for paid subscribers — but open to all this week — in which you’ll find articles worth reading, things to watch, and details on what’s been going on behind the scenes of the newsletter…
At the time of writing, the newsletter has hit 262 paid subscribers (up 14 on last week) and 2,506 (up 191 on last week) subscribers overall. If you’re a free subscriber or someone from Twitter reading one of these weekly bulletins for the first time, why not subscribe and get it and other bonus editions every time…
This week’s best performing editions were:
Published this week:
Aside from 9 issues of this newsletter (including the one you’re reading and a bonus essay on what GB News has learned from Russia Today which I’ve just unlocked today), I was a guest on Not Today, Thank You on Monday and put out 5 editions of the daily media review show, The Paper Thing.
Here’s the NTTY episode in which we once again pick over the horrible bones of GB News…
… and the latest episode of The Paper Thing, which went out on the day that Matt Hancock’s handsy video nasty was revealed:
Here are some tweets I enjoyed that you might too:
…and some articles that you might also enjoy:
1. Jude Rogers in The Observer: Elton John and John Grant: ‘We help each other. We are both complicated people:
Elton John: … The government are philistines. We’ve got used to governments – especially the British government – just telling us lies every day, and I don’t feel OK with that. Look what they did with the NHS. After all that those people did during Covid, they give them a 1% increase. I find that extraordinary. I just can’t live with that. It makes me so angry. I’m 74 years of age and I just don’t get this unfairness and this ridiculous ability to lie through your teeth every fucking minute of the day.
2. David Fedman and Cary Karacas giving Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book a royal shellacking in the LA Review of Books (When Pop History Bombs: A Response to Malcolm Gladwell’s Love Letter to American Air Power):
The Bomber Mafia is not so much a “case study in how dreams go awry,” as Gladwell claims, as a case study in how narratives of this incendiary campaign sidestep unsettling moral questions about the deliberate targeting of civilians. It pins responsibility for the destruction of 64 cities on one man, thereby absolving the AAF and, by extension, the American government. By the same token, it entirely overlooks the years-long process through which American war planners reduced Japanese cities in all their complexity to “industrial systems” populated exclusively by “skilled workers.” Rather than carefully consider the eroding ethical constraints governing what constitutes a legitimate target, Gladwell gives us a morality play. With its “great man” framing, exclusion of Japanese perspectives, and counterfactual justifications, it tells a story seemingly designed to soothe the American conscience.
3. There was a piece by the legendary New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, who died recently, in this section last week but… here’s another one. The Journalist And The Murderer is a phenomenal piece of work and its first paragraph, which I quoted in the newsletter this week, is a perfect summary of what journalism is versus what it likes to think it is:
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.1
4. ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ at 25: ‘The Most R-Rated G You Will Ever See’ by Sarah Bahr for The New York Times:
They know exactly what they got away with.
“That’s the most R-rated G you will ever see in your life,” said Tab Murphy, a screenwriter of Disney’s animated “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” which was released 25 years ago this month.
“Thousands of dollars must have changed hands somewhere, I’m sure,” joked Gary Trousdale, who directed the film with Kirk Wise.
However it came about, a ratings board made up of parents decided that a film with a musical number about lust and hellfire and a plot that involves the threat of genocide against Gypsies was appropriate for a general audience…
Things I watched this week that you might also like:
This interview with Dan Harmon where he actually answers the questions — mostly — and addresses the toxic elements of the Rick & Morty fanbase:
Can’t think why this clip from The Thick Of It has been in my head over the past 72 hours:
David Bowie talking about punk… in 1980:
Ed Miliband reviewing Ed Miliband memes:
A classic clip of Kevlin MacKenzie being doorstepped and very much not enjoying it:
And finally, finally…
A playlist of riot grrrl songs both new and old that I made for my step-kid but which you might like too:
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The ‘he’ thing here is most likely a style thing from the late 80s New Yorker. I hope it wouldn’t make a woman describe the archetypical journalist as a man these days.