I write as someone with experience in Rubinology. For some reason, Mr Rubin used to wind me up. The left-le…

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I take a seat on a bench that swings wildly upwards if too much weight is applied to either end. Excited children, hairy men in WWE shirts and grizzled babcie, among others, are eating slices of pizza or drinking bottled beer. A bespectacled announcer steps nervously into the ring. The event has an endearing ramshackle feel.

Five minutes later, I am howling in outrage as the British veteran Johnny Storm is robbed of victory. It might as well be Las Vegas after all.

Polish pro wrestling does not have the millions of fans, and billions of dollars, of American pro wrestling but the audience makes up for it with enthusiasm. Heroic “babyfaces” are greeted with rhapsodic cheers. Villainous “heels” are showered with boos. The fans know all the wrestlers and their catchphrases. Even the girl auctioning signed shirts appears to be beloved.

Professional wrestling does not have the believability that it once did, in an age before mass media exposed the tricks of trade. Watching live, though, you can suspend your disbelief. As the egomaniacal Nano Lopez hammers a chair into the back of the plucky local boy Daniel Razor, while blood dribbles down Razor’s face, the audience snarls with indignation. So do I.

A few weeks earlier, in Wrocław, I had stood in a dark room in the bowels of a cavernous nightclub, as rabid fans of Maniac Pro Wrestling exhorted the host of the event to show his ass. He tore off his jacket to reveal a shirt that bore a pair of cartoon buttocks. The crowd erupted.

With an increasingly prosperous Poland creeping towards membership of the G20 — a scenario that would have seemed fantastically implausible two decades ago — people have more money for entertainment. Much of this entertainment, predictably, has been inspired by American cultural products. From reality TV to horror films, Polish pop culture has adopted tropes from U.S. media. Polish professional wrestling is no exception. There are similar archetypes, similar storylines and even some of the same slogans (“Leeeeet’s get ready to ruuuuumble!”).

Professional wrestling was not born in the United States, but Americans have spread it around the world. The unprecedented success of World Wrestling Entertainment led to market dominance in the US. Its ultimate global reach sent spores of inspiration across the planet.

WWE has toured everywhere from Europe to India. Next year, controversially, Wrestlemania will take place in Riyadh, which marks the next step in the economically fruitful if morally dubious relationship between the organisation and the Saudis. Now, independent wrestling promotions have emerged everywhere from Poland to Uganda, where Soft Ground Wrestling has become something of an internet sensation thanks to wrestlers hurling each other across the mud. American admirers crowdfunded to get SGW a ring.

A triumph of Americanisation? To some extent. But look closer and local particularities emerge. At Maniac Zone Wrestling, the most hated wrestlers are a pair of shaven headed heels who have adopted the persona of football hooligans. It is not their thuggishness that makes them truly hated, though — it is the fact that they represent Legia Warszawa. At Prime Time Wrestling, the mysterious masked wrestler Whiteblade reveals his true heinousness by choking a wrestler with a scarf that bears the colours of the Polish flag. One of my favourite acts of the night was a tag team called the Forest Brothers — a pair of hulking ursine men you can imagine roaming the Bieszczady Mountains in search of prey.

There is, sometimes, no clear distinction between the universal and the specific. At its best, culture can take global inspiration while being locally rooted. This is true in the world of poems and novels and it is true in the world of armdrags and powerbombs. Economists call this “glocalization”, and as much as it can be as superficial as McDonald’s serving teriyaki burgers in Japan, it can also mean infusing that which has universal appeal — like, say, theatrical displays of violence — with the colours of one’s home.

Polish professional wrestling (“Po wrestling”?) might be a niche subculture but it seethes with ambition. Prime Time Wrestling, which was formed in 2021, has hosted international stars like Santino Marella, Matt Sydal and, most impressively, Mercedes Moné, a former champion in World Wrestling Entertainment and its rival All Elite Wrestling.

