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.

I dropped in to Tones & Drones at Trades Hall, Walthamstow on 5 March and caught a bit of Sami Fitz with Arconic, plus projections from 2digitvisuals, which was an improvised mix of vocals, gong and pad synth and felt weirdly a bit more like stumbling into a yoga retreat than being at a gig.

Next up was a night of comedy at Union Chapel, Islington on 7 March compered by Maisie Adam and featuring Dylan Moran, Fin Taylor, Alana Jackson and Michael Odewale. The most inadvertently funny moment of the night though wasn’t on stage, but Maisie asking two guys in the audience how they’d met, and one of them deadpan replying “I fucked his sister.”

Well’ard, Capital Salvage present at Trades Hall, Walthamstow, 8 Mar – Very fun young punks who threw in a Chappell Roan cover and a pulsing bass-driven cover of Barrett Strong’s Money.

The Charlemagnes, Capital Salvage present at Trades Hall, Walthamstow, 8 Mar – This was pleasant enough power pop, but I must admit I was distracted as I had managed to book to do all the things that day which included then dashing to the pub to watch Leeds set up an FA Cup quarter-final with West Ham after beating Norwich (so missing the headline act Spoilers), and then heading off to see Red Sonja at Bar Trash.

Capital Salvage is DIY/not for profit gig promotions from East London, “bringing new and old noises to Sunday afternoon all ages matinee shows”.

Disco 2000, Trades Hall, Walthamstow, 21 Mar – The night where I discovered that my partner is happy to dance along to Suede b-sides she doesn’t know, but I am prissy about being on the dance floor for anything I don’t know every single word for, even if it is one of her favourite songs. Ooops.

Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s, Design Museum, Kensington, 25 Mar – I wanted to go to this exhibition before it shut, and I was glad I did, but it was quite slight for the money. The actual recreation of the Blitz with a video wall playing the kind of music Rusty Egan would have DJ’d was neat though, as well as some of the examples of contemporary magazines on display. Good, but not £18 good.

Spirited Followers, Windmill, Brixton, 25 Mar – Had a bit of a Greek/Lebanese flavour to it as it ebbed and flowed into a huge climax, reminded me a bit of Her Name Is Calla blended with Swans.

What Jen Wants, at Windmill, Brixton, 25 Mar – Really solid shoe-gazy vibe

Jen Brister, Big Penny Social, Walthamstow, 26 Mar – Brister was the headliner here, with a long and sometimes screamingly angry rant about menopause, men and relationships. Before then we’d had Rajiv Karia‘s wry observations about being one of very view people of colour in the room, and by virtue of sitting in the front row I got roasted first by compere Jamie Allerton and then at some length by Jordan Brookes, who was definitely my pick of the night.

You can browse the full archive of one-line gig reviews here – a slowly expanding record of loud rooms, old favourites, questionable nostalgia traps but mostly excellent life decisions – even if not all of them panned out this month.

Last time out I wrote about the Umlauts, and a gloriously 90s-and-early-2000s-loaded run of Maxïmo Park, Kaiser Chiefs and Suede x 2 (pictured below).

If you’d like these sent to you without relying on algorithms you can subscribe by email here.

This is a bumper month – I saw a lot of cinema – featuring: a brilliant silent film built entirely from archive train footage, a promising AI nightmare that spectacularly lost its way, giant fuck off radioactive ants and a gloriously entertaining undead crime romp (alongside multiple Bar Trash screenings reminding me that cinema is still best enjoyed slightly drunk in a room full of queer chaos).

The Zodiac Killer (1971), Tom Hanson – Bar Trash at Beer Merchant’s Tap, Hackney Wick – I went into this with very low expectations, after all, it is a curio made on a tiny budget with the express intention of luring the real Zodiac Killer to a theatre in San Francisco in the hope of catching them. Despite being absolutely littered with grim casual misogyny, it was very watchable.

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.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2025), Gore Verbinski – I really enjoyed the first two-thirds of this, like a Black Mirror episode about phones and school shootings and AI etc on the big ol’ silver screen, but then it had an incredibly janky CGI-laden final third that left me quite disappointed.

Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare (2026), James Jones – Incredible archive footage and present day interviews, and like everything I later found out about Chernobyl, it turns out it was bad but somehow as a planet we really dodged a bullet with a mix of people willing to sacrifice themselves and some luck.

Do You Love Me (2025), Lana Daher – This was like a fever dream collage working through 70 years of archival footage of Lebanon and Beirut which simultaneously made me want to visit the country and shows why nothing ever lasts there. Huge plaudits due not just to director Lana Daher but also editor and co-writer Qutaiba Barhamji.

Red Sonja (1985), Richard Fleischer – Bar Trash at Finsbury Park Picturehouse – A swords-and-sorcery type affair with a scantily clad young Brigitte Nielsen and every now and then Arnold Schwarzenegger would pop up to do something she wasn’t quite strong enough to do, as a character who was definitely Conan the Barbarian although everybody was careful not to mention that due to rights issues. Huge kudos to Ernie Reyes Jr who played the annoying brat character of Prince Tarn so well that I wanted to punch the little prick every time he was on the screen.

Empire of the Ants (1977), Bert I Gordon – Bar Trash at Genesis Cinema, Bethnal Green – This is generally regarded as the nadir of Joan Collins’ career but it was incredibly entertaining, like a Poseidon Adventure or Towering Inferno disaster movie set-up but with *checks notes* giant fucking radioactive ants. You know how sometimes movies say “no animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture”? Well, there was an establishing shot of some ants walking around licking what looked to be mercury posing as radioactive waste, and I immediately figured that a lot of ants got harmed in the making of this particular picture.

The Bride! (2026), Maggie Gyllenhaal – A hugely entertaining and sexy crime caper romp, but with additional cursed undead. I really enjoyed the production design and the performances, great fun.

Muppets from Space (1999), Tim Hill – A fairly innocuous entry into the Muppets canon, probably the highlight for me being prominent roles for two of my favourite latter-day additions to the gang: Pepe the King Prawn and Bobo the Bear.

Still with me? Yes, it is a lot. You’re roughly halfway through. If you’d like these reviews – plus my weekly Friday Reading round-up of things worth your time on the internet – sent straight to your inbox, you can sign up here.

Satan War (1979), Bart La Rue and The Burning Hell (1974), Ron Ormond – Bar Trash at Beer Merchant’s Tap, Hackney Wick – Satan War was undoubtedly badly written, badly acted, and barely lit, but nevertheless was entertainingly creepy and rather sincere in the story it was trying to tell, and had an absolutely brilliant minimalist eerie synth score leading to the caption [OMINOUS SYNTH MUSIC CONTINUES] appearing more often than any other dialogue

[Picture caption: Sally Schermerhorn in Satan War]

The Burning Hell, on the other hand, was batshit crazy, full of Biblical vignettes with all the characters being played by southern-drawled Jesus freaks, while some middle-aged white preachers were desperately contorting words from the Bible to “prove” that you were going to hell and be burned and have your face eaten by worms for billions of billions of years unless you have repented of your sins and turned to Jesus, which always, I dunno, seems a bit harsh on some random baby who dies of starvation aged five months. It’s the worms for you, m’laddie!

[Picture caption: Well this is awkward]

Sound of Falling (2025), Mascha Schilinski – I nearly went to see this on three separate occasions and each time baulked at the running length. Two hours and thirty-five minutes? Come on, get real.

Scarlet (2025), Mamoru Hosoda – An initially intriguing remix of Hamlet and Japanese afterlife mythology, plus one random modern-day dude, but I grew weary of this in the end and just didn’t warm to Scarlet enough to care if she was eventually going to get her revenge. Included a curious decision to have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern apparently based on Jedward.

Limbo (1999), Tina Krause and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), Nathan Juran – Bar Trash at Genesis Cinema, Bethnal Green – A very strange double bill. Limbo came across like an unfinished student art project with very little discernible plot, and then Allison Hayes is a hottie but it is very much Cameo of the 50 Foot Woman because we barely see her in her embiggened state at all.

The Testament of Ann Lee (2025), Mona Fastvold – I loved the music and choreography and the vibe of this, but much preferred the erotically-charged first act before, frankly, Ann Lee turned into a kind of over-sincere religious killjoy because she was fed up of getting knocked up by her husband and appeared to have grown weary of a little gentle 18th century spiritual BDSM.

