Obligatory shilling. I wrote at THE ZONE about the Quiet Revival, morality, making money as a writer, snuff films on social media, Hungary, communism, Tarnowskie Góry and being open.

I wrote for The Critic about The Information State, Tisza, Ant & Dec, anonymity, Unite the Kingdom and the tyranny of memes.

I wrote for The American Conservative about Hungary.

When the Music Fades. My sister’s first book has been published today! Here is the blurb:

A generation was told to surrender everything for Jesus. A generation were told they were history makers and could change the world. But what happens when the music fades? In this powerful reflection, Lucy Sixsmith revisits the experience of growing up in the Soul Survivor generation. From the euphoric highs of worship tents and passionate songs to the quiet reckoning of adulthood, Sixsmith traces her journey through the charismatic culture of Soul Survivor, a movement that promised transformation, belonging, and divine purpose. With clarity, compassion, and wit, she explores the longing for purpose, the dangers of power, and the cost of unquestioning faith. When the Music Fades offers a vital reckoning with the past, and a search for grace in what remains.

Even if you aren’t interested in the theme, Lucy is such a good writer that you should buy this book. Do it now!

Spring has sprung. Truly, this is the most beautiful time of year. I can only assume that I have been taking few photos of spring scenes because I have been enjoying them. As Philip Larkin wrote in “The Trees” (not without ambivalence but with some genuine optimism:

Still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

I hope spring looks beautiful where you are too.

Save the pigs. I rarely give opinions on the object-level politics of distant nations but I felt compelled to register my disgust towards the “Save Our Bacon Act” — an attempt to cripple minimum space requirements in livestock farming, which could massively set back farm animal protection laws in the USA and, in doing so, enable the systematic torture of intelligent animals. To attempt to direct people’s interest away from the systematic torture of intelligent animals back towards their fried breakfast is the height of well-fed barbarism.

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Failing state. Ed West reflects on many levels of state failure around crime, political correctness and mental health:

On June 13, 2023, a mentally ill man named Valdo Calocane went on a rampage in Nottingham, murdering 65-year-old caretaker Ian Coates and two 19-year-old students, Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar. All three victims were clearly much loved by families and friends, and warm tributes poured out; O’Malley-Kumar had died trying to protect her friend and was posthumously awarded the George Medal for bravery. It was a senseless waste of life, all the more so because the killer had a long history of violence and just six weeks before the murders had attacked two people. The police failed to act.

An island within an island. Wessie du Toit asks whether London is meaningfully English:

In Khan’s short video addressing the question “What does it mean to be English?”, he does of course imply that the capital is part of England. But on closer inspection, his idea of Englishness is defined by London rather than vice-versa. After nodding to the usual clichés — “fish and chips and a Sunday roast… our love of queuing, our incessant apologising”— he moves onto “a tapestry made up of different cultures, faiths, histories and ideas, woven together to tell one story”. He concludes that being English means “we stand up for what we believe in” (at which point the video shows a “Refugees Welcome” sign). The event in Trafalgar Square suggests that he views Englishness like any other identity in his scheme of managed diversity, whereby the authorities, like a nursery teacher negotiating with tired toddlers, ensure that every group gets its moment at the centre of attention, flying its flags and performing its rituals in public space.

The pathologies of outdated ideologies. Will Solfiac considers elites who woke up too late:

One of the most bizarre characteristics of those who struggle to maintain what’s left of the liberal international order is their refusal to accept reforms that might head off its destruction.

Indigenous ways of knowing. Jonathan Salem-Wiseman mounts a qualified defence:

In his recent book Rationality, Steven Pinker discusses the work of Louis Liebenberg, a tracking scientist who has studied the hunting practices of the Indigenous San people in southern Africa. Despite their harsh environment, the San have survived for thousands of years by employing “logic, critical thinking, statistical reasoning, causal inference, and game theory.”

While they may not have heard of Bayes’ theorem, their hunters use Bayesian reasoning to determine the likelihood that an ambiguous track belongs to one species of game or another, based on prior probabilities. In other words, they employ the same basic tools of rationality as Westerners.

Aesthetics and environments. Freddie deBoer ponders beauty and authenticity in architecture:

The real question isn’t whether we can build beautifully, it’s whether we’re willing to admit what we actually want, which is to be surrounded by things that feel old and storied and earned, even when they aren’t.

The case for Israelorealism. Michael Murphy takes on right-wing foreign policy idealism:

Israel is vying for regional hegemony, and America seems to be helping it get there in the erroneous belief this is a civilisational war in which America has an equal stake. There appears to be no bridge Trump and Israel’s allies are unwilling to burn to bring this about.