Polish pro wrestling is heavily decentralised, with various promotions across the country. This has led to real-world disputes, with PTW, for example, facing an exodus of talent in 2024 amid financial and creative disagreements. On the bright side, this leads to brand loyalty that bigger and richer promotions would love to have. In Wrocław, dedicated “Maniacy” viciously insult wrestlers from rival companies. (Hardcore fans are also touchingly solicitous towards viewers, like me, for whom it is their first MZW show.) As I approach the Prime Time Wrestling event, meanwhile, the fields around the village of Kozłow echo with chants of “PTW!”

There is no shortage of genuine talent in the Polish scene. At MZW, Jakub, who once performed in PTW as Axel Fox, is bursting with charisma — a heel with as hateable a smirk as you will ever see. At PTW, Spartan is the epitome of a conquering champion — a giant man with an aura of invincibility. Bart Petro is a babyface who reminds me of an old era of British wrestling — a working class hero with a body you can imagine being formed by manual labour rather than steroids and bicep curls.

True, some of the wrestling can be sloppy. True, some of the doormen look more fearsome than most of the guys in the ring. But the passion and dedication are inspiring. These wrestlers are not making serious money. The chance of making serious money is minimal. But they very obviously love what they do, and their training, and their dreaming, and their willingness to risk their health to entertain the audience is undeniable. From the lighting, to the music, to the t-shirts, an insane amount of effort has also been committed to the production, including by people who get none of the viewers’ acclaim.

Who knows. There have been successful Polish pro wrestlers. As far back as the 1970s, Ivan Putski, “The Polish Hammer”, was intimidating American audiences. Polish promoters can also take inspiration from the improbable success of Scotland’s Insane Championship Wrestling, which went from being a dream in a Glasgow flat to putting on stadium shows, working with WWE, and helping to launch the careers of global stars like Grado, Joe Hendry and, especially, former WWE champion Drew McIntyre.

These are rare success stories in an industry where promotions live more precarious lives than BASE jumpers. Still, culture, and business, are all about taking risks. The Polish economy has risen on the back of entrepreneurial dynamism — on the sort of ambition, as well as hard work, that commits people, for example, to thinking that an idea for parcel lockers might inspire a company, InPost, that has transformed logistics across Europe. Polish culture needs that sort of bold commitment to making the unlikely real, and it shines through the men and women who swagger out of their locker rooms as if they are in stadiums and not in pubs, clubs and restaurants. Here, they are stars however many people know it.

Of course, in entertainment being successful is not just about making a profit. It is about making people happy. In Wrocław, the MZW show ends in triumph for a villainous heel group, but the Maniacy are soon cheerfully discussing the event over cigarettes. In Kozłow, as the crowd heads out towards the fields, in a haze of blood-sated satisfaction, I hear one family talking in English with American accents. I don’t think they were disappointed to have missed Wrestlemania.

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Not me. I’m not a very virtuous person at all.

I’m not trying to do some lame performative self-deprecation thing here. I’m not an absolutely terrible person. But I can be very careless and distracted, and very dense when it comes t…

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“Through sparrow black wind,” sings Molina:

A dead crow calls out to his wing
We were lightning across the whole world
We were lightning

Go and listen to it. This live vers…

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Obligatory shilling. This month, I wrote on THE ZONE about the British doom loop, Douglas Adams, horses, why people look younger for longer, racial ideology in education, abuse and irrationality in evangelicalism, and the endless sins of Tony Blair.

I’m very sorry for the somewhat lighter publication schedule in May but I’ve been writing a little book. I hope I will be on better form next month.

I wrote for The Critic about anti-Jewish terrorism, right-wing cancel culture, establishment journalists, Dana White and mental health, Roald Dahl, Itamar Ben-Gvir, chicken farming, “optimisation” and 2020.

For Quillette, I reviewed Suicidal Empathy by Gad Saad.

A fellow visiting Cambridge. It was lovely to visit Cambridge this month to attend the launch party of my sister’s new book When the Music Fades (which, by the way, is receiving rave reviews). What a place it is.

Attending a formal dinner, I was surprised to learn that I had been inexplicably made a doctor:

I believe that this is what you call an “honorary degree”. From now on, I am Dr Ben Sixsmith.