Pociagi (Trains) (2024), Maciej J Drygas – One of the best things I’ve seen in ages – no narrative, no voiceover, just 80 minutes of found archive footage of railways from Europe in the early 20th century that somehow managed to tell the social history of a continent. I’ve written more about my thoughts on this movie here.

Dead Man’s Wire (2025), Gus Van Sant – I knew nothing about the true events this film was based on so didn’t know which way it would turn and really enjoyed it – Bill Skarsgård is particularly good as the twitchy neurotic main protagonist. I am tempted to watch the doco Dead Man’s Line which has all the original footage in it too now.

967-Evil (1985), Robert Englund – Bar Trash at Finsbury Park Picturehouse – Featuring a “Oooooh that’s the hologram Doctor off Star Trek!” cameo and an extremely camp rich performance by Stephen Geoffreys in the lead role, but the absolute star was an unhinged performance by Sandy Dennis as ultra-conservative batshit religious Aunt Lucy (pictured below).

Broken English (2025), Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard – She’s such a fascinating artist and character, and was so genuine in this as bits of her life were replayed to her in her frailer final years – some of her observations/barbs were proper LOL moments – but it had the slightly odd conceit of being an “investigation” by the Tilda Swinton-led “Ministry of Not Forgotting”, and I’d have maybe preferred them to have let the archive footage shine a bit more.

Two Prosecutors (2025), Sergei Loznitsa – I wanted to see this as I was obsessed with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. It brilliantly evokes a suffocating feeling of being trapped in a Stalinist tyranny with its glacial pacing, endless shots of corridors, doors being locked and unlocked, waiting rooms, personal paperwork checks and lengthy pregnant pauses.

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 wrote about the acoustic folk horror of Rabbit Trap, Rose Byrne – who got ROBBED of an Oscar – in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, music-themed cinema experiences from Paul McCartney, Elvis and Charli XCX, plus an unhinged 4D Bar Trash screening of Plan 9 from Outer Space.

If you’d like these posts by email, without relying on whatever algorithms decide you should see, you can subscribe 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 I’ve read 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.

Mic Wright is scathing here on the exposure that Matt Goodwin’s new so-called book has happily regurgitated hallucinated references from ChatGPT without fact-checking getting a look in at all.

“Putting aside the intellectual dishonesty that runs through Goodwin’s work, like the message in a peculiarly poisonous stick of Blackpool rock, there’s a wider danger from this kind of book. Those fabricated quotes will enter the information stream and, when generative AI gobbles them up, will end up being treated as real.”

Read more here: Mic Wright, Byline Times – MattGPT: The Sorry Tale of Matt Goodwin’s AI-Assisted, Fake-Quote-Filled New Book

I have moaned many many times that if the people planning and building HS2 had been the people planning and building the west coast mainline, it would never have got finished because there would have been some spurious calculation suggesting the stretch around Carlisle would never be profitable and you can get to Glasgow from Edinburgh anyway. I was very much struck by this quote from HS2 chief executive Mark Wild in an article that suggests the top speed of the trains is going to be capped lower to save money:

Speed has never been the primary objective. This railway will deliver better journeys, more capacity on the network, and economic growth – all of which are vital to the country’s future prosperity.

The problem, of course, is that the whole project was very much sold to the public on the idea it would make the London-Birmingham journey faster. This 2020 essay by Alex Hern arguing that the promise of speed with both HS2 and 5G was a ludicrous mis-selling has long lived with me.

“Both [HS2 and 5G] are massive infrastructure projects, which won’t pay off til years after work begins, and require the co-operation of government and industry at the highest levels. Both, too, were basically far too far along by the time the public started paying attention to them for them to ever really be substantially tweaked. And both have absolutely fucked up their public messaging by focusing on speed.

Speed is nice for marketing folk. It’s sexy, it’s obvious, it’s cool. Even if it’s just a fast train, the ability to say that that train is faster than the previous one is an obvious sell. And so it’s no surprise that, if you look at the messaging for both 5G and HS2, you’ll see speed front and centre. I mean, it’s literally in the name of HS2.

But the problem is that in both cases, speed is effectively tangential to the real reason for the infrastructure build-out, which is capacity.”