Dancing with death. Clarissa Hard reflects on the tragic consequences of rushing to judgement:

Not only had Liam killed himself, never to create a work of art again, but access to his existing material had apparently been limited. Like many other balletomanes, I felt bereft. To this day, Sweet Violets only lingers in my memory.

Liam Scarlett was an artist of rare imaginative power who had decades ahead of him. It is heartrending to think of the ballets he would have gone on to create, which will now never see the light of day.

Self-goretraits. Zachary Ginsberg writes on Picasso:

As Picasso approached middle age, he started to show an awareness that his behavior was wrong, even if he didn’t want or know how to stop it. But he could portray it. As with almost any artist, his drawings and prints offer a uniquely intimate entrée into his psyche. They are smaller and more quotidian than his works on canvas—less monumental, less committal—and often devoted to trying out ideas before solidifying them in oil. Hung behind glass in a museum, his drawings and prints seem like confessional artifacts. In these diaristic works, Picasso exhibits an unflinching willingness to stare down his dark side and put it on display. In doing so, he performs the almost impossible task, at once earnest and provocative, of transporting viewers into the mind of a monster, preserving his baseness and allowing us to empathize with him.

Have a lovely month,

Ben

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Listen, there have always been unusual arrangements in marriages. I wouldn’t accept it but I’m not going to act like I’m flabbergasted to hear that people do not all have monoga…

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Tarnowskie Góry, which has a population of around 60,000 and is nestled in the forests near big cities like Gliwice and Katowice, was built around its silver mine. A bold feat of engineering brilliance, where water was extracted from the mine shafts to supply local towns, this has received UNESCO heritage status.

Throughout various times in regional history, Tarnowskie Góry was Polish, Prussian, German and then Polish again. Its Prussian history means that it is a rare Polish town with a Protestant church on its market square.

The local landowners were the Von Donnersmarcks — an uber-rich family of feudal lords turned industrialists who built various parks and palaces before being driven out of the region by the communists. (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, a descendant of the family, directed the fantastic Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others.)

Tarnowskie Góry was close enough to Germany for the Nazis to pursue Germanisation during the war. The local synagogue was burned and Jewish people were removed. Streets were renamed things like “Adolf-Hitler-Straße”. Once the Nazis lost, the German population largely fled or was expelled. A once-multi ethnic town had become almost entirely Polish.

Under communism, Tarnowskie Góry was fairly typical of working-class Silesia — built around factories that produced mining equipment and children’s clothes. (There was also a chemical factory, the grounds of which remain closed because they absolutely seethe with hazardous waste deposits.) Nowadays, TG is more of a historic town and a bedroom community.

I moved to Tarnowskie Góry in 2013, when I was 22. Whether or not I live there in the future, it will always be my spiritual hometown.

Back then, I was unemployed and unqualified — still only half-recovered from anorexia. Most of my day — which, in more conventional terms, included none of the morning and most of the night — was spent hunched over the computer. I was the sort of person who was becoming an awkward footnote in a family.

But I had one goal — to teach English abroad. My mum was an English teacher in Bath, where we lived, and my sister was teaching English in Moscow.

I wanted to go to Japan. Alas, Japan didn’t want to have me. But I had a profile on a Teaching English as a Foreign Language website, where potential teachers had to name four countries they would like to work in. I named Japan, Italy (I had a mafia obsession), and, more or less randomly, Spain and Poland. One morning, I woke up to an invitation to a town I had never heard of in a country I knew almost nothing about.

“This is our new bus station!” announced my new boss a week later, as we drove into Tarnowskie Góry. Well, I thought, there must be something good about this place if it has a new bus station.

I’ve written about my love for Tarnowskie Góry again, and again, and again, so I suspect that I don’t have to tell you that I rather liked the place. I’m not being at all hyperbolic, though, when I add that if I had gone anywhere but Tarnowskie Góry, there would have been something like a tenfold higher risk that I would have ended up depressed, dependent or dead.

It was perfect for me: big enough to explore, but small enough to be familiar; urban enough for a fulfilling social life but rural enough to feel close to nature; prosperous enough to be comfortable yet not so geared around commerce as to feel homogenised and corporate. You could have a wild night in bars like Valhalla and Bakaraj and then go to the fields, and the forests, and the lake and feel like you were in the wild. (It goes without saying that it helped to meet so many kind and interesting people.)