Keyboard concerns. As I write, my laptop is missing an “n” key. When I need an “n” I have to copy and paste it. The name “Isaac Newton” is great because I can copy an “N” and an “n”. You would think that this would be incredibly annoying, and it is, but at least it makes me more conscious about my prose. It does make me very biased against using words like “interconnecting” or “inconveniencing”. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The city and the cities. Fred Sculthorp visits Dubai:

Before Tuan let me go back to my apartment in the Marina, a place costing me more in a week than he earned in a month, he showed me around his neighbourhood. Its bustling streets were the busiest I had seen in Dubai. They gave the impression that the entire world outside of the West — from Africa and the Indian subcontinent to Indonesia — was assembling on the periphery of the city ready to inherit it. “One day, you will join us here,” he said in a way which meant I wasn’t sure if it was a joke, a threat, a serious vision or all three.

A mainstream fantasy land. Chris Bayliss writes on establishment delusions:

We are a country with anaemic GDP growth, stagnant productivity, and a growing share of the adult population out of work. We also have a reasonably high level of general education and plenty of capacity to train people to do various jobs. The fact our governing class seems to have absorbed the idea that we need to maintain permanent positive inflows in the hundreds of thousands is reflective of something very unhealthy and abnormal.

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Everyday barbarism. Bentham’s Bulldog addresses livestock farming in the UK:

All across the world, even in an unusually high welfare place like the UK, animals rot in hellish conditions. I’ll discuss the torments that are standard practice. Things are often much worse, because only about 2.5% of UK farms are inspected in a year.

The lonely death of Henry Nowak. Ed West reflects on anti-majoritarian ideology:

At the trial, prosecutor Nicholas Lobbenberg said that the killer had used the ‘trump card’ in making the allegations of racism. Such a trump card should not exist, but the sin of racism has undergone runaway moralisation, growing out of all proportion to its real harm. It clouds people’s judgement and in many cases places the public at risk.

The rule of three. Simon Evans writes beautifully about life and death:

I have of late had a number of what are sometimes called “reversals”, a term I like as it encourages us not to take them personally. Nevertheless, I am a pattern seeking animal, and not always fooled by word choice. So, forgive me if this seems a bit pat. But it does feel as though Fate has taken an unusual interest in me, and played, to be fair, a blinder, a very clever bit of at least 2-D chess – more than enough dimensions to skewer the likes of me - pinning my knights and getting my Queen up on blocks, before revealing the unsuspected attack on my King.

Reading roots. Bethel McGrew reflects on homeschooling:

When I was a child, I became used to awkwardness when strangers found out I was homeschooled. “Oh,” they would say, fumbling for something polite to say. “Do you like that?” I didn’t know what answer they expected, but I always said that I loved it. How could I not? I lived in a house of ten thousand books.

Have a lovely month,

Dr Ben Sixsmith

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Still, people are taking Tony Blair’s recent essay on the state of British politics seriously. Samuel Rubinstein — a writer and commentator I very much enjoy — says it is time for Blair to return to politics.

I disagree. I think it is time for Blair to shut up and go away.

My first problem with his long essay is the suffocating blandness of its prose. There isn’t as much as the breath of wit or eloquence in its 5000+ words. It reads like a pep talk from a middle manager to an office full of bored IT technicians.

But I’m willing to admit that I’d prefer to have an effective policy-maker who can’t write for toffee than a political idiot with sparkling prose. What is Sir Tony recommending?

I want to start by saying that I am not completely biased on the Blair Question. I’m willing to give him credit when he has been right. I used to huff and puff about him being friendly with dictators, despite his broader rhetoric about human rights, but the fact is that you can’t be a world leader without being friendly with unpleasant people. You might as well try to never kill an animal, even down to dust mites.

Blair’s essay, which argues that the British government must step out of its narrow-minded political framework and embrace effective policies for growth, does make some good points. Yes, the UK needs planning reform and to stop net zero from menacing Britons with energy insecurity. Blair is right that it is futile for the government to keep promising growth while maintaining the regulatory and ideological systems that effectively preclude it.

