This month featuring: a dreamlike internet horror, a ragequit at the BFI, a gleefully trashy Satanic romp, and a 4K anime masterpiece (plus some truly baffling nonsense).

Arco (2025), Ugo Bienvenu & Gilles Cazaux – This was quite slow-burn and I wasn’t really finding the main characters likeable, but it had an incredibly strong gut-punch of a third act.

Underland (2025), Rob Petit – I was enjoying this until in a sudden flight of fancy it started going on about somebody’s dream of the Underland rather than the real thing going on in front of the film crew. NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR DREAM. YOUR DREAM IS NOT A REAL THING. NOBODY CARES.

But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), Jamie Babbit – Incredibly sharply observed satire of attitudes to – and within – the LGBTQ+ community with great performances from Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall.

This was a screening by La Monocle’s film club. La Monocle’s mission is to nurture inclusive FLINTA-focused queer spaces, inspired by the spirit of the historic Parisian Le Monocle. The film club aims to create a consistent, friendly, and accessible community space where queer people can gather, unwind, and feel fully welcomed. All of the evenings help fund the opening of their own bar.

Submit to Me (1985), Richard Kern – Well this absolutely went from “Oh yes, Lydia Lunch looking gothy and hot AF doing some light BDSM” to “Jesus Christ what the hell am I watching? My eyes! MY EYES!” over the course of its 12 minutes.

Blood Feast (1963), Herschell Gordon Lewis – This, it is said, spawned the whole gore/splatter genre, and was very watchable despite having some absolutely insane juxtapositions between “brutal murder of a woman”, “weird racist trope about Egyptians” and “ZOMG the most generic dialogue US police officers can have”. The last couple of minutes, where two cops literally reiterate and explain the whole previous hour we’d just watched would not have been out of place in Police Squad.

Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), Mike Kuchar – This was quite surreal with a weird monotone voiceover, and acting so stilted by everybody that it was difficult to tell who were meant to be the fleshapoids and who the humans were.

Napoleon Dynamite (2004), Jared Hess – Truly one of my favourite movies of all time, with so many little quirky asides. Was delighted to be able to introduce my 13-year-old to it on the big screen.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026), Aaron Horvat, Michael Jelenic, Pierre Leduc & Fabien Polack – Well, this was certainly some sounds and images that some people put together and decided to release.

[Live scenes of the author “enjoying” this movie]

El día de la bestia (The Day of the Beast) (1995), Álex de la Iglesia – Bar Trash at Finsbury Park Picturehouse – Brilliantly, for the first half-hour, this was like if a British farce writer had decided to do a Satan movie set in Madrid, and then it gradually got more violent and bizarre.

Bar Trash, run by Token Homo, presents “Queer cult & curious cinema” in relaxed screenings with alcohol, a raffle, a quiz and lots of laughs – find out more at tokenhomo.com/bar-trash.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), Jane Schoenbrun – This has an incredible dreamlike quality to it, and – from what I have seen of my kids watching ARGs (alternate reality games) and video journals on YouTube – is incredibly well observed. Would recommend.

I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Jane Schoenbrun – An absolute gem of a movie of the last decade, ideal if you love Buffy / X-files / lived in the 90s, and guaranteed to be an endlessly reshown future cult film.

Akira (1988), Katsuhiro Ôtomo – I didn’t know much about this except its reputation, so went to see the 4K remaster at the Imax and was blown away. A two hour movie where I didn’t nip out for a wee? That’s saying something. Also kudos for way back then predicting that in 2019 Tokyo would be preparing for a cursed Olympics.

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L’Étranger (The Stranger) (2025), François Ozon – I don’t know the novel and went to this because I knew it had inspired the Cure’s debut single, so presumed that at some point he was going to, indeed, kill an Arab. I enjoyed it but the lead character is a right insufferable prick, isn’t he?

The Conspiracists (2024), Liz Smith – Well edited, but also I began to feel uneasy about the voyeuristic nature of watching these people who have had to deal with trauma in their life and then somehow – thanks to the internet, mostly – converted it not into helping out at the local evangelical church to give them the faith, certainty, community, participation and the false promise of a better tomorrow they need, but instead have latched on to chemtrails, Pizzagate, the death of Princess Diana, and Mother Teresa being Anthony Fauci’s mother as their truth. It did, though, have some remarkably cute dogs and cats and puppies and kittens in it, all of whom seemed oblivious that they were living with people who, frankly, need help.

Another Day, Another Man (1966), Doris Wishman – You live, you learn. This was a double-bill at the BFI starting at 8.20pm with an “intro”, but that was like a 30 minute lecture, so the first film didn’t start until 8.50pm, and we were already on for a post 11pm ending. But more importantly than that, Wishman’s movie, with its weird jump cuts and the dialogue being done after the fact by voice actors, divorced from what had actually been filmed, was unwatchable. It was like “The Slightly Titillating Stories of Ferdinand de Bargos”. I ragequit.

Ultras (2025), Ragnhild Ekner – Some really brilliant shots of the absolute joy that being part of a football crowd can bring, and some insane synchronised displays, but I felt it glossed over some of the more unsavoury elements of hardcore football fandom.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026), Lee Cronin – I liked that it took the well-worn Mummy outline and turned it into a claustrophobic paranoid family drama. I liked less that the final act really leaned into gore-for-gore’s sake, and also I felt it had a brilliant implied ending that could have cut to black, and then they decided we needed to see a bit more just in case someone in a test screening didn’t get the implied ending.