I like to think that I’ve been a loyal local patriot. “Why did you go to Poland?” I used to be asked when I was visiting Britain. “Why did you go to Tarnowskie Góry?” I used to be asked when I was visiting Warsaw. Both questions hummed with a mild but unmistakable disdain. It’s better than I here, I used to growl at these snobs.

This enabled me in becoming a bit too much of a romantic localist. The fact is that places like Tarnowskie Góry would not exist without places like Warsaw. But I was a bit too romantic because I really loved my home that much.

Tarnowskie Góry has changed a lot. It has become bigger and more middle class. Fields I used to run through have turned into suburbs. Dive bars I used to love have been replaced by bistros. The little shops that used to sell cans of lukewarm beer and fly-encrusted pastries have become indistinguishable convenience stores. It used to be difficult to get a glass of wine in the centre of Tarnowskie Góry. Now, there are at least three wine bars.

Hey, that’s life. People need somewhere to live. As people become richer, they start getting interested in prosciutto as well as in pierogi, and in Tempranillo as well as in Tyskie.

God bless them. This seems to be as natural as wearing shorts when the sun comes out. But I am still something of a romantic localist. Places change, and it is delusional and arrogant to have a fundamental problem with that, but we can hope that change will happen in a manner that links the past, the present and the future so as to invest us in the story of a place. Influences can be broad and innovative but we can hope that the combination will be synergistic. People will come and go but we can hope that the sense of a society endures.

I love Tarnowskie Góry and I hope that people will continue to love it as it becomes something new and unexpected. For all that I’ve become happier and mature in Poland, I have had a lot of hard times (some unfortunate, some self-inflicted). But however sad I was, or stupid I was being, I never felt entirely alone on Tarnowskie Góry’s streets. That’s home for you.

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Young women, claims Scarlett Maguire, “feel much more positively towards communism than capitalism” and “dislike…

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(Well, now I mention it, that could hardly have been worse than what Britain has ended up having.)

I’m no expert on Hungary but I have visisted a couple of…

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Now, on social media, every day offers a new sequel to Faces of Death. Drone footage from the…

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Of course, times were never easy for writers. Yes, Vanity Fair might have been offering tens of thousands of dollars for freelance pieces in the 90s — but you probably were not going to get commissioned by Vanity Fair.

Still, it seems undeniable that 2026 is an unusually difficult time to be a writer with professional aspirations. As someone who has spent many years scribbling on the peripheries of journalism, I thought I would offer some advice on how to be a professional writer.

1. Have rich and generous parents.

Having rich and generous parents is a cool trick because it means you don’t really have to make a lot of money. You can be a professional writer on the strength of an occasional book review for The Spectator. There is one flaw in this strategy, though, which is that most of us don’t have rich and generous parents, and you can’t feasibly acquire them.

Moving on …

2. Freelance.

Okay, most people who want to be writers want to get a book contract or a column. Well, aspiring football players want to play for Arsenal, but first they might have to play for Doncaster Rovers. If you want to be a writer, you’ll probably start by freelancing. As someone who has been on both sides of the wall, as a freelancer and an editor, I hope I can offer some solid advice here.

• Have another job. Don’t have the rich parents? You’ll almost definitely need a day job. Sorry — I’ve never been a full-time freelancer and I live in Upper Silesia, which is not exactly London when it comes to prices.

• Write a lot. If you just want to get your writing out there, disregard this. If you want to make money, though, you’re going to have to be prolific. Writing doesn’t make a lot of money — if it makes any — so nor do writers. You’re going to have to read, read, read and write, write, write. Say goodbye to a normal work-life balance. That’s the price of being in a competitive yet unprofitable field.

• Sell your ideas. A lot of people feel uncomfortable about promoting themselves. Alas, someone has promote you, and it isn’t going to be anyone else. But you don’t have to promote yourself as much as you have to promote your idea. Hardly anyone will read 1000+ words if you don’t make them excited first. If you are excited to write, prepare to convey your excitement to others.

• Be nice to editors. Okay, I am an editor, so of course I would say this, but I would have said it before I became one. Ultimately, editors have a lot of pitches and a limited budget, so you’re going to have to get used to (a) waiting and (b) being rejected. Being irritable about either of these things is a good way to make sure you never get accepted. That said — disregard this if you have to wait a long time before getting paid. It’s always nice to be polite, of course, but you should never feel bad about reminding someone to pay you. No one has to accept your pitches but they do have to honour their financial commitments. To paraphrase Tony Soprano, you shouldn’t let someone act like they are doing you a favour if they pay you what you’re owed.