But here the kind words end. Firstly, Blair is an absolutely massive honking hypocrite. He bangs on and on about how the ruling Labour Party has “an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion”. Sure! But who was the PM who attached the UK to futile regime change wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Who was the PM who massively, unprecedentedly expanded migration from India, Pakistan, Nigeria and elsewhere? Who was the PM who wanted everybody and their dog to go to university?

Someone can be right while being hypocritical, of course. But Blair repeatedly confuses rational policy with “things Tony Blair likes”. Not cooperating with the US’s war in Iran, he says, was “not the best way to treat our ally”. “Our ally” had been threatening a reckless and arrogant invasion of European soil — besides which, if our only priority is pleasing the US, agreeing with Donald Trump on everything and anything will hardly be an asset to the UK in two years.

“We went through Afghanistan and Iraq together,” Blair says, rhapsodising about the transatlantic relationship, “But it mattered deeply to America and so it mattered to us also.” Well, firstly, being a good friend can mean being critical if your friends are being reckless. Secondly, though, I dare Sir Tony to go to the parents, spouses, children, and friends of the British soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq and tell them that it “mattered deeply to America”.

What a shameless man.

In partnership with his argument that British politics is delusional is Blair’s argument that it is parochial. This, in fairness to Blair, is often true. People do want to talk about NHS waiting times far more than China or AI — understandably, in a sense, inasmuch as anyone in the UK might find themselves in A&E tomorrow, but misguidedly because British politics does not exist in a vacuum and depends on broader technological, economic and geopolitical trends.

But I think a big problem with Blair is that there’s very little sense of what policy is actually aimed towards. This could sound far too post-liberal. I don’t want politicians to have a comprehensive sense of what a nation should be like because there is so much that its people should be determining for themselves. But Blair seems to have no sense of what a nation is, or of what a people is, or of what values should underpin their collective life.

He talks about economic growth, and that is valid. Pretty much all of your political ambitions, whatever they are, depend on an underlying reality of economic growth. But there is no — and I do mean no — sense of how Blair understand’s Britain’s culture and identity. It almost sounds like he sees it as some kind of corporation, where all that really matters is the bottom line. This is weird, because the man who presided over the creation of reams of stultifying legislation from 1997 to 2007 is no sort of neoliberal fanatic. But it seems very much like it is because Blair, whose think tank has received tens of millions of pounds from Larry Ellison of Oracle, wants the UK to be some sort of playground for Big Tech.

Hey, nations need rich people. They cannot insulate themselves against technological change. I’ll be the first — well, among the first — to oppose petty political obstructionism. I don’t want Europe to be debating the finer details of GDPR reform while China is creating a superintelligence. But the rich have to at least respect a framework of laws and values — laws and values around such things as freedom and privacy — or else you don’t have much of a nation at all. You just have a business park with a suburb attached to it.

So, I don’t think Tony Blair is really selling a meaningful plan for the future as a wise elder statesmen. I think he is making a sales pitch as a glorified B2B salesperson. Hey, the world needs people who sell things. But I don’t think Blair’s product is as sophisticated as it looks — and I’m not sure you should listen to a sales pitches from someone who has scammed you before.

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“Was

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When it comes to some subjects, like history or literature, a political element is probably unavoidable i…

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The word is music to my ears. Every time a barman or a shop assistant asks to see my ID, I feel young again. I always get my beer or wine, too, even if I don’t have my ID, because they know that only someone in their thirties would look so glad to be asked.

Objectively, I am not young. I am 35. Next year I will be old enough to have lived for eig…

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Maybe it’s the weather.

Anyways, for a vegetarian, I’ve never been a big animal guy. I love dogs, but you don’t have to be an animal guy to love dogs. There are people who won’t bat an eyelid over pigs and cows being tortured but would launch a one-…

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, his masterpiece, was tarnished by an absolutely dire 2005 Hollywood adaptation. Adams wrote the screenplay before his death, so I’m not sure to what extent I can blame its creators, but I remember convincing friends to come and watch the film — as a huge fan of the radio series and the books — and then melting into my seat as the twee bollocks unfolded in front of me.