Rose of Nevada (2025), Mark Jenkin – At first I thought I was finding this too much like Enys Men, which at the time I said had “all the elements that should have made it exactly my cup of tea – bleak repetition, an ambient but intense soundtrack, a Cornish folk horror mystery – but alas it was not my cup of tea and I was left re-reading the glowing reviews and wondering what they had seen in it that I hadn’t”. Again I was thinking Jenkin had produced something over-stylised and kooky for the sake of it, but then A THING HAPPENED and, unlike with Enys Men, I was absolutely drawn into it for the second half.

Mother Mary (2026), David Lowery – As I walked out they were advertising that it was on again in 15 minutes time, and I nearly bought a ticket to walk back in and watch it again, even though I’m not sure I actually liked it? There is an incredible two-handed play in there between Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel about a Taylor Swift-esque popstar reconnecting with her long-estranged costume designer/muse/lover but then also loads of other things happen that might be supernatural or a metaphor or just… ridiculous?

Exit 8 (2025), Genki Kawamura – A good creepypasta atmosphere with lashings of suspense and tension, but dear lord if you thought the messaging was blunt in recent seasons of Doctor Who this was something else, I ended up wanting to scream “YES, WE GET IT” at the screen about halfway through.

Super 8½ (1994), Bruce LaBruce – Raw sexy fun and a lovely slice of camp 90s life although it tailed off a bit towards the end. [Insert your own sexual performance punchline here]

Read more of my one-line spoiler-free reviews of everything I’ve watched in the cinema in the monthly archive. Last time out I really enjoyed The Bride!, Pociagi (Trains) and Dead Man’s Wire (pictured below).

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A weekly round-up of what I’ve read and enjoyed from around the web.

I’m interested in journalism, media, technology, and nerdy things found down the back of the world wide web’s sofa. Most weeks I publish a handful of things that caught my eye – regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me. You can subscribe to get it by email here. And if you read something odd and wonderful you think I’d enjoy, feel free to send it my way.

“Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future. In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich.”

So argues Elizabeth Lopatto for the Verge in a piece titled Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want

“This was one of his most advanced ‘hacks’ yet: a sophisticated plan of manipulation, which involved him being cruel, vindictive, sycophantic, even abusive. ‘I fell into this dark flow where I knew exactly what to say, and what the model would say back, and I watched it pour out everything,’ he says. Thanks to him, the creators of the chatbot could now fix the flaw he had found, hopefully making it a little safer for everyone.”

Well, I guess training people to fuck with AI is at least one example of it creating jobs rather than replacing them.

Read more here: Jamie Bartlett, The Guardian – Meet the AI jailbreakers: ‘I see the worst things humanity has produced’

Unfortunately doomscrolling out of office hours is very much part of my work routine, and I have a massive stack of unread 2000AD progs. But maybe reading this will shift the dial: The one change that worked – I swapped doomscrolling for reading comic books…

“Instead of reaching for my phone in the evenings, I picked up a comic instead. Reading them as an adult restored a sense of childlike wonder that transcended my anxieties. I found my quality of sleep started to improve. My dreams were more fanciful and less marked by the banal terrors of day-to-day life. I began to wake up feeling revitalised, free of the residual negativity from the previous night’s miserable doomscrolling.”

Read more here: Joel Harley, The Guardian – The one change that worked: I swapped doomscrolling for reading comic books

It is very difficult to take a publication like The Spectator seriously when it has happy to publish this kind of drivel which includes a factual error as part of its main premise. Rory Sutherland writes about The BBC’s shameful treatment of Top Cat but says:

“Language can be triggering. I know that from watching the BBC as a child, when two linguistic absurdities drove the seven-year-old me practically insane. One was the Blue Peter habit of referring to Sellotape as ‘sticky-backed plastic’, a phrase unspoken by anyone else in any other circumstances, except in parodies of BBC children’s programmes.”

OH MATE. THE STICKY-BACKED PLASTIC WAS FABLON NOT SELLOTAPE. OH MATE.

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz is its fifth birthday edition! Interrupted dinners and shows, and a salamander. Guest animal: Arnie, who was four-months-old when this picture was taken.

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This is a great read from The Cutprice Guignol – “He’s in here…I can feel him”: The Murder of Philip Peters and the Case of the Denver Spider Man – about a murder in the 1940s that sounds like an episode of the X-Files – a drifter moved in to a couple’s home, murdered one of them, and then continued to live hidden there in the attic.

Having worked at Reckless Records in the 90s, I am no stranger to the music business often not being on the level. Shaad D’Souza looks at the cynical viral campaigns giving indie bands authenticity’s veneer.

When I left the cinema after watching Mother Mary on Tuesday I immediately wanted to go back in and re-watch it, despite being oddly unsure about whether I liked it. David Lowery discusses it with Nick Chen.

“Despite decades of archiving, no complete recordings of these shows exist in the archives of their original host broadcasters. We believe that copies – or fragments – of these shows could still exist. In private collections. In broadcaster vaults. On old film reels. Or even tucked away in an attic, long forgotten.”

Sound familiar? For once it isn’t me wanging on about Doctor Who, but this is a global appeal by Eurovision to hunt for what might still exist of the two missing believed wiped contests, Lugano 1956 and Copenhagen 1964.

You know I am the first person to start moaning about logins/passwords/account migration, especially in the context of football TV subscriptions thanks to still one of the maddest bits of law-making in my lifetime, the EU decision that to avoid having a monopoly and to provide competition, football competitions and leagues can’t sell themselves exclusively to one provider. The net result? The price for rights is driven up and up and as consumers you have to have multiple subscriptions across multiple platforms to get access to all your team’s matches. Moan, moan, moan. Anyway BT Sport became TNT and then that got folded into Discovery+ but now that has been moved to HBO Max and the process of migrating my account was… really fucking easy?