3. Substack.

The best time to launch a Substack was five years ago. At this point, the market is almost as saturated as the market for podcasts and Dubai chocolate. Still, if you have good ideas and a lot of style, this is a great platform. I suspect the best way to thrive here is to find some sort of thematic niche. (I’ve always written about anything and everything, which means that anyone who comes for the chin-stroking philosophical reflection gets annoyed by the pro wrestling, and anyone who comes for the pro-wrestling gets annoyed by the chin-stroking philosophical reflection.)

4. Shill.

You would be surprised by how many PR people will pay you to mention their policy, product or service in what poses as a straightforward journalistic or creative piece. On the plus side, it is easy money. On the other hand, you are absolutely selling your soul, and if it came to light that anyone was doing this I would never publish them.

5. Copywriting/Ghostwriting.

I would have turned my nose up at this in the past. Is it really writing if someone is telling you what to write? Well, no, but after years of working in journalism, I have a lot more respect for copywriting that is open, honest copywriting rather than copywriting that pretends to be journalism or literature. It seems far less immoral to write an advert that is presented as an advert rather than an advert that is posing as something else. (Of course, AI has made this a less profitable side gig.)

6. Get a patron.

In the past, many writers had patrons. Harriet Shaw Weaver supported James Joyce for decades. (He repaid her by writing Finnegan’s Wake.) I gather that many writers are still being backed by billionaires and multi-millionaires, though I’m not sure how they find them. Supposedly, a lot of people are being paid by Peter Thiel. Me, I was aiming for Vince McMahon. Unfortunately, he became the subject of sexual assault allegations. Plus, he never read me.

7. Move to a country with a lower cost of living.

I didn’t actually move to Poland to be a writer but I happened to be living in Poland when I became something of a professional writer. This was great because the money went a lot further. £75 in the UK? It isn’t much. 350zł in Poland? It was a lot! Granted, again, I couldn’t make a living out of it. But people with “English as a first language” privilege should not find it impossible to get other work.

8. Rob a bank.

Granted, there are ethical and logistical concerns here. Besides, even the average successful bank robbery makes about £10,000 per robber. But that’s a lot more than the average book advance! Besides, if you get caught, you’ll have a lot of time for writing the book. Score!

In all seriousness, you can make money from writing. But if you want to be a writer, you should love the writing more than you love the money. “Writers” who plagiarise, or use AI, or shill for companies confuse me, because if you are going to be corrupt, there are far more profitable ways of being corrupt. Money is great but writing is first and foremost about being honest, playful and precise on the page.

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I’m never sure what I think about assisted suicide. (“Assis…

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So, I was surprised when I heard rumblings about the “Quiet Revival”. More and more people, I read, were turning to faith. God was back on the menu, brothers.

I was sceptical. Firstly, this very much contradicted my book, so I had a wholly selfish reason not to believe it. Tell a man who has written a book predicting the apocalypse that humanity is saved and he will grind his teeth.

But I wasn’t just biased. I was jaded. I had grown up in an evangelical church with pastors screaming about “THE REVIVAL GENERATION” as if churches weren’t emptying like a music venue if Taylor Swift was followed by a Nickelback tribute band. (Again, pre-order my sister’s book on Soul Survivor and evangelicalism.)

I also didn’t see the evidence. I would see occasional anecdotal references to full pews and busy pastors, but where was the data? Well, in 2025, a Bible Society report, based on polling from YouGov, claimed that congregations were indeed growing. I was unconvinced — referencing, among other things, the difference between reported and recorded church attendance as cause for doubt. But a lot of people were very much convinced. The headlines almost made it sound like the Second Coming: “Gen Z is flocking to church”, “Gen Z are turning to faith” et cetera. Op-eds bloomed. Podcasts blossomed. Conferences were held.

Then, last month, the Bible Society announced that YouGov had withdrawn the poll that its report has been based on, as it had contained “fraudulent” responses. This was unsurprising. A report based on British Social Attitudes data had failed to confirm YouGov’s results. “We have found little evidence of a religious – or more specifically a Christian – revival in Britain,” the legendary political scientist Sir John Curtice had written. The BSA data also suggested that Gen Z, far from “flocking to church”, were the least Christian people in the country.

It seems like the “Quiet Revival” was quiet in the same sense that the Loch Ness Monster is silent. What had made people so willing to believe in it? I’m sure some churches have seen their congregations grow — especially as a result of the migration of African Pentecostals. I can also see how some much-liked, well-shared conversions, advertised on social media, could make Christians believe in a broad societal trend.

