“This is why Streeting is not merely phoney in the old sense: he is phone-y—his emotional life, at least as represented in the memoir, is mediated by bidirectional digital attention. He does not so much suffer privately and then communicate publicly; he appears to discover the meaning of suffering through its circulation, while, not being apprised of difference, he cannot understand that each retweet attenuates rather than reinforces it.”

If you want to join the campaign against cliché, this article will be right up your street...

“Amis’s famous triad, the clichés of the pen, the mind and the heart, needs now to be extended. All governing, like all writing, should be a campaign against cliché—against the inherited verbal, emotional and institutional mistakes by which societies repeat themselves into decline, death, and, once that death—having been memorialised only in cliches, is forgotten—utter oblivion, whether they’re former health secretaries or knights of the realm.”

we are honoured to publish the strange and brilliant 'black dahlia society' by @maxdaniellawton. read it on our website now ok

One amazing book about phones everyone should read

Having Will Self back—and long may he persist—is rather like climbing a mountain and suddenly seeing someone half-remembered emerge from the nearest cliff face, climbing irons dangling from his waist like pans. counterpunch.org/2026/06/05/…

@wself counterpunch.org/2026/06/05/…

@wself: "The root problem is not that we need to start doing something new. It is that we need to stop doing things we are already doing compulsively. The addiction issue is massive. We are not dealing with a marginal habit or an unfortunate side effect. We are dealing with mass cognitive impairment and affective derangement on an industrial scale. Four hours a day on a smartphone is not a lifestyle choice. It is closer, in moral and cognitive terms, to smoking crack for four hours a day: a patterned derangement of attention, reward, memory, anxiety and selfhood. It produces populations that are distracted, neurotic, suggestible, volatile and, at the edges, psychotic in their relation to reality. Catholicism has the language for this. It has always had it. Spiritual hygiene. Fasting. Abstinence. Custody of the eyes. Examination of conscience. Mortification. Restraint. The discipline of desire. The refusal of temptation. The struggle against bondage of the will. So why does the Pope not say it? Why does he not say to Catholics, and to all people of goodwill: restrict your time online. Put the phone down. Keep one day a week substantially free from digital media. Do not give your children smartphones. Do not take the machine to bed. Do not allow your first and last act of the day to be submission to the glowing rectangle: the hagioscope in which you worship yourself. Limit your use to an hour. Recover silence. Recover boredom. Recover prayer. Recover reading. Recover the face of another human being. That would be a true pastoral intervention, and a truly Catholic move."

“The most urgent moral act in the age of artificial intelligence may not be innovation, regulation or education. It may be refusal.”

He penned a novel about a black cab driver messiah. He has my sword.

another great polemic from will self

Like it.

Every word

"Why does he not say to Catholics, and to all people of goodwill: restrict your time online...Limit your use to an hour. Recover silence. Recover boredom. Recover prayer. Recover reading. Recover the face of another human being.

“The Gates Foundation’s achievements in global health are real; that is precisely why the moral problem is so acute. Hypercapitalism does not fail because it does no good. It fails because the good it does becomes dependent on the continued legitimacy of the structures that caused, intensified or monetised the harm it also conspicuously does: harm to the environment overall, but even more: harm to the capacity people have to believe in the good at all when it’s parachuted from above by a cargo cult headed by a John Frum who shops at Costco.”

“In a nutshell: Graham Greene’s eponymous ‘quiet American’ shat out on demand to fuck up another whole era.”

'I disposed of all the Class A drugs I had on me...into my body' Will Self on what really happened behind his 90s 'doing heroin on John Major's plane' story, his 'antisemitic' mother who was delighted to have blonde children, and feeling estranged from the society in which he grew up Plus a lifetime of masturbation, crushes on fellow schoolboys, and the experience of being 'deeply in love' and cared for while being very ill Fascinating and deeply honest - @wself speaking to @GylesB1 on @therosebudpod youtube.com/watch?v=NhMysihG…

"It’s worth considering again how anyone with tastes that mundane could possibly spend all that money. Faced with Gates’s duff philanthropy, one almost longs for him to be some Hannibal Lecter, who would at least build a Topaki Palace-sized torture chamber with all that dosh, rather than just torment us with normcore."