I’m behind in my reading, so this isn’t really new, but I’ve just enjoyed this David Sedaris essay published last month in The New Yorker. There was something quite festive about it in a bit of a Chris Rea sense—it’s an account of driving through the night from Maine to Manhattan.

Earlier this week, John Prescott sadly died. Here’s the headline on the Sky News article reporting his death:

Former Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott dies aged 86

Long-term readers may think that I’m going to rant about the use of the present tense “dies” rather than the past tense “has died”—this is a persistent and widespread bugbear—but I was more intrigued by the use of the word “Labour” in that headline.

He was—as anyone would be—”deputy prime minister” for the whole country, not just for Labour. It felt an odd, somewhat tribal, somewhat divisive qualification to make, and it didn’t feel familiar.

I suspected that, previously, the headlines have just reported the office of state, not the party affiliation. It seems like this might represent further tribalisation of our politics. But I chose to suspend my disappointment for a bit while I checked my facts.

This is a tricky thing to do: there have only been eight formally appointed deputy prime ministers in the UK, two of whom were Dominic Raab, and all of which—barring John Prescott—are still alive. Sky News has never had to report the death of a former deputy prime minister before.

Reporting on the death of a former prime minister feels qualitatively different from the death of a former deputy, so that doesn’t seem like a fair comparison. But what about holders of the other great offices of state?

The most recent former chancellor to die was, of course, Alastair Darling, late last year. The Sky News headline:

Alistair Darling: Former Labour chancellor dies aged 70

The most recent former home secretary to die was Lord Waddington, in 2017. The Sky News headline:

Former Conservative home secretary Lord Waddington dies aged 87

The most recent former foreign secretary to die was Robin Cook, in 2005, which is further back than the Sky News website archive stretches… but from the examples above, I think we can safely conclude that this isn’t a new practice after all. Sky News has been headlining the party affiliation of dead politicians for years. For what it’s worth, this doesn’t seem to apply to prime ministers (“Margaret Thatcher dies at 87 after stroke”).

So why did it feel unusual? I suspect it is because the BBC doesn’t do it. Their headlines for each of these stories:

Former deputy PM Lord Prescott dies aged 86

Former Chancellor Alistair Darling dies aged 70

Former Home Secretary Lord Waddington dies at age of 87

Former minister Robin Cook dies

Just because the BBC does something doesn’t mean it’s right—in fact, the BBC News house style often riles me. It’s curious that it often nonetheless sets expectations.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Most of my childhood cinema memories are of occasional trips with friends to Southport’s ABC Cinema. It had two screens to choose from, the schedule for each published in the local paper. The tickets were traditional little stubby paper things which were torn in two on entry, the usher retaining one half by piercing it with a needle attached to a string.

I even remember, on at least one occasion, my friends and I taking handwritten notes from our parents to confirm we were appropriately aged to see a particular film—which seems a remarkably lax form of enforcement even for the 1990s.

I don’t have many memories of going to the cinema as a younger child. But in June 1993, when I was eight years old, Steven Spielberg’s film Jurassic Park was released. In the build up to the UK release, there had been much feverish discussion and media speculation about what age classification the BBFC would give the film. It was eventually, not uncontroversially, awarded a PG certificate—though with a special note attached that it

contains sequences which may be particularly disturbing to younger children or those of a sensitive disposition.

In the modern world, it’s a 12A—but that didn’t exist in 1993. I remember being delighted by the PG decision, and I was very keen to see the film. I can’t recall who took me in the end, but I do remember that I didn’t see it at the cinema—I saw it at Southport Theatre, which used to occasionally show films.

These memories have been stirred by the news that the very projector which showed me that film has just been preserved as historically important during the demolition of Southport Theatre.

I found this a bit mind-boggling at first: the theatre was built in the 1970s, so the projectors would probably have been only 20 years old when Jurassic Park came out—how could they possibly be historic? But then I remembered that 1993 is 31 years ago, the projectors are over half a century old, and time is a funny old thing.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

This long piece by James Bennet was published in 1843 last December. Despite seemingly causing a bit of a stir at the time, it passed me by until now.