But it is also the case that more people have been describing themselves in spiritual terms. 62 per cent of 18-24-year-olds, for example, according to a OnePoll poll, describe themselves as “very” or “fairly” spiritual. I think a lot of Christians have a vague deterministic attitude which encourages them to think that once people start questioning life, they will almost inevitably find themselves drifting towards Christ. To say “there must be something more”, for them, is to open the window that allows Jesus into your life.

I’d go so far as to say that a lot of believers — not all, or even most, but a lot — don’t really believe in non-believers. For them, a non-believer is a temporarily confused believer — or a believer in denial. “There are no atheists in foxholes” used to be a popular aphorism. Some religious thinkers, like the highly regarded Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, think we have a natural sense of the divine which has been obscured by sin.

I don’t think that this is true. Frankly, it seems crackers to think that the universe obviously exists because of an all-good, all-powerful God who became man in Judea and died for our sins, just as it seems crackers to think that the universe obviously exists just, er, because. There’s nothing obvious about it!

People who think of themselves as “spiritual” could mean it in all kinds of different ways, from a vague enthusiasm for Tarot cards to a deep emotional attachment to nature. This can be as close to committed theistic belief as drinking plant milk because of lactose intolerance is close to veganism.

I absolutely don’t say this in order to gloat. I do find theism plausible in the sense of its explanatory power — as a means of answering why there is something rather than nothing, and how consciousness could have developed, and how life can be soaked in meaning. I’m not a believer but I am at least very much challenged by belief.

Yet whether or not there is a God, revival is not simply going to happen. True, if God exists, there is a good argument that God is all-powerful, so in theory it could “just happen”, but history is not rich in bizarre events that defy all previous societal trends. Our ruling paradigms are materialist in the epistemological sense, individualistic in the existential sense and ideological in the moral sense. These are not fertile grounds for “revival” any more than Polish fields are fertile grounds for sweet potatoes. I’m not sure if it will happen, but if it does happen, it is hard to believe that it will happen quietly. A coup d’état might happen quietly, but that doesn’t mean that people will believe in it. A revolution — political or spiritual — makes noise.

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Obligatory shilling. This month at THE ZONE I wrote about Red Dwarf, Gad Saad, war hawks, gentrification and multiculturalism, androcratic idiocies, Ian Miles Cheong, Poland and migration, the war and conservatism, hoarding and slopaganda.

I wrote for The Critic about Trump at war, the BAFTAs and Tourette’s, ritual slaughter and factory farming, Reform and war, Will Self, the right and conspiracy theory, Matt Goodwin, reparations and Tony Blair.

I wrote for the American Conservative about war propaganda.

I wrote for the Telegraph about Dubai.

Finally, for the Washington Examiner, I reviewed a fine new biography of the antimafia author Leonardo Sciascia.

Happy birthday to THE ZONE. This newsletter turns 6 in a week. It is not the most significant or successful of Substacks — which, given its inconsistent output, it has never deserved to be — but I have loved, and continue to love, writing and being read here. Thank you so much.

On reading about myself. It’s a curious feature of having even marginal notability online that one develops all kinds of esoteric lore. Three completely bogus claims about me circulate as facts whenever a piece of mine goes semi-viral, so at the risk of being self-indulgent I’d like to take a moment to debunk them. One is that I’m a Catholic, when is understandable when I have written for The Catholic Herald, but you don’t have to be French to write for The Paris Review. (I’m agnostic.) The second is that I went to Poland for political reasons, which is just flatly untrue. (I was offered a job there quite randomly.) The third, and the funniest, is that I must be related to the diplomat and author Martin Sixsmith. Nepotism is rife in the media, so I see why people assume this, but my dad is actually a mathematician. This doesn’t open many doors in journalism — or many doors anywhere unless I wanted to get into Complex Dynamics though I wonder if I have had commissions accepted because people think I must be related to Martin. I’m not at all — and I suspect the rumour is more damaging to him than it is to me — though he did give our family a laugh when he was involved in a diplomatic scandal and my dad turned on his car radio to hear the words, “The government blames Mr Sixsmith …”

Home front. I had a lot of fun this weekend, going to see Maniac Zone Wrestling in Wrocław. The quality of the wrestling, and the booking, and the production was far higher than I would have expected for a tiny outfit that must struggle every year to stay afloat.

Don’t get me wrong, I know professional wrestling is absurd. But in a little venue in Lower Silesia, in front of no more than a couple of hundred fans, the villainous heel faction claiming the MZW championship still felt, just briefly, like the most important thing in the world.

When the Music Fades. My sister Lucy’s book — on evangelicalism, abuse, power and dignity — is released next month! You can pre-order it here. She talked about it on the Nomad podcast.