The Leyton Orientear – who I don’t always see eye-to-eye with – has crunched numbers on Orient’s mooted stadium expansion and come to the conclusion that:

“The Gandlerplan would increase our capacity in absolute terms by more than 20,000. Only four clubs have added more than 20,000 to their capacity in a single move before: and three of them (Arsenal, Spurs, West Ham) are our close neighbours. Now, that could indicate that North-East London is the absolute epicentre of the game with a vast reservoir of untapped demand, or it could mean that all the excess demand in the area has already been catered for. As usual, the truth is probably somewhere between the two.”

Read more here: The Leyton Orientear – Ambition Bites the Nails of Success: Orient’s new owner continues to talk big about a new stadium, but just how realistic are his goals?

A sober and clear-headed legal look at why it is taking so long to find out what has happened with Manchester City’s 115 charges.

“Perhaps the ex-footballer is particularly susceptible to this kind of radicalisation, spending pretty much their adult life in a kind of gilded cage, living by the hard uncomplicated certainties of performance and self-optimisation, before retiring and being forced to stare irrelevance squarely in the face.”

Jonathan Liew is possibly being too kind to the Jonjo Shelvey, Rickie Lambert and Matt Le Tissier’s of this world in this piece: Captain. Leader. Far-right sympathiser. John Terry joins ranks of football’s radicalised.

Friday Reading is a (usually) weekly series of recommended reads from Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things found on the internet. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive it by email.

A weekly round-up of what I’ve read and enjoyed from around the web.

I’m interested in journalism, media, technology, and nerdy things found down the back of the world wide web’s sofa. Most weeks I publish a handful of things that caught my eye – regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me. You can subscribe to get it by email here. And if you read something odd and wonderful you think I’d enjoy, feel free to send it my way.

It used to be our parents warning us about the dangers of the internet, but that seems to have flipped around. Simon Usborne talks to the families torn apart by older relatives going far right.

“The 1980s or 90s setting of much of this generative content reveals its origins in the hands of gen Z creators. They are feeding demand for nostalgia among fellow young digital natives who fetishise a pre-smartphone era of mix tapes and Blockbuster stores; think Stranger Things without the monsters. But their videos are hitting a nerve among older cohorts becoming accustomed to a diet of ‘boomerslop’ – clips that range from weird AI twists on traditional cat content to the kinds of unhinged videos being shared by rightwing influencers including boomer-in-chief Donald Trump.”

Read more here: Simon Usborne, The Guardian – ‘I feel like I’m losing her’: the families torn apart by older relatives going far right

It is behind a paywall but the Observer has an investigation into whether AI psychosis is a mental health crisis for the 21st century

Daniel Engber goes out on a limb for the Atlantic and describes the current mania over missing US scientists as – in a strong field – the single dumbest conspiracy theory of 2026.

Incidentally I watched The Conspiracists (2024) this week, which follows a couple of people involved in the 6 January Capitol insurrection in the US, and I began to feel uneasy about the voyeuristic nature of watching these people who have had to deal with trauma in their life and then somehow – thanks to the internet, mostly – converted it not into helping out at the local evangelical church to give them the faith, certainty, community, participation and the false promise of a better tomorrow they need, but instead have latched on to conspiracy.

Tammy, one of the Trump supporters featuring in the documentary

“I found myself withdrawing little green men from the nonsense box in my mind. Either an alien invasion was taking place under our noses or there were some very confused people in the upper echelons of US intelligence. Either way, there was a story to tell. So, much to the surprise of my close friends and family, in the autumn of 2023, I dropped everything and headed to the US to chase aliens.”

Read more here: Daniel Lavelle, The Guardian – The Pentagon released its UFO videos – so I went to the US to chase aliens. This is what I found

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: insurance scams, drinking games and errors of biblical proportions. Guest animal: Jimmy from the Cinema museum in Kennington.

Enjoying Friday Reading by email? Feel free to forward it to a friend – they can sign up here. And if you’ve recently read something you think I would enjoy, do send it my way.

London Centric spent this week in south-west London talking to local teenagers, shop staff and restaurant owners. What we found was a perfect storm of retailers fed up with police inaction on so-called ‘low-level’ crimes such as shoplifting, bored teenagers blurring the lines between filming crimes and participating in them, and viral videos spreading awareness of what people can get away with in the face of security guards trained not to confront teenagers.

I’m thoroughly bored with the people pushing their “London has fallen” agenda, but this is really interesting from London Centric: What actually happened in Clapham last week? [£ – sorry]

A rightly angry and brutal essay from Hannah Shea on what happens online when you tell your story of being sexually assaulted.

Tom Vanderbilt is wistfully – and slightly oddly – nostalgic about old-school street scams, which he says he much prefers to the faceless phone-snatchers of today.

The Face is closing which sucks.

Highlights from a selection from more than 70 galleries at Aipad: The Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York from 22-26 April.

I’m very much taken with this Nine Inch Noize project, and really enjoyed the Tron: Ares remixathon as well, so two NIN releases in the space of a couple of months that have very much done the business for me.

“In death he has maintained arguably the biggest – and certainly the most vocal – fanbase of any deceased celebrity” is quite the understatement. I can imagine it took a significant amount of time to get this piece through the lawyers as well: Can a new biopic change your mind about Michael Jackson?. I’m going to venture to say, not for me Clive, no.