Now, it seems as if there are imaginary Douglas Adamses populating people’s minds. “The saddest thing about Douglas Adams and the Pythons,” posted “Some Guy on Twitter” in a post that passed across my timeline recently, “Is that despite their own brilliance they genuinely and truly believed that the worst people on Earth were other middle class Englishmen.” What? This is plain made-up. Bending over backwards, I can see how the “Krikkit” subplot in Hitchhiker’s Guide… — about a charming race of aliens on a completely isolated planet who learn of the rest of the universe and resolve to destroy it — could be read as a satire on British colonialism. But I think you would have to be very literal-minded not to read it as a satire on small-minded militarism in general.

In case you hadn’t guessed, I remain a fan of Adams’ work. I am by no means the biggest (somehow, I’ve never got through the “Dirk Gently” books) but my dad introduced me to the Hitchhiker’s Guide… radio series when I was young, and I repaid him by insisting that we always listen to the tapes while we were driving. Many an hour was spent navigating the Yorkshire Dales or the Scottish Highlands while I was kept busy listening to the adventures of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and friends.

Hitchhiker’s Guide…, in case you don’t know, is about a hapless Englishman, Arthur Dent, who has discovered that his house is going to be destroyed to make room for a bypass. He lies down in front of a bulldozer to stop it. At that moment, though, his friend, Ford Prefect, arrives to insist that they leave the Earth, which, as Arthur soon discovers, is being destroyed to make room for a hyperspace bypass. So begins a series of bizarre and often rather philosophical adventures, involving a deeply intelligent and deeply depressed android, a race of psychopathic poem-writing aliens, a computer that offers the answer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” but doesn’t say what the question is, and much, much more.

Adams’s humour is a lot more sharp than his towel-bearing admirers might lead you to think. The best jokes surprise you while also making sense, rather than just surprising you while being completely inexplicable. “There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying,” begins a throwaway line of Life, the Universe and Everything, “The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”

Adams’s humour could also be dark and poignant rather than just quirky. I’m thinking of “Share and Enjoy” — the slogan of the gratingly cheerful complaints department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, which sells a robot called “your plastic pal who’s fun to be with” but ultimately says that if it malfunctions you can “stick your head in a pig”.

I’m thinking of the whale who materialises in the sky and has a jolly rush of thoughts before its sudden death. It has just decided on the word “ground” to describe the “big and flat and round” thing it has been approaching when it asks, “I wonder if it will be friends with me?”

“And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.”

Indeed, Adams had a keen sense for human feeling. In the first book of the novelised version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide…, Arthur Dent reflects on the destruction of Earth:

England no longer existed. He’d got that—somehow he’d got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.

Adams was a self-described “radical atheist”. His friend, Richard Dawkins, dedicated The God Delusion to him. His puddle joke — which compares advocates of the fine-tuning argument to a puddle marvelling at its fortune for inhabiting a hole that so precisely suits it — challenges my own agnostic wonderings about the strangeness of existence. But Adams was no smug reductionist. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is full of unanswered existential pondering. Adams was also a man who proved his love of the richness and variety of life on Earth with his environmental activism, described in his book Last Chance to See.

The man couldn’t write female characters to save his life (which I believe he acknowledged). The later books and series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide were not half as strong as the earlier work. I’m not a big fan of any of the filmed adaptations, in which the quirkiness drowns out the philosophical and satirical content. (On a minor, narrowly political note, while I share Adams’s frustration with cold bureaucracies, nowadays the state is liable to thwart rather than impose construction.)

But 25 years after Adams’s death, his work deserves to be remembered — not for the cultural epiphenomena but for the sharp and humane comedy. The bizarre elements of The Hitchhiker’s Guide… were not bizarre for the sake of it but bizarre in a manner that jokingly illuminated real-life questions — existential mysteries, moral dilemmas, cold bureaucracies, and, yes, English manners. (With reference to the tweet I mentioned earlier, the toxic nature of oikophobes should not stop you from laughing at yourself.)

So, revisit The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Introduce your kids to it. Just don’t watch the film.

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I don’t want to do this. Quite apart from being rooted in hyperbole, it is just …

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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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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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