They never learn. It’s rare that I disagree with the great and powerful Philippe Lemoine, and the war in Iran is no exception:

The truth is that it’s a stupid war that obviously wasn’t the result of careful deliberation. Trump painted himself in a corner in January by threatening to intervene militarily if the regime killed protesters, he was under pressure from Israel and probably let himself be convinced that he could get another easy win by pulling the same stunt as in Venezuela. But Iran isn’t Venezuela, so instead he just got himself into a mess and now he has no idea how to get out of it.

The revival that wasn’t. The Bible Society has pulled its “Quiet Revival” report after YouGov admitted that some of its polling had been bogus. I take no pleasure in saying that I was always sceptical of the narrative. I think the kernel of truth was that a lot of people have been saying, “There must be something more!” But it didn’t follow that their next sentence would necessarily be, “And it’s Jesus!”

Bennett’s Britain. The great and powerful Fred Sculthorp writes on Alan Bennett and British culture:

Enough Said is about Britain’s last literary national treasure getting old, and with it a sense of Englishness marching to its doom. This is a country floating off into the antithesis of Bennettland, where no one knows the local vicar and his famous monologues of quiet desperation have unfurled themselves into full blown howls.

I went to see Bennett speak in Bath, almost twenty years ago, and it was like Beatlemania for grandmothers.

The limits of therapy speak. Sarah Fletcher writes on Louis Theroux and the charmless opportunists of the “manosphere” (itself a marketing term of its critics):

The left are used to being called crazy, but it is none the better for them to call the right crazy, even when encoded in the polite and cosy gauze of therapy speak. Pathologising political anger means any movements outside the acceptable liberal conversation become signs of illness. I find the views, in so much as they are even cohesive views, shown in the documentary to be incorrect. But not diseased.

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The limits of liberal moralism. James Martin Charlton also addresses Theroux:

Theroux begins to resemble a kind of cultural parasite, feeding on the moral and psychological disarray he documents while offering no alternative vision of the good. The snarky, ostentatiously tolerant liberal humanism he represents, far from occupying a stable moral high ground from which figures like HSTikkyTokky can be judged, looks exactly like the stance that made them possible.

The price is wrong. Chris Bayliss considers the British state and markets:

All of this is a result of a stubborn — or perhaps pig ignorant — refusal to consider second or third-order effects of policy. We currently have a government dominated by people who are actively hostile to the idea that human beings respond to incentives (though this type of policy was also the hallmark of previous Conservative governments, especially that of Theresa May). We now see intervention upon intervention, with policy-makers desperately trying to address the consequences of their previous blow of the cudgel.

Fake news and lame news. Ed West reflects on a neglected problem in journalism:

This is lame news, in other words, something Sailer characterised as reporting deliberately designed to obscure the ‘who what where how why’. It’s different from fake news in that it doesn’t actually fabricate facts - it just frames a story in a misleading way and leaves out relevant information, the sort of details that are the basics of reporting. Lame news is not as popular a concept as ‘fake news’, but it has a corrosive effect on public trust in the media.

Not even an ethos. Becca Rothfeld considers therapeutic managerialism:

Chapters are subdivided into digestible sections (“Get Bored the Right Way,” “Give More to Transcend Yourself”) and often end with homework, set aside in a little box, as in elementary-school textbooks. When Brooks is not offering “Questions for Reflection and Self-Assessment,” he is laying out “Three Big Things to Remember,” as if he were providing a study guide for the exam of a meaningful life.

The Critic is now on Substack! Subscribe here.

Have a lovely month!

Ben

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The book I reviewed was Matt Goodwin’s Suicide of a Nation — an anti-mass migration polemic. Despite broadly agreeing with Goodwin on this…

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• A timing chip I forgot to attach to myself before a half marathon.

• My dead dog’s check-up book.

• Childhood photographs.

• A half-empty box of COVID masks.

• A half-used bottle of male fragrance.

• A gigantic bag of 1, 2, 5, 10 and 20 grosze coins.

• The business card of the deputy editor of The European Conservative.

• A m…

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This said, I do think t…

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Experts claim that the decisive factor was British immigration to Poland — specifically the arrival of one British immigrant who transformed the country’s international image with his photos …

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The author of these words is a Malaysian man, who seems to be living in Dubai, who comments obsessively on American politics.

I am morbidly obsessed with Ian Miles Cheong. He is, for me, one of the most fascinating characters on social media. This is despite the fact that he does not seem to have much character. (Perhaps this is no coincidence.)