The writer was the editor of the New York Times Opinion section in June 2020. In the aftermath of protests following the murder of George Floyd, Bennet published an opinion piece by Republican Senator Tom Cotton arguing that the military ought to be deployed to quell the riots. Much unhappiness followed, leading to Bennet’s resignation.

In 18,000 words, Bennett sets out his side of the argument, eloquently and with some flair. It is, perhaps ironically, one of those articles which is worth reading whether you agree with everything he says or not.

The picture at the top is by Jason Kuffer, and used under licence.

Until about a week ago, I’d never heard of Berlin’s ultra exclusive nightclub Berghain, and I couldn’t have told you much about techno music either. But the two-part episode of Search Engine in which PJ Vogt investigates why his friends weren’t allowed in to the club is brilliant.

It’s a great example of that podcast-y thing of tugging on a thread and seeing where it leads, exploring everything from the reunification of Germany to the economic downturn in Detroit along the way.

I thoroughly enjoyed it.

In the final seconds of BBC One’s Weekend News bulletin yesterday, Reeta Chakrabarti squeezed in an extra story in just 25 words:

Just before we go, President Biden has just tweeted that he intends to address the nation later this week, saying that it has been a great privilege to serve. We’ll bring you more at ten.

We know now, of course, that in the judgement of mere seconds, the team had perhaps overlooked the more significant message of Biden’s message: his decision to withdraw from his re-election campaign.

It’s not hard to see why: Biden’s statement refers only to standing down, without complete clarity on what from. It’s a letter that’s hard to parse on a scan-read, with the eyes of a nation watching.

Wendy and I switched over to the news channels, and after minutes of slightly desperate filling, the airwaves were thick with discussion of the political consequences of the decision, with hot takes and commentary on who might replace him and what it may mean for an election that’s still months away.

Nobody seemed keen to take a step back. It’s not hard to imagine the sense of profound grief Biden must feel at this moment. This is surely a moment that marks a painful shift in the way Biden sees himself: judged irreversibly incapable by dint of age of doing something he’s done before.

As Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic last night:

Coming to terms with mortality is never easy. We rage against the dying of the light. Many elderly people face the painful moment of letting go, of losing independence and human agency, when they are told by family they have to give up the keys to the car; Biden was told by his party to give up the keys to the presidency.

It must cut deep; I hope he’s okay.

It’s funny, really, how little attention the news pays to the universal aspects of stories like this. How the immediate reaction focuses on predicting what might happen next, rather than on sitting with what’s just happened. How it refuses to dwell on the humanity, those moments of insufficiency most of us have faced and will continue to face in life.

The news runs away from the lessons of others’ experience, the things we might take and apply in our own lives. And that seems like a shame.

When The Times started publishing its ‘compact’ edition in 2003, initially alongside the broadsheet format, there was a lot of debate about the potential impact on its journalism. One concern its journalists wrote about publicly was that in a compact size, it becomes more tempting to ‘hang’ stories around photographs, which can pervert the way that stories are covered.

Two decades on, this feels a bit quaint: large numbers of journalists for most media outlets work in multiple formats, writing stories, taking photographs, and filming videos, for example. But it feels undeniable that this has changed the weight that is given to different aspects of stories.

For example, over the last few days, we’ve been subjected to a huge amount of news coverage about a widespread computer fault. A huge proportion of the coverage—the lede in most cases—has been the impact on air travel. Yet, there is no reasonable interpretation of this story in which air travel is the most significant angle. The effect on GP services, for example, will have affected far more people and almost certainly caused more harm—and the underlying technical issue, and the way it has affected so many system across many countries, is a much more interesting analytical story.

I posit that the reason for the heavy weighting towards air travel is the multimodal way in which journalists now operate. It’s very difficult to create images of the problems with GP systems, and even more so to illustrate IT problems, yet airports provide an immediately available endless supply of emotive imagery of huge queues. That imagery can be easily supported by information on flight cancellations that’s freely available on websites journalists can access from their desks.

The lede becomes what’s easy rather than what’s important. Images become more important than analysis. We’re all less well-informed as a result.

In The Times Luxury newsletter this week, Kate Reardon wrote:

A lifetime ago, when I was editor of Tatler, I got into terrific trouble. I gave the Speech Day address at a girls’ boarding school in the Cotswolds (I did a lot of that sort of thing at the time — being editor of Tatler gives you the status of, if not a minor royal, then at least a non-royal duchess) and I said something that caused a bit of a stir.

