About to throw this broken table football game out, I took one last look – this time, from the players’ point of view. Everything can look confused, urgent, overwhelming and dramatic if you get sucked in too close to the action. Existentialist writer and philosopher Albert Camus once said, “Everything I know about…
Camus, Wim Wenders and a philosophy of table football
About to throw this broken table football game out, I took one last look – this time, from the players’ point of view. Everything can look confused, urgent, overwhelming and dramatic if you get sucked in too close to the action. Existentialist writer and philosopher Albert Camus once said, “Everything I know about…
Zombies, punks & immigrants: What J.G. Ballard’s ‘High Rise’ says about Britain in 2015
It’s there if you look for it, snaking like mist around the tower blocks of West London, from Acton to Ladbroke Grove. An atmosphere. A message for us, maybe. This part of London was the inspiration and setting for JG Ballard as he wrote his 1975 dystopian novel High Rise. In…
Review: Why new Ukraine documentary film Maïdan is right to resist the voiceover
I was asked to review Sergei Loznitsa’s 2014 documentary film Maïdan for Radio 4’s Front Row programme earlier this week. You can listen to the review, in the form of a stimulating conversation with presenter Samira Ahmed, here. A year on from the massacre of Maidan protestors by president Viktor Yanukovich’s berkut officers,…
Are US mercenaries deploying in Ukraine? Or… is it bullshit? On Putin’s use of speculation as foreign policy.
Yesterday, Russian news agency RIA Novosti asked for my insight into Kremlin claims that US private military company Greystone is deploying mercenaries in Ukraine. Amid the chaos of eastern Ukraine and Greystone’s association with Blackwater/Xe Services, the Russian claims seem to be gathering momentum, regardless of evidence. There’s an added twist. RIA…
Crime & corruption: Are you a terrorist? If Yes, please tick box below…
Ever get the creeping feeling that the fight against corruption, money laundering and tax avoidance are doomed? Well, you’d be right. And here – in one phone call – is why. I had a conversation with my bank about money laundering today. I denied everything, naturally. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? These…
The real reason I write: In praise of ‘threshold apprehension’
The cover for my next book arrived today. Any writer will tell you: the arrival of their new book’s cover is an exciting moment. Me, I’ve always found it a little bit poignant too. Up to this point, it’s all about the making. There are routes to take; ways to turn things. The…
A modest proposal: or, how to save journalism, make money and safeguard self-regulation… by killing content
In this post, I suggest a way forward for journalism, both for journalists and media companies struggling to make content pay. But the future sketched here is about more than keeping (making) content financially viable. In the aftermath of the Leveson inquiry, I believe it could also be a way out of the…
Comment: Reign of Errors – The Merchant of Death story ends the way we all figured. Or does it?
Comment: Duwayne Brooks and the London riot story that never got written
Some stories write themselves. Some never get written, though they’re better by far. There’s something irreducible about them, too many loose ends. They don’t have neat beginnings and endings. They don’t fit our (journalists’, readers’) idea of the arc. Sometimes they’re just collected impressions. This one’s like that, and I’m setting it down here simply…
Comment: The best writer I know
While I was in New York, running around promoting the book and doing things I thought were all terribly important, something else happened. Jetlagged and excited, I sat on a step outside a Starbucks close to 5th Avenue to check my emails. There was a cheery, round-robin, letting-you-know email from a good friend…