Cheong first came to prominence in 2012 when the Daily Dot alleged that he had become a “redditor for hire”. Cheong denied this but was banned from Reddit nonetheless.

Cheong was a self-described “turbofeminist” who abruptly switched sides in the 2010s. Cheong was known for saying and doing anything to get ahead. He wrote a column for Milo Yiannopoulous’ website called “Incel Corner”.

By the late 2010s, Cheong was working with the YouTuber Andy Warski on the fringes of the far right debate-centric “Internet Bloodsports” community. The pair launched a gaming commentary channel but quickly fell out. In revenge, according to Right Wing Watch, Cheong “logged in to [Warski’s]’ YouTube account and replaced video thumbnails on [Warski’s]’ main YouTube channel with pornographic images”. He then reported him to the police.

Cheong was also an energetic user of Twitter, which has since been renamed X. He appeared to post all day and night — focussing on domestic American politics with an obsessiveness that was extremely strange for a Malaysian living in Malaysia. He was a passionate fan of Donald Trump who became a passionate fan of Ron DeSantis and then pivoted back again. When America sneezes, the world catches a cold, so it makes sense for anyone to have an interest in American politics, but when you’re a non-American fan of Ron DeSantis you might want to get a sense of perspective.

Cheong is also a massive fan of Elon Musk. He is the social media equivalent of a pilot fish — obsessively praising and defending Musk. Musk, who has a chronic addiction to sycophancy, has reciprocated with supportive replies. Now that people can be paid for posting tweets, Cheong’s obsessive engagement baiting — as I write, he has posted six tweets in an hour — can make him a fortune.

There is something perversely impressive about this. The man who was getting into obscure YouTube feuds now has more than a million followers, interacts with the world’s richest man and lives what appears to be a comfortable life in one of the world’s most opulent cities. What makes it less impressive, except from the most cynical perspective, is that Cheong has been so completely opportunistic.

It’s the shamelessness that is truly fascinating. Cheong has made an art form out of amoral engagement baiting. Take this tweet about the female athlete Katie Ledecky, who had just won a swimming race. Is Cheong calling her trans? Is he calling her ugly? Is he trying to say that you have a problem if you think is her calling her trans or ugly? Does he know what he looks like? The answer is probably yes, yes, yes and yes — he is trying to provoke all kinds of reactions, positive and negative. It’s all engagement.

More prosaically, Cheong has been accused of “shilling”. (“MAGA Influencers Caught Red-Handed Shilling for Big Soda” was the Daily Beast’s headline in 2025 after Cheong, among others, had bizarrely intervened to oppose a ban on food stamps being spent on fizzy drinks.) It barely matters when his output is so fundamentally insincere. “Andrew Tate is peak goyslop,” he wrote in a Twitter article in January:

While Tate presents himself as an "antidote" to a weak society, many critics—particularly within the same subcultures that coined the term—view him as just another form of "mental slop." And they’re not wrong.

The irony is that this is instantly recognisable as AI-generated text. It isn’t even subtle. Is that supposed to be the joke? Is it supposed to be sincere or a joke depending on how it is perceived? (Again, it’s all engagement.)

From Dubai, Cheong has been posting videos that attempt to prove that the city is peaceful despite Iranian attacks. He makes it look insanely grim, with migrant workers frantically pretending to have fun in a nauseating nightclub as Cheong sprawls fleshily across a sofa, and a lonely meal in an anonymous shopping mall as tourists pretend not to notice that Cheong is ranting into his phone.

This is the ultimate irony — that the man who hates “globalism” is posting garbage from a shopping mall in Dubai about a country he has never even lived in. This is globalism — globalism in excelsis. No, it’s not the cultured cosmopolitan paradise that its advocates imagined — it is rootless consumerism and opportunistic pretension. Yet that it is so extremely powerful that even some of its major critics — if “major” is perceived in cold numerical terms — represent a kind of reductio ad absurdum of these pathologies is bizarrely impressive.

Perhaps what makes Cheong especially compelling to me is that I am not completely different from him. I live in a country that is not my own, and write about countries that are not my own, despite being a critic of certain “globalising” trends. I’ve drifted between ideas. I make my living from creating “content” online. Of course, I would argue that my critique is more qualified, and that my thinking is more sincere, and that my “content” has genuine qualities. But if Cheong and I are from different breeds, that doesn’t mean that we are from different species.

Perhaps this proves that there is an element of naivete in the critique of “globalism”. As long as we occupy similar informational and economic environments, an element of “globalism” is as avoidable as the smell of weed in California. Yet the moral and intellectual vacancy that yawns at the centre of Mr Cheong’s public being is urgent proof of our need for a relational and philosophical core.

