Weekend digest: Bad things from The Sunday Times + 5 good articles to make it better
And! A playlist of classic punk and new wave to listen to while you read all this.
Rather than giving you another single piece on Sundays, I’m going to do a digest of stuff from Sunday (and the rest of the week) that’s on my mind, plus recommend some articles that aren’t absolute dog shit.
1 The Sunday Times makes me want to start a bloody revolution… every bloody week
The Times is bad enough on weekdays, but The Sunday Times really leans into the decadent celebration of the establishment’s most reprehensible consumerist, classist, crass tendencies. To read the Style magazine, I have to keep Das Kapital next to me and regularly strike myself in the head with it.
After last week’s ‘nouveau broke’ feature — which ran in the Saturday magazine — and a multi-day assault by the serialisation of Caitlin Moran’s new self-justifying tract, today’s Sunday Times Magazine has a cover feature on unhappiness in middle-aged men. Had the piece been completely dedicated to what it does in parts — examining issues with disillusionment and depression across the cohort — it would have been good, but sadly it centres the concerns of columnist Matt Rudd who wangs on about his own worries for hundreds of words while framing his wife as “The Predator” because she would like him to stop fidgeting in bed while she is trying to sleep.
Elsewhere in the same magazine, Jeremy Clarkson makes a claim about the last Labour manifesto that is demonstrably untrue and sneers at the ‘poor’, suggesting they are no good at farming. I’m sure he’ll be laughing just as much when we finally expropriate all that land he’s using for his hobbyist gentleman farmer schtick. Tick tock, Jezza.
2 … but here are some things that are good, actually
The Wrong And Winding Road: The Keatons tour of Scotland, 1990
Rhodri Marsden writes hilariously about his band’s incident beset tour of Scotland in the dim and distant… 1990s. Admittedly that’s 30 years ago, but I still feel as though it was definitely 1995 last Thursday.
Newsletters could be the next (and only) hope to save the media
Oliver Franklin-Wallis on the growth of newsletters as alternatives to ‘traditional’ publications. It’s a great summary and not just because it features the peerless Vittles, to which I have contributed.
Why People Can’t Stand Tech Journalists: An Interview With Casey Newton
Alex Kantrowitz interviews The Verge’s Silicon Valley editor, Casey Newton, about why so many people think tech journalists are pricks. I am occasionally still a tech journalist and I could write a large volume on why tech journalists are awful, but for now, this interview does the job admirably.
Art by Women About Women Making Art About Women
The headline tells you what you need to know about this excellent (and long) piece from The Believer by Melissa Febos.
The extraordinarily-talented Diyora Shadijanova talked to British estate agents about the Netflix real estate reality show that no one will stop going on about. As usual with her pieces, it’s funny and frank, getting some killer quotes from the interviewees.
3 And finally… the playlist
This week’s playlist is nearly two hours of classic punk and new wave songs (but not necessarily the ones you’d expect) with some wild cards thrown in the mix. May it adequately soundtrack your Sunday.