Good lord, the Aadam Jacobs Collection is just thousands and thousands of free live bootlegs the dude has recorded over the years.

*whispers* I don’t ever recall playing Chuckie Egg, one of the ZX Spectrum’s defining games. 40 years on Keith Stuart waxes lyrical about a game which exists thanks to a 15-year-old tea boy who worked a Saturday shift in a computer shop in Greater Manchester. Maybe I should finally give it a whirl on my ZX replicant.

Uefa may finally be thinking about fixing European men’s qualifying to stop top-ranked sides being forced to routinely thump the likes of San Marino and Andorra in uncompetitive matches nobody wants to watch.

Jonny Weeks on the boyhood autographs that remind him of Coventry City’s Premier League heydays.

If you missed it, this week I wrote about my local pub which is changing hands for yet another refit: Adieu to the Bell (for now… again)

Friday Reading is a (usually) weekly series of recommended reads from Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things found on the internet. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive it by email.

In that time it has gone through many incarnations. And it hasn’t always been my local – The College Arms, The Flowerpot and the Dog & Duck have just entered the chat – but it really often has been. When I first started going, like many pubs of the era, it was divided into two distinct bars – a regular bit and a posh bit. Both had fires. Only one had big armchairs. You knew which bit you belonged in. At one point half of it was cordoned off for an Indian restaurant. Later there was some kind of Brazilian food pop-up in the beer garden.

Andy and Louisa at the Bell in 2022

The Bell interior in 2022

When Stonegate took the pub back in-house in 2022 and forced out long-standing manager Andy Potter, locals did not take it well. This wasn’t a gentle handover – it felt like a brutal corporate eviction of a much-loved institution. Leaked plans pointing to it turning into a sports bar with 14 screens only made things worse in advance of reopening, fuelling fears it was about to be totally stripped of its character.

When it did reopen after the 2022 refurb, a MyLondon visit found the cheapest pint – Amstel – was £5.20 and said they were surprised how expensive it now was, while also running pieces about it being besieged with negative reviews. The internet never forgets though, and it was very much plus ça change. There is a review of the pub on BeerInTheEvening – a deliciously old-school internet forum – from 2007 that says “Beer prices are extortionate. £2.90 for a pint of Stella? For a back street pub in Walthamstow it ain’t all that. Best you go somewhere else”. £2.90 for a pint of Stella? Expensive? Oh you sweet summer child.

The Bell interior 2014, as featured in this review from the Weird Walthamstow blog

The building itself is iconic in Walthamstow. There are art prints you can buy, and it often features in “look wasn’t it better in the old days” nostalgia picture groups, which I think are often aimed at saying wasn’t the dress sense and ethnic make-up of the people in the frame “better” back in the day, plus there being no litter on the streets. But aside from the implied racism, I usually just think “Wow, didn’t stuff look better in London when there were hardly any cars completely clogging up our streets?”

An art print of the Bell which you can buy here

The Bell in the early 1900s

The Bell in the 1960s or 1970s (probably)

The Bell is about to change again, with last orders for the current team coming this Saturday. The end of the most recent upheaval – the Stonegate takeover and sports-bar refit – has been greeted with glee in some quarters. But for me, one of the elements of gentrification in Walthamstow had been the diminishing number of pubs where you could watch football. The Bell was always one of the stops on our FA Cup final day pub crawl, and I remember watching England’s 5–1 win in Munich at the Bell, which remains historic^* in the very specific sense that English people remember it vividly and German people absolutely do not.

In more recent years, in its sports bar incarnation, I’ve watched England’s women lose a World Cup final to Spain and then win a European Championship on penalties against the same opposition. Joy and heartbreak. Same four walls. Different management. Different screens.

In 2025 the Bell had an oddly compressed annus horribilis. In the space of a couple of weeks a fire at the front door closed it for a few hours, and then almost immediately there was a longer hygiene closure due to a mouse infestation that led to the management being yeeted.

Part of Stonegate’s team that refurbed the pub in 2022

The people who have been managing it since then have been lovely to me, and I’m sad that the machinations of the parent company mean people are losing their jobs, and in some cases having to move out of London to take up roles elsewhere in the chain.

I imagine, as with every upheaval at the Bell, there will be some people saying “I’ll never go there again”, other people going “Finally I can go back”, and yet more who are drawn in either way because, frankly, footfall and locality are often bigger drivers for people turning up to local businesses than whether they are amazing or not. I guess, after all these years, once it reopens I will be there regardless, and always remember the different incarnations, even if the next set of management and staff don’t.

The Bell – and the author – April 2026

(^*We both qualified for Japan/South Korea. They reached the final. We did not.)

A weekly round-up of what I’ve read and enjoyed from around the web.

I’m interested in journalism, media, technology, and nerdy things found down the back of the world wide web’s sofa. Most weeks I publish a handful of things that caught my eye – regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me. You can subscribe to get it by email here. And if you read something odd and wonderful you think I’d enjoy, feel free to send it my way.

“The transformation of search engines into AI-driven answer engines has emerged as the biggest issue facing the industry in our annual publisher survey” – that is according to Nic Newman, writing for InPublishing about publishers placing a focus on distinctiveness and trust in 2026.

“The 42-year-old, who has penned more than 600 stories since rejoining Fortune in July, may be a bellwether for where much of the media business is headed.”

Hmmmmmmmm … are you sure?