It was along the lines of this: manners can be much more important than academic results (outside an ever-decreasing list of licensed professions). It’s a ticklish business, but bear with. Good manners will make people like you. If they like you, they will help you and, more importantly, they will want to work with you. I’m not talking about some weird etiquette like using the correct spoon for soup or eating asparagus with your left hand. I’m talking about being polite, respectful and making people feel valued.

A few years ago, I would have inwardly nodded while reading those paragraphs and moved on with my day. Yet in 2024, in the forty-eight hours or so since I read them, a debate has been raging between different parts of my brain.

My first reaction is strongly negative: Reardon’s is a privileged take which gives preference to people who adhere to a narrow set of cultural norms. It’s difficult to see someone with a strong regional accent and an underprivileged background being judged as polite by Reardon’s yardstick, let alone people from entirely different cultures. It reminds me of being at a House of Lords event and finding it deeply weird and confusing to be asked where I went to school, until it clicked, days later.

My second reaction is the opposite: there are many different ways to make people feel valued, and to act with politeness, respect, and consideration. Anyone can be nice—there’s really no class or cultural issue to be found.

My third reaction is disgust: this is a posh woman proudly declaring that she tells young girls that their agreeability is more important than their education. That is… problematic to say the least.

My fourth reaction is anxiety: it’s true that being nice is a useful quality in life regardless of gender. Is my disgust an inappropriate and revealingly prejudiced response to the writer’s identity rather than the content of her ideas?

I no longer know what to think.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Seventeen years ago, I highlighted a BBC News article in which Dave Gilbert reflected on thirteen years of online news.

So much of what has come to pass since is unwittingly signalled in that article.

The shrewdest comments came from the newspaper advertising executives who wondered where the revenue would come from. It’s a question some are still asking.

In 2024, this question is posed more frequently than in 2007. Waves of news organisations have collapsed, having transitioned to a business model that siphoned their income to Google and Facebook.

We clocked very early on that it was about a global audience, audience response and encouraging feedback – Web 2.0 in fact.

The idea of ‘audience response’ feels so quaint in 2024, when many news articles are built around embedded Twitter quotes. Often, it feels like the commentary has become the news, in a way that I certainly never foresaw.

People buy newspapers for a host of reasons but reporters never know how many read their own stories. From our real-time statistics, I know exactly what the audience is reading, and the feedback is almost instantaneous.

I don’t think any of us quite understood the extent to which those statistics would come to drive the news agenda, ‘public interest’ playing second fiddle to ‘things that interest the public,’ even at the BBC. ‘Beyoncé’s country album: the verdict’ would not have been one of BBC News’s top stories in 2007, though it was yesterday.

The pace of cultural change is difficult to believe.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I read Jacob Stern’s article in The Atlantic about the political controversy in the USA related to specific car manufacturers selling certain models without AM radios.

It made me wonder whether my car has an AM radio. I know it did when I bought it, a little over 14 years ago. I remember occasionally listening to Richard Bacon’s afternoon show on BBC Radio 5 Live in the car. But I’ve replaced the radio twice since then.

For the last three years, I’ve been using a ‘radio’ which uses Apple’s CarPlay system to stream content from my phone. Since then, I’ve never listened to broadcasts via FM or AM. I knew the system had a ‘tuner’ function, but I wasn’t sure whether it included AM frequencies.

Surprisingly, the ‘radio’ unit I bought is still ‘current’. I found it on sale on a national retailer’s website. Despite the technology now being several years old, the retail price has inflated by more than 11% since I bought it.

The retailer’s website didn’t list whether the ‘radio’ had an AM tuner. I can only assume this must be irrelevant to many people’s purchasing decisions these days.

I consulted the manufacturer’s website, but it wasn’t listed on the main product page there, either. I dug into a separate ‘full specifications and features’ page—lo and behold, there it was!

My car radio does, indeed, have a hitherto unused AM tuner.

Some US commentators appear to believe this to be essential to my freedom. I still don’t think I’m going to use it. Given that my car model isn’t sold in the US, perhaps no one will mind.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.