Read more here: Alex Hern, The World Is Yours* – HS5G2

“The war is a video game, a spectator sport, a social media festival of dunking” is Nesrine Malik’s verdict on how Trump’s AI, memes and a simplistic narrative have flattened the conflict in Iran.

This is far too long from Wayne Horkan on the rise of the age-gated internet but his core point resonated with me:

“Governments around the world are introducing age-verification and youth social-media laws, but these policies may be doing far more than protecting children. They are quietly pushing identity into operating systems, app stores, and the core infrastructure of the internet, shifting governance down the stack and creating new enforcement chokepoints. Along the way, they reshape platform power, favour large incumbents.”

Read more here: Wayne Horkan, Horkan – The age-gated internet: child safety, identity infrastructure, and the not so quiet re-architecting of the web

Former colleague Hannah Ray has a new book out, and has written about what moved her to write about motherhood.

“Everyone else seemed to go on in the pretence. Like it’s not about creating new life, and being an animal, and the blood, and guts, and the raw close-to-death experience of it all. I saw motherhood as slippery as the slime you see kids playing with. Society was asking me to hide this gloop into neat, sanitised boxes. But it kept spilling out. My preconceptions of writing about motherhood were just as dripped in the patriarchy as most of my pre-parenthood ideals. I saw the subject matter as weak because I’d been trained into thinking women move into weakness when they shape-shift into mothers.”

Read more here: Hannah Ray, Tell Their Stories – Mother, Inc. — my new book — is available now

The Guardian’s media editor Michael Savage sadly neglected to add “What the hell is going on with Doctor Who?” into this otherwise very useful list of six urgent issues for BBC’s new boss, Matt Brittin.

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: Security scrapes, sordid statues and feral ferrets.

Questioning man illustration: Anaïs Mims. Guest animal: Mr Foxy of Walthamstow

This is a rather cute conceit, as Huck magazine’s Ella Glossop visits and photographs some of the increasingly diminishing number of newsagents who still stock big ranges of print magazines.

Fotohane Darkroom is a space for the children of Mardin – a Turkish city that borders Syria and Iraq – to learn how to shoot, develop, and print their own analogue photographs, giving them the chance to tell their stories themselves, Flora Medina reports for i-D magazine.

“When political strife, international conflict, and forced migration take hold, pause becomes even more powerful. It’s a strength that Amar Kılıç and Serbest Salih felt firsthand living in Mardin, Turkey. The city has migration woven into its existence. It sits on the border of Syria and Iraq—two places affected by heavy military presence, largely at the hands of the US government, driving out many native residents. They wanted to make a space for the children of the city to connect with each other and express themselves creatively, and so founded Fotohane Darkroom.”

Read more here: Flora Medina, i-D magazine – A city of borders, seen through a child’s lens

Among other things I discovered in this Catherine Slessor piece about Henry Moore’s house, Hoglands, is that his statues were so controversial at the time some got vandalised.

A series that never disappoints, this week’s pet I’ll never forget is Harriet the hedgehog, who took to living in Roger Leitch’s airing cupboard.

Keith Stuart is always very readable doing the Pushing Buttons newsletter, and here outlines a new passion for a new way of spending his money on fragile video-game nostalgia.

“And as the game industry has been terrible at archiving its own history, anyone who buys and looks after these fragile objects, is performing an act of vital preservation and curation. You may find many of these video demos and cartoons on YouTube, but always, always, the primary artefact itself – its packaging, its smell, its quirks, its frailties – is part of the experience of understanding and appreciating history. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.”

Read more here: Keith Stuart, Pushing Buttons – My ​quest to ​preserve VHS-​era ​gaming ​culture​, one eBay bid at a time

I am of an age where online shooters are just a hiding to nothing due to the reaction time and dedication of the younglings, but I remain interested in the ecosystem, which seems increasingly unsustainable.

“Highguard’s implosion was swift. According to Bloomberg, 90% of the game’s players had abandoned it a week later. After a month, developer Wildlight Entertainment announced that it would end service on 12 March, after fewer than 50 days online. As you read this, it is already too late. Highguard is gone, and the 2 million players Wildlight says logged on to the game could not come back if they wanted to. Two million players. And yet this game is a flop.”