“While many journalists hit the phones and cultivate source relationships, when news breaks Nick Lichtenberg often uploads press releases or analyst notes into AI tools and prompts them to spit out articles that he can edit and publish quickly. His work involves what some view as the third rail of journalism: AI playing a leading role not just in researching, but in writing stories. AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune’s web traffic in the second half of 2025. Most were written by Lichtenberg. Lichtenberg isn’t pounding the pavement to find and unveil secrets about institutions and power brokers. That’s OK with him.”

Read more here: An AI upheaval is coming for media. This journalist is already all in [£].

Peter Lewis is heading very much in the opposite direction …

“As a loud and proud AI sceptic, I have been resistant to using the technology in my work. But recognising that I need to know thy enemy, I’ve spent the last month trying Anthropic’s Claude to understand how it might ‘support’ my writing process. To guide me on this journey, I’ve been taking advice from former Australian chief scientist Alan Finkel, who has launched a global certification process for creators to ‘verify’ their work is human-authored. Indeed, I’m delighted to become their first ‘Proudly Human’ columnist, joining a growing list of authors, musicians and publishers who have gone through the same formal accreditation process.”

Read more here: Peter Lewis, The Guardian – Could AI write this column? In a world of slop-inion, I’m certifying myself human

Findings from the Tech Transparency Project claim that Google and Apple’s app stores not only host harmful apps that can undress images of women, but encourage users to find them.

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: Trump is unwise, an emperor dies and a €1m raffle prize. Guest animal: Tanji.

Featured video: I Had A Baby Not A Lobotomy by the Anchoress ft Gwenno.

Enjoying Friday Reading by email? Feel free to forward it to a friend – they can sign up here. And if you’ve recently read something you think I would enjoy, do send it my way.

Long and detailed from Jonn Elledge here on “How do you build a new high speed railway, anyway?” after he visited a couple of construction sites along the route of HS2, a project whose ever ballooning costs are in part because of locals being fussy about every damn decision along the route. For example, Jonn visits Wendover Green tunnel, where he explains, “The word ‘green’ here doesn’t mean ‘environmentally friendly’, except in so far as rail generally is: it means it’s being built on the surface and then buried with grass and other plants, so that it disappears into the landscape” – at huge additional expense.

Samira Shackle talks to Tareena Shakil, who is trying to rebuild her life in the UK as an influencer, having fled to live inside the Islamic State as a teenager. Rather like when I saw the movie Brides last October, it is interesting to see a different perspective on the narrative around why young Muslim girls and teenagers would flee the UK to go and live with the proscribed terrorist group.

Elena Saavedra Buckley relays her experience of taking part in a mission to live on Mars with the caveat that it is taking place at a purpose-built camp in Utah.

“The MDRS is the longest-running Martian habitat in the world; more than three hundred crews have traveled there to live together, eat freeze-dried food, drive “rovers” through the desert in helmeted space suits, and work on research projects. [But] it wasn’t initially clear to me what, exactly, the organization’s simulation had done to nudge humanity toward the red planet. It seemed more like an elaborate team-building exercise, a logistically complicated and expensive ropes course for space-travel diehards.”

Read more here: Elena Saavedra Buckley, Harpers – Redshift – rehearsing for humanity’s future on Mars

Sam Wollaston is visiting a series of abandoned buildings in the UK, starting with the grand department store in Newport, Wales, that became an illicit cannabis farm.

Sydney Lobe writes for Huck about an upcoming exhibition of Dona Ann McAdams’s defiant photos of New York’s 80s & 90s queer activists.

Emily Dinsdale speaks to five photographers – including Anton Corbijn whose work with Depeche Mode has been a constant companion of mine since the 90s – who are exhibiting at Japan’s epic photography festival: Kyotographie 2026

The Green party think they can break Labour’s majority in Waltham Forest, a council that has been solidly Labour for most of my adult life.

My friend Beth Axford writing on how the David Tennant and Billie Piper TARDIS team dynamic – twenty years old this month – has impacted a whole generation of fans.

“One was a normal girl from a normal world; the other, and an ancient adventurer who could go anywhere in the universe. They may have been worlds apart – and worlds away from ours – yet they worked, because they were so real. The intricate and accessible writing throughout the series made this love story stand the test of time (and space). Rose was young, tenacious and brave, but she also had her flaws. The Doctor was clever, kind and powerful, but he wasn’t always perfect. They grew together despite their imperfections, which has resonated with many fans over the years.”

Read more here: Beth Axford, Doctor Who TV – Celebrating an iconic duo: 20 years of the Tenth Doctor and Rose

ZOMG Character Options are releasing a set with Mr Ring-a-Ding and Dugga Doo figures. TAKE. MY. MONEY.

Well, this is one way of looking at it…

“The clients who are cheap, or just have a tight budget will most likely use AI for the music in their project (videogames, some commercials, etc.). And this is actually great IMO. If you’ve ever worked with a client who thinks music should be cheap to create, you’ll know how horrible it is to work with them.”

Taken from this Reddit thread: Follow-up to “AI will replace sound designers and composers” post.

Pamela Hutchinson is always fascinating about ancient film and pre-code silent nonsense, and here she is on top form talking about Letty Lynton, Joan Crawford’s wildest film, which has not been screened legally since January 1936.

“If you’re a man going to a match, it is automatically assumed you know everything about football,” Prof Stacey Pope, a leading women’s football sociologist, says. “Women are undermined while the status of male fans is enhanced.”

The recently-opened pop-up exhibition, The Beacon of Light, next to Sunderland’s Stadium of Light, portrays the experiences of women on the terraces of the north-east since the 1950s. Juliet Nottingham speaks to Pope, who has put the exhibition together.

