Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

hopefully not

last week's guide had 2 weeks of tv in it so i'm assuming not.

There is one (with magazine and Feast).

it's feast or famine time

Oh lol Jesus Christ I thought that was in ukpol

John Harris notes that Orwell is pertinent to Britain today.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/27/history-britain-ruling-class-created-crisis-boris-johnson-brexit-covid

Surprised no one remarked on this.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/26/hancocks-half-hour-britain-laughing-1950-radio-comedy

Hancock's Half Hour reminds us what once united Britain: laughing at each other
Zoe Williams

Before Tony Hancock and Sid James even touch on what they hate about cappuccino and kebabs, they take a detour via cleanliness – “All this hygiene stuff may be very nice but it takes all the charm out of things”. This is actually the core case of the anti-mask brigade: the ones who say it’s an infringement of their civil liberties are pilfering the line from their US counterparts. Most of them just find it charmless: life is when you can see one another’s faces. Anything else is less like life.

Hancock hates young people, whose crime is their youth plus intellectualism (“Sitting there with their green fingernails and their omnibus edition of Ibsen”). I mean, hear the timeless gentleman out: he could be talking about snowflakes. He could be Nigel Farage.

jesus fucking wept

"This is actually the core case of the anti-mask brigade: the ones who say it’s an infringement of their civil liberties are pilfering the line from their US counterparts. Most of them just find it charmless: life is when you can see one another’s faces. Anything else is less like life."

No evidence for this statement, and it doesn't even feel intuitively true. Unfortunately it's a defence of people who are consciously posing a danger to public health.

i've been following Peter Hitchens on Twitter and altho he tries to use the language of science for a lot of his anti-covid rhetoric you get these occasional Freudian insights - he thinks masks make us look "foolish" or "weak"

"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.."

I mean the Hitchens bros were posh military brats in the last days of Empire.

Zoe Williams, please stop posting.

Lol correct, didn’t she have that stupid take about two weeks before the start of second wave about how gr8 it is to work in an office

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist.

you missed out "Tragically," at the beginning there

"Novels are terrible and you'll never convince me otherwise." We don’t need fiction – the real world is strange enough. Plus, fancy writing is incomprehensible, argues Ben Butler. Lucy Clark tries to prove him wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/dec/28/novels-are-terrible-and-youll-never-convince-me-otherwise

ok

i promise never to try to convince this man otherwise or to even think about him ever again

The plodding mundanity of Ben’s mind shows me exactly why people read novels.

Seriously, never trust people who go off about how intrinsically lesser fiction is and how they’d rather be reading a hagiography of some cunt. Basically take the John Waters view on non-fiction braggers.

it's all fiction really

I have no idea what’s happening and little interest in putting in the work of figuring it out.

i say ban non-fiction too… the thing happened! why are we just feebly repeating it print, who does that help?

Ben Butler is Guardian Australia's senior business reporter

could've just printed that, save bothering with the article

I'm possibly putting it a bit simplistic here, but even if someone spends 10 years studying the soviet archives and writes an account of life in the soviet union, it's still their story, filtered through their own biases etc

anyway Daniil Kharms was the only real non-fiction writer

Ben Butler is Guardian Australia's senior business reporter

lmao

Kingdoms may rise and kingdoms may fall, but some things never change - L@ur@ B@rt0n among them.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/dec/29/i-was-bored-of-chats-about-house-prices-and-polyamory-but-i-had-a-secret-plan-for-happiness

It was January when I decided that salvation might lie in facts. I was in the Mojave desert, watching the sun rise over Seven Magic Mountains – Ugo Rondinone’s much-Instagrammed neon-rock sculpture in the Ivanpah Valley.

Lol she just can't help herself. I never see people on twitter sharing Laura Barton links with comments like "brilliant piece is this" perhaps all her readership are too busy joining creative communities and attending pop-up restaurants and festivals... eh what fucking year is this?!

Our house was still not ready when the lease on the rented flat expired and – having gambled on readiness – we had nowhere to live. Days before we had to move out, we were desperately casting around. With immense kindness, my best friend stepped in. He has a tiny, spare, one-bedroom flat opposite our house, in which family members stay when they come to London.

O the humanity!

never heard of this columnist before sounds hillaria

one of my faves of this genre of myopic priv-class blathering was when the late Deborah Orr was pondering something like: why is everyone so critical of zero-hour contracts? what about people like my friend who likes to teach Yoga part-time occasionally and not be constrained by something as vulgar as a full-time working week.

i thought spare rooms were luxurious and this guy's got a spare flat!

"oh, this old thing? i run it out every few months just to keep the rust off"

this from the guardian’s “analysis” of the new BBC chairman appointment:

Sharp’s appointment to the BBC could be a sign of the “Sunakification” of the British establishment, whatever that means.

well i think you’ve really nailed that. identified a really important process in the framework of institutional governance. if it is a process. and idk governance what the hell is that is it just a word? not really sure what i mean by framework either like a climbing frame maybe i guess.

>>> Our house was still not ready when the lease on the rented flat expired and – having gambled on readiness – we had nowhere to live. Days before we had to move out, we were desperately casting around. With immense kindness, my best friend stepped in. He has a tiny, spare, one-bedroom flat opposite our house, in which family members stay when they come to London.

Where's that from? Not ms Barton!

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/dec/29/crammed-tiny-one-bed-flat-realised-i-loved-my-home

So bad it needed to be posted twice.

Didn't he used to post here or am I confusing him with someone?

yes he did!

He has a tiny, spare, one-bedroom flat opposite our house, in which family members stay when they come to London (yes, I know, a spare flat. But all I can do is thank goodness he has it).

does everyone at the Graun have a friend who just happens to have a spare fucking flat in London?

Boggling at the Hann article. All the 'what i learned during lockdown' pieces have a base of privilege, which is fine tbh, but 'after being mildly inconvenienced, i learned that i love my spacious Victorian house in London' is fabulous.

(PS did I mention I'm a music journalist)

Down and out in a one bedroom flat in London

Someone who had previously spent 20+ years as a staffer and has an Oxbridge spouse with an even better staff job should probably not be regarded as a precarious freelancer, yet this is every self-employed, married 40s/50s music writer I know. They’re all in houses or large flats which they bought because they married another middle-class person with a flat bought for a song in the ‘90s, consolidated, and if they have a mortgage at all it’s substantially lower than the price of a room in a flatshare. Boo fucking hoo.

it's not that I disagree with what she's saying so much as that she is writing this article, now, while living in the USA. you know, that USA

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/06/britain-used-to-be-my-home-but-its-beginning-to-look-unrecognisable-to-me

lol, the request for money at the bottom of the page is longer than the article.