Read more here: Joshua Rivera, The Guardian – In the killer world of online gaming, there are no hits any more – just survivors

I was bewitched last week by Trains (2024, dir Maciej Drygas) and so ended up writing a little mini-essay about it:

“The premise of Trains is simple: archive footage, no narration, tracing trains across the 20th century from pre-first world war through to the aftermath of the second. In doing so, it manages to tell an extraordinary social history without ever needing words.”

Read more here: Martin Belam, martinbelam.com – Thoughts on … Trains (2024) – Maciej Drygas

One of those lovely olden-times quirky football stories about the English manager who took Sweden to the 1958 World Cup final and then the only job he could get back home was with non-league Skegness Town.

Tonight’s friendly with England brings the hugely popular Elland Road legend Marcelo Bielsa back to England four years after leaving Leeds United. Jonathan Wilson analyses his Uruguay tenure as Bielsa heads towards his third World Cup.

Billy Bragg and Rosa Walton of the experimental pop duo Let’s Eat Grandma are among those delivering 10 expert tips on how to become more musical.

My contributions to the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter this week were:
·  Monday briefing: What a new Guardian podcast reveals about the US justice system
·  Wednesday briefing: Can Sarah Mullally steer the Church of England back into safer waters?
·  Friday briefing: Can the left mobilise itself to outmarch the momentum of the far right?

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.

One of my favourite things I’ve watched in recent years is From the Sea to the Land Beyond, directed by Penny Woolcock and with a soundtrack by Sea Power. Pociagi [Trains] (2024) from Maciej Drygas is in a similar vein – and one of the best things I’ve seen on the big screen for ages.

The premise of Trains is simple: archive footage, no narration, tracing trains across the 20th century from pre-first world war through to the aftermath of the second. In doing so, it manages to tell an extraordinary social history without ever needing words.

Watching material like this – as I was the other day watching the fictionalised versions of The Testament of Ann Lee and Train Dreams back in December – you are struck by how hard life looks in the past: how much depended on manual labour, and how much risk people simply had to accept. Trains opens with sequences of locomotives being built: hot metal, close work, no gloves or face protection, workers standing in positions where the slightest misjudgement could be fatal. Anyone complaining that “elf’n’safety” is strangling productivity should probably spend a few minutes with those clips and decide whether they really want to go back to those days.

The wars effectively bookend the film. For 1914–18, there are astonishing scenes of soldiers being waved off in a spirit of glory, followed by the grim reality of hospital trains bringing the wounded home. There are artillery trains too – vast guns mounted on rails – which only really underline how imprecise and unwieldy that kind of warfare could be.

The second world war footage is even more harrowing. Women scramble over relief packages being thrown from trains; Nazi officers lounge in comfort between destinations; children press flowers into Hitler’s hands as his train tour passes through crowds of adoration. There are scenes of people being herded into wagons bound for the camps, and of emaciated bodies that did not survive the journey.

But trains are not solely instruments of horror here. There is also evacuation – children being sent away from cities under threat – and the fragile relief of Holocaust survivors being transported away from the camps at the war’s end.

In between all of that, there is everyday life: frustrated commuters, seaside trips, luxury travel, the quiet infrastructure of mail delivery. A whole continent moving, for better and worse.

One of the things I particularly loved is how it echoes something I’ve seen live: 1990s Kraftwerk shows would accompany Trans-Europe Express / Metall auf Metall / Abzug with archive railway footage. The later 3D shows replaced that with digital renderings – still beautiful, but different. There was something quietly wonderful about sitting through 80 minutes of real metal on metal as compiled by Drygas.

[Picture caption: Kraftwerk playing Trans Europe Express in 1992 with real train footage]

[Picture caption: Kraftwerk’s digital TEE train]

Most of all, though, director Drygas and editor Rafał Listopad have done an extraordinary job in sourcing and restoring this material. From postwar Berlin to holidaymakers heading out from Knotty Ash, the footage feels both intimate and vast. This will be an absolutely certain Blu-ray purchase and rewatch for me.

If you have even a passing interest in history, cinema, or trains, it’s hard to imagine not being completely absorbed by it.