My contributions to the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter this week were:
·  Monday briefing: Hungary chooses Péter Magyar over Viktor Orbán
·  Friday briefing: Is theatre in a Misérables state, or is the industry just adapting to tough times?

Friday Reading is a (usually) weekly series of recommended reads from Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things found on the internet. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive it by email.

A weekly round-up of what I’ve read and enjoyed from around the web.

I’m interested in journalism, media, technology, and nerdy things found down the back of the world wide web’s sofa. Most weeks I publish a handful of things that caught my eye – regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me. You can subscribe to get it by email here. And if you read something odd and wonderful you think I’d enjoy, feel free to send it my way.

An essential long read from Matt Stone about how AI will remove corrective timing from systems, what that means and why it should worry us all.

“Friction is inefficiency. Hesitation is inconsistency. Review is latency. Context is noise. If a system is trained to optimize throughput, then anything that slows the flow gets marked for extermination. The same people who once promised that automation would eliminate drudgery are now building systems that eliminate pause, eliminate revision, eliminate the few remaining seconds in which a bad decision can still be recognised as bad before it starts breeding consequences. That is why the phrase corrective timing matters so much.”

Read more here: Matt Stone, The Grounded Ghost – No Country for Middle Men

The rather odd development of US tech bros complaining that EU regulation of them has been weakened with the lapse of a law that permitted them to sweep for illegal material being posted amid privacy concerns.

Some actual statistical proof that we are living in silos separated by politics and radicalisation …

“Reform UK voters are the least likely to see posts from friends and family on social media and most likely to see content from brands and news organisations, a study has found. Research analysing users’ feeds on Instagram, Facebook, X, Bluesky and TikTok found that only 13% of Reform UK voters saw content from someone they knew, compared with 23% of Green party voters.

The findings were based on a representative UK survey of 1,000 people who were asked to categorise the top four posts of their most used social media feed. Of these top four posts, 18% came from someone a user actually knew, while 35% were from influencers, public figures or recommended content, and 29% were from adverts and brands.”

Read more here: Jessica Murray, The Guardian – Reform UK voters least likely to see social media posts from family and friends, study finds

I am not going to lie. “Two weeks ago, an AI bot invited me to a party it was organising in Manchester. It then promptly lied to dozens of potential sponsors that I’d agreed to cover the event, and misled me into believing there would be food. Despite all this, it was a pretty good night” is one hell of a drop-into on this piece from Aisha Down. And so is this quote: “I can attest that Manchester, and everywhere else, is about to get a lot stranger.”

Read more here: Aisha Down, The Guardian – An AI bot invited me to its party in Manchester. It was a pretty good night

“Slopaganda is probably here to stay. But with sufficient foresight and courage, we may still be able to adapt to it – and even control it.”

Mark Alfano and Michał Klincewicz analyse the use of AI to generate memes in a time of conflict.

I know what my answer would be, but Sophie Wilson looks at a rising trend and asks would you let AI help you choose your next tattoo?

Enjoying Friday Reading by email? Feel free to forward it to a friend – they can sign up here. And if you’ve recently read something you think I would enjoy, do send it my way.

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: spaceship crews, planning news and who is in a meltdown?. Guest animal: Tigger from Fareham, with quiz author shown for scale. One regular contributor messaged me to say in the picture I don’t look a day older than “a rusty teakettle”. Nice one, thanks.

This gallery of 33 scandalous photos that shocked the world truly is a gift that keeps on giving – even if it doesn’t have the Duchess of Argyll’s actual fellatio Polaroids in it. This little bit from Gaby Hinsliff in the intro though was bittersweet:

“From the historic to the trivial, what makes many of these images unusually poignant in 2026 is that the era they represent – one of humans offering other humans visual proof of our shared world – is now under threat. Hoaxers have always existed, as the fakes in this collection show. But the proliferation of highly convincing AI-generated images, spread instantly and virally by social media, risks a much more serious erosion of trust in what our eyes are telling us.

Malign actors are already exploiting that technology. Will it become common practice for public figures snapped in blatant wrongdoing to blame AI? What you see here may yet come to be remembered as a golden age for photography: one in which cameras were quick enough to catch a fleeting moment of truth, and we were still capable of believing it.”

Read more here: Gaby Hinsliff, Hannah J Davies and Gabrielle Schwarz, The Guardian – ‘Occasionally a picture can change the course of history’: 33 scandalous photos that shocked the world

“Every pamphlet, every plaque, every lecture I have watched or read on Avebury seems to contradict the previous one,” says Nat Guest as she goes on one of her silly little walks, including a night-time flit to the Avebury stones after a day spent trying to coax out their secrets:

“We have spent the day tracing circles within circles, trying to select our favourite rocks – or at least, those that speak to us in some way. We find the stones strangely mute, though, despite my mum having brought along small beakers so we can listen to them as you would listen to the sea in a shell.”

Read more here: Nat Guest, I go on a little walk – I go on a silly little trip to… Avebury – on narratives of place and questions without answers

Wyrd Britain reminds us that there used to be a 1980 BBC1 Jackanory spinoff “Spine Chillers” that featured abridged readings of classic spooky stories. Highlighted in this blog post is Saki’s The Music on the Hill, read by Jonathan Pryce.

Labour MP for Milton Keynes North, Chris Curtis, has written a piece arguing in favour of building tram networks in order to unlock economic productivity across British cities. I don’t know about the economy angle, but I’d love to have more trams to visit.

Catherine Kim in Politico on the phenomena of Trump-adoring right-wing youth in South Korea.

All I know is that I am much better at pool after two pints, and much worse at pool after four pints. Here Joel Snape looks at the actual science on why alcohol makes us both happy and miserable – and what else it does to our minds and bodies.

