Have said this before in other forms, but will reiterate it here: if you're doing long-form writing of any sort, reading the words aloud into a microphone is a completely unparalleled cheat code. It's free, easy, and so effective it feels like it shouldn't be allowed. I do it in a few stages...
Also, more from me on Lebrecht. Some outstanding questions that the BBC isn’t answering van-magazine.com/mag/norman-l...
Went to Amsterdam for the New York Times - great new film opera by michel van der aa about disinformation and its impact on immediate relationships
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/a...
I didn't much care for Robin Holloway's odyssey, while Elizabeth Alker's new book has its moments - my review for the latest issue of @prospectmagazine.co.uk, published today.
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/7256...
🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work.
This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public.
Please spread the word.
🧵 1/4
I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.
good!
endemble. That kinda day
Lmao
Wrote about the marvellous idrisi endemble for the guardian
www.theguardian.com/music/2026/f...
Sectarian.
The sheer contempt and entitlement in that word.
Thousands of Muslim voters just voted for a white, (I think) working class non-Muslim woman because they feel abandoned by Labour and agree with her views on a huge foreign policy issue and on immigration policy
More details in the VAN newsletter :)
Scoop: Lebrecht gone from R3
van-magazine.com
Over on Instagram, Yuja Wang fires back at Norman Lebrecht…
RIP Eliane Radigue, a legend of slow sound
go Henry!
Asif Aziz's Criterion Capital halts mass eviction after London Centric uncovered what was going on. Hundreds of Londoners now receiving bizarre door-to-door visits blaming misinformation and being asked to record videos saying they don't want to be evicted. www.londoncentric.media/p/asif-aziz-...
nice
Former UK PM Gordon Brown is providing - voluntarily and not for the first time - information to the police about abuses of power relating to the Epstein files. As PM Brown was briefed against by people such as Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson as being ‘psychologically flawed’ ….1/
Pardon
Oh yeahhh
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Inquiry brought up the case of Denholm Elliott's daughter - PAUL McMULLAN: Oh, yeah - BROOKE GLADSTONE: - which is one case that you truly do regret. PAUL McMULLAN: I do, yeah. After Denholm died, she hit rock bottom, was allegedly doing methadone. And although she had, you know, the half-million-pound flat that Denholm had bought her, she didn't have any money to get her ten-pound bag in the morning. So she'd get up and go begging at the tube station. Here was a young girl crying out to be helped, and she met a police officer who didn't help her but rang up the News of the World and asked for money because he couldn't believe that this is the same girl who'd walked down the red carpet behind Eddie Murphy with Denholm Elliott, you know.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you offered her 50 pounds - PAUL MCMULLAN: Yeah. BROOKE GLADSTONE: - if she would come to your place and have sex. So you led her into prostitution, which she wasn't in that space for. PAUL McMULLAN: No, indeed. But she was in such a bad place that someone offering her 50 pounds for sex. I mean, that's five bags.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So how do you justify that? Yes, she was a drug addict, yes, she was begging. Why push her that extra step? Why take pictures of her topless? PAUL McMULLAN: I was keen. It was in my first year. I wanted to impress Piers Morgan, who was my boss at the time, and just wanted to say, not only have I caught this girl begging, but l've got pictures of her topless and I've got her offering me sex for 50 quid. How great am I? BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is a pretty dehumanizing enterprise, not just for Jennifer Elliott, but for you, yourself. PAUL McMULLAN: Yeah, that's why I feel terrible about it, not just 'cause she killed herself afterwards, but I, I actually liked her as a person.
Sharing from a friend, a passage from the Leveson Inquiry regarding the British actor Denholm Elliott, who died of AIDS in 1992. Three years after her death, the News of the World journalist Paul McMullan did the following to his daughter—neither a celebrity nor even someone of public interest.
When the edible kicks in just as Knee Play 2 gets going and it could be Franky it could be very fresh and clean it could be it could get some gasoline shortest one so all these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends
Exclusive: Josh Simons claimed to be “surprised” and “furious” at a PR agency’s work to investigate journalists on his behalf. He had been personally involved in naming them to British intelligence officials and falsely linking them to pro-Russian propaganda. w/ @dansabbagh.bsky.social
I Never Thought The Leopards Would Eat My Face, sobs woman who wrote innumerable opinion columns about how there were reasonable concerns about how regulations banning leopards eating people’s faces endangered women
you're laughing? Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor got arrested on his birthday, and you're laughing?
prince to Andrew to “man in his sixties”
Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.