Otherwise, we will end up in the great Dubai shopping mall of the soul.

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I feel less like this now. People who might have wound me up more often make me laugh. Perhaps I take “the discourse” a bit less seriously. Or perhaps I’m just getting old.

But sometimes my bile ducts seethe. Enter Gad Saad.

Gad Saad is an anti-woke Canadian marketing professor. He appears to be Elon Musk’s favourite author. He is also perhaps the most self-satisfied man in the world. He is the living embodiment of the old joke, “Enough about me. What do you think about me?”

This is a claim that needs support, so let’s turn to Saad’s The Parasitic Mind (2020). Within the first few pages, Saad has announced himself to be an “ardent warrior against … destructive ideas” and declared himself to be “willing to tackle thorny and difficult issues”. “Why do I stick my neck out repeatedly?” Saad asks. Why indeed! Well, he is “a free thinker who is allergic to go-along, get-along group think”. (Saad writes at length about his “inquisitive nature”, “strong individuality” and “desire for intellectual freedom”. I like to think I am above-averagely curious and independent-minded but I think such self-assessments should be (a) qualified and (b) short.)

“Unlike the great majority of my highfalutin colleagues who take great pride in being ivory tower–dwellers,” writes Saad, “I am a professor of the people.” My sympathy is extended to his “highfalutin colleagues”. “While I am a jovial and warm person,” continues Saad, “I can become a combative brawler when I witness departures from reason.” This is a neat way of bragging about his personality and his intellectualism.

He’s humble too! Yes, Saad hates people having “zero epistemic humility”. “I am so offended by individuals who exhibit the Dunning-Kruger effect,” he writes, “That is, a self-assuredness and supreme confidence despite one’s idiocy.” Naturally, here Saad takes the chance to talk about other people’s mistakes rather than his own.

As if all this was not enough, Saad is also quite the athlete! As a young man, Saad “developed into a very competitive soccer player with the potential to head to Europe to pursue a professional career”. I’m not saying this isn’t true — I’m just saying I don’t trust Saad’s assessment of whether it is true.

All this, mind you, comes in the few first pages.

Saad’s ego is massive but also fragile. When Bari Weiss wrote an embarrassing essay about various figures from the “Intellectual Dark Web” in 2018, Saad complained about a “glaring omission”: himself. “[Weiss] must have missed my engagement over the past 20+ years both in academia and in the public arena when few if any academics were speaking out against bad ideas,” Saad sniffed. He later insisted that he was “trolling”, adding “I don’t wish to belong to any self-important group”. As the old Groucho Marx saying didn’t go, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that wouldn’t have me as a member”.

Fast forward to now. Saad’s social media strategy appears to involve winding people up and then spending post after post marvelling at the fact that people have been wound up. “Why do women no longer wear any real clothes and instead are always in athleisure?” Saad posted this week. “It’s grotesque. Every single woman at the cafe is dressed in this manner.”

Now, I think it’s fine to have personal opinions about what constitutes appropriate dress — as long as you aren’t inflicting them on people in the street. I’m a natural slob, so it would be farcical for me to concern myself with how other people are dressed, but I don’t see anything essentially wrong with it. “Grotesque”, though? Firstly, it just seems like a weird claim (I’m going to be courageous enough to suggest that people can look good in gym clothes). Secondly, it’s downright obnoxious. Of course it’s going to wind people up.

But Saad spent post, after post, after post responding to “Camel Toe Karens” he had irritated. (A “Karen”, as I understand the concept, is someone complaining about something that is not their business. Surely Saad is the “Karen” here?)

He also insisted that he had been joking.

This is what pissed me off. I do strongly feel that people should take jokes less seriously. But Saad wasn’t joking. I challenge anyone to find the humorous or facetious content in his post. You might as well look for a restaurant in Antarctica. You won’t find it.

True, it’s still a waste of someone’s time and energy to get mad about a smug Canadian academic’s opinions on clothes. But Saad was absolutely trying to make people mad. It’s like slapping a bee nest and then huffing about the rudeness and sensitivity of bees.

What really irritates me about Saad, I think, is that I care about people being allowed to ask unfashionable questions, and I care about people being allowed to make provocative jokes. But the former takes humility and objectivity, and the latter takes a lightness of spirit. With his overwhelming narcissism and egotism, Saad makes it more difficult to do either.

Anyways, I feel better for writing that. This is the uncomfortable paradox of disliking people online, I know. We do dislike them. But there’s something pleasurably cathartic about expressing that.

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