An extremely detailed interview with Peter Williams, who was engineer for some of the sessions of David Sylvian’s solo debut Brilliant Trees. It is specifically about the song Nostalgia from that album, but more broadly about working with Steve Nye, guest musician Holger Czukay, and Sylvian himself.

David Sylvian and Holger Czukay

Worth bookmarking from James Cridland – an updated guide to how to listen to BBC Radio outside the UK.

Matt Mills interviews various heavy metal bands to find out why so many in the genre have decided in recent years to adopt wearing masks on stage.

I really enjoyed seeing Musik starring Frances Barber back in October – “An hour long tour de force one woman show from Frances Barber as she tells a fictional life story woven around real cultural icons and events with a self-absorbed self-centred acid wit, and occasionally bursts into songs written by Tennant/Lowe” – and if that sounds like your bag it is on at selected cinemas tonight and on Sunday.

A date for your diary – East London’s best 90s+Britpop+Indie night is back, Back, BACK! Stereotypes at The Ciderhouse E7, Friday 15 May with DJ Miss Cosmic.

“As a rule, if a game was released on the ZX Spectrum based on a film, the likelihood was that it was terrible beyond measure.”

From that opening line this is a great set of reviews on Weird Bones of every game tenuously linked to the horror genre on the ol’ 48k rubber-keyed wonder.

David Marples on how football has changed during the 43 years he has taken to complete a tour of all 92 league grounds.

My contributions to the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter this week were:

·  Tuesday briefing: What is driving the record rise in stalking offences?
·  Thursday briefing: What difference will the ceasefire in the Middle East make, and will it hold?

Friday Reading is a (usually) weekly series of recommended reads from Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things found on the internet. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive it by email.

It has been an amazing time to be a Doctor Who fan, with the sudden rediscovery of two missing William Hartnell episodes from the 12-part 1965 epic The Daleks’ Master Plan. And an even more amazing time if you are a journalist who sometimes writes about Doctor Who, i.e. me, as you get to write a news story about them being put up on iPlayer, a recap of the episodes reviewing them, and, it turns out, to appear on the radio.

I do vividly recall my shock when a friend of mine explained to me for the first time that there were lots of missing Doctor Who episodes. In those pre-internet days I didn’t know, but he had a printed out list of what had disappeared. I was gobsmacked – how could they have disappeared? Of course, now I understand the situation much more clearly – videotape and storage space were expensive, and so with no prospect of repeats, further overseas sales and no home video market, there wasn’t really much point keeping them.

I ended up on BBC Radio 4 with Shaun Ley, alongside legendary archivist Sue Malden, talking about the significance of these newly recovered episodes. The short version is that they really do matter – not just as curios, but as part of a much bigger story about how television used to be made and valued:

“These are really interesting and important cultural artefacts. At that time, television was treated more like a theatre production, so you didn’t really have repeat runs … there was no opportunity to sell things on DVD or VHS, and so lots of things didn’t get preserved.”

That context is what makes finds like this so remarkable. The Daleks’ Master Plan wasn’t even sold overseas in the way many other stories were, which is how previous missing episodes have sometimes turned up in unexpected places:

“The last time any Doctor Who episodes were found was in 2013 … in a TV relay station in Nigeria, where the stories had been sold overseas. But these episodes were never sold overseas, so we thought they were some of the least likely ever to be recovered.”

Which makes their return all the more joyous – not least because it means, occasionally, you can still experience 1960s Doctor Who as something genuinely new:

“I got up at 6 o’clock and watched two episodes of Doctor Who that I’ve never seen before … I’ve tried to avoid finding out too much about the missing episodes, so I can watch them fresh as a fan. It was a really, really great joyous experience.”

As for the episodes themselves? It is so exciting to have them back it is hard to judge them on their actual merits. The Nightmare Begins is stronger than The Devil’s Planet, but one of my main takeaways was it was interesting to have more of Adrienne Hill as Katarina, the briefest of Doctor Who companions. As I wrote in my recap:

“Katarina has just been introduced to replace Vicki (Maureen O’Brien) in the preceding story The Myth Makers, and immediately the script editors seem to have had regrets about her character. ‘Don’t ask questions and do as you are told,’ the Doctor tells her at one point, which just about sums up how interesting she is.”

Adrienne Hill as Katarina

Of course, it’s not just Doctor Who. The programme tends to get the headlines, but there are missing episodes of Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son, Hancock’s Half Hour, and editions of Top of the Pops that once featured the Beatles. Film – and videotape – is a fragile medium, and if it isn’t stored properly, it disappears.

I was lucky enough to visit the BBC film archive in the early 2000s – which I blogged about at the time – and one thing that really struck me was how many decisions still had to be made about what to keep. You’re not going to retain every single episode of The Weakest Link forever – but what if one of the discarded ones turns out to feature a future prime minister?

Even then, preservation wasn’t as simple as “digitise it and you’re done”. A lot of material had been transferred to digital tape formats that were themselves already becoming obsolete, making it harder to maintain the machines needed to play them back. Archiving television turns out not to be a solved problem so much as an ongoing race against time.

• Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, the radio interview should be available to listen to for a year – our segment on Doctor Who starts at about the 26 minute mark, and you can hear it here.

A weekly round-up of what I’ve read and enjoyed from around the web.

I’m interested in journalism, media, technology, and nerdy things found down the back of the world wide web’s sofa. Most weeks I publish a handful of things that caught my eye – regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me. You can subscribe to get it by email here. And if you read something odd and wonderful you think I’d enjoy, feel free to send it my way.

Last week a Friday Reading subscriber messaged me to suggest “the underlying theme for me, was this all adds evidence to the claim, that we just can’t have nice things like, the internet, train travel for all, and fallible human-created chatbots are ruining everything for all humans before our eyes”. I’m not sure this week’s selection of stories is going to help that impression – if anything, it rather reinforces it.

It is such a staple of sci-fi that it seems inevitable some sort of headworn camera/HUD combo will eventually capture the market. Not sure it will be Meta’s offering though, judging from this highly entertaining read from Elle Hunt:

“Not only do I feel creepy wearing them, but they also lead me to think like a creep. When I see a stranger walking her lookalike dog, and when I run into an ex for the first time in years, both times I have the fleeting thought: I wish I’d been recording. I’m perturbed by how quickly my initial discomfort passes and the glasses become second nature. Just having a covert camera makes me want to use it, the possibilities of the tech overriding my better judgment and even basic decency.”

Read more here: Elle Hunt, The Guardian – I wore Meta’s smartglasses for a month – and it left me feeling like a creep

You can now buy an AI version of your lost loved one. But should you?

“‘Deadbots,’ as these posthumous AI creations are known, promise to replace the dead, and the way they are remembered. This raises plenty of ethical issues, not least the extent to which turning deadbots into marketable products will rely on exploiting people in mourning. But perhaps the biggest question is how such a product might shift our experience of personal grief and collective memory. Is grief merely a painful human shortcoming that we haven’t learned to optimize our way out of yet, or does it have a purpose?”

Read more here: Charley Burlock, The Atlantic – The AI companies trying to make grief obsolete

Be warned – the details in this are almost unthinkable, but Kim Devins talks to Anna Moore about the murder of Bianca Devins (pictured above), whose dead and mutilated body became memeified on the darkest corners of the internet.

“Brutal, bloodied images of Bianca’s body were posted on various platforms, with more captions (‘Sorry fuckers, you’re going to have to find somebody else to orbit’). The killer spray-painted a message on the ground beside his parked car (‘May you never forget me’), called the police, stabbed himself in the neck, took selfies, made more posts. In the ambulance, he asked how many news channels were covering the story. ‘Everything he did was for maximum attention,’ says Devins”

Read more here: Anna Moore, The Guardian – Her daughter was murdered seven years ago. Why are images of the crime still on social media?

“Conservative parents’ advocacy groups have been experimenting with using commercially available artificial intelligence tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries. Even though LLMs are notoriously error-prone, and the books in question aren’t pornographic, these groups continue to explore use cases for AI anyway.”

Read more here: Claire Woodcock, 404 Media – ‘Blockade’: The right is using AI content scanners to try to supercharge book banning

Enjoying Friday Reading by email? Feel free to forward it to a friend – they can sign up here. And if you’ve recently read something you think I would enjoy, do send it my way.

I was very active on the quiz front this week. First off, after MattGPT Goodwin came under some fire for the apparent use of AI in “his” book, I wrote this quiz about mangled quotations: Quotations quiz – can you spot what’s Shakespeare, Cantona or chatbot?

I also co-wrote with Dan Milmo this quiz looking at some of Apple’s hits, misses and milestones during the computer company’s five decades of history: Apple at 50 quiz – top sellers, turkeys and turtlenecks.

And of course no week is complete without the Guardian Thursday news quiz: daring dogs, delinquent capybaras and far too many bananas. Turner was this week’s guest canine.

An in-depth look for i-D magazine by Nicolaia Rips into – not to put too fine a point on it – are Gen Z fucking? It makes me glad my formative dating years were all strictly offline.

Also on a sex tip, Charlotte Jansen reviews a Dean Sameshima show of photographs of extreme queer LA sex clubs hidden in plain sight.

Not entirely sure it would suit me but Steph Pomphrey visited Svalbard in Norway to cold camp and sleep on ice at the edge of a steadily warming world. I believe god gave us houses for a reason.

Keith Stuart makes me feel sad I did not attend the Friday Live celebration of video game play and performance at the V&A, where, he says, players get to envisage games in a different way, placed between renaissance paintings and baroque silverware.

“Veteran event curator and game designer V Buckenham, who was involved in the evening’s Car Boot Casino installation – a collection of new card-based bluffing games – sees these spaces as a virtuous circle: players get to envisage games in a different way, while non-gamers may have their expectations about the medium challenged, and developers get a lot out of it too: ‘There’s an inherent excitement in running your stupid game about sausages next to a hand-carved mantelpiece that’s hundreds of years old. Or improvising algorave music and visuals under a Chihuly [sculpture].’”

Read more here: Keith Stuart, The Guardian – Pixels and paintings: video games return to the V&A

At the second attempt it looks like Eurovision is finally going to expand into Asia, with Bangkok hosting the inaugural, and slightly clumsily titled, Eurovision song contest Asia in November.

From the life comes at you fast files: the official Paul McCartney Reddit account appeared to have been temporarily banned from the Paul McCartney subreddit, which was how I found out Paul McCartney even had a Reddit presence.

I’ve written a lot already about the recently rediscovered missing episodes of Doctor Who – and now they have been published on iPlayer for everybody in the UK to enjoy, I have written my Guardian episode-by-episode recap of them.

My contributions to the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter this week were:

·  Tuesday briefing: How to make sense of England’s local elections campaigns
·  Friday briefing: Why does your Easter egg feel smaller? Because it is

Friday Reading is a (usually) weekly series of recommended reads from Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things found on the internet. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive it by email.