Thoughts on … is an occasional series where I write in greater depth about specific pieces of film, television and music. If you’d like to get these sent to you by email, you can sign up 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 I’ve read 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.

I absolutely loved this takedown by Jason Koebler of Mark Zuckerberg’s creepy crappy metaverse, dripping with invective and “I told you so”.

Zuckerberg’s bold vision of the metaverse was a place where T-Pain would sell NFTs of imaginary sneakers at concerts attended by people sitting silently in their living rooms with computers strapped to their face. The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.

Read more here: Jason Koebler, 404 Media – RIP Metaverse, an $80bn dumpster fire nobody wanted. Who could have possibly predicted this, besides everyone?

ALSO FROM THE WHO COULD SEE THIS COMING FILES: The Observer offers voluntary redundancy to all staff. Myself and my NUJ colleagues went on strike in order to try and prevent the sale of the paper, or at least secure better terms and conditions for the staff being forced out of the business.

The Observer has offered its entire workforce voluntary redundancy as the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper grapples for direction following its sale by The Guardian. The Telegraph has learned that the weekly title has offered voluntary redundancy to all 140 staff, with bosses warning that the cuts could become compulsory. Journalists staged a four-day strike in 2024 over plans to hand the title to Tortoise, a loss-making start-up founded by James Harding, the former head of BBC News.

Read more here: James Warrington, The Telegraph – The Observer offers voluntary redundancy to all staff

Google has dropped a new artificial intelligence search feature that gave users crowdsourced health advice from amateurs around the world. How do these things ever get off the drawing board, let alone get launched?

Grammarly has disabled a controversial AI feature that imitated the style of prominent writers and academics, and is facing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit from those whose identities were used without consent. I ask again … how do these things ever get off the drawing board, let alone get launched?

Emerging evidence indicates that agential AI might validate or amplify delusional or grandiose content, particularly in users already vulnerable to psychosis, although it is not clear whether these interactions can result in the emergence of de novo psychosis in the absence of pre-existing vulnerability.

There’s a lot of big words there, but this doesn’t sound great, does it? New study raises concerns about AI chatbots fueling delusional thinking.

Norway has at least taken a stand against the whole of the internet being subjected to enshittification with a funny campaign video showing a bloke making real world things slightly worse through deliberate product decisions.

It sounds like the opening of a sci-fi film, but US scientists recently uploaded a copy of the brain of a living fly into a simulation. In San Francisco, biotechnology company Eon Systems created a virtual insect that knew how to walk, fly, groom and feed in its virtual environment. Researchers in Australia, meanwhile, have taught a petri dish containing 200,000 human brain cells to play the iconic 90s shooter Doom. One experiment has pushed a brain into a computer; the other has plugged a computer into brain cells. Both stories have been hailed as scientific breakthroughs, but have also sparked inevitable fears about the prospects of lab-grown humans and digital clones. Should we be concerned?

I have watched a lot of sci-fi b-movies, and so my hunch would be “Should we be concerned?” “Yep.”

Read more here: Rich Pelley, The Guardian – A petri dish of human brain cells is currently playing Doom. Should we be worried?

Nat Guest gloriously declares she has always been “the primary subject of my own study” in this post detailing immense sensory overload and how it makes everyday interactions unbearable for her.

The body has more senses than the Big Five, and you can have sensitivities or processing abnormalities across what I think of as the “Dark Senses” too. These hidden senses include: vestibular – your balance and coordination; interoception – your awareness of internal and autonomic processes, such as your heartbeat; proprioception – your awareness of the body’s position relative to the space around it.

To these more hidden Dark Senses I would add a sense of bodily integrity: the feeling of your physical and psychological edges and borders, a hyper-awareness of intrusion, a drive to remain whole and autonomous. The feeling of where you end and the world begins. I don’t know if there is a word for this sense, but senses can exist without words, and for a long time do.

Read more here: Nat Guest, Nothing but a Wordbag – Bad Wiring: A Non-Exhaustive Catalogue of Sensory Malfunctions

“The woman filmed without her consent sees none of that” is just one of the many depressing sentences in this piece looking at the revenue-making potential of “creepshots in motion” aka social media nightlife videos that focus on young women.

I used to love seeing hedgehogs in our garden in the 1970s and 1980s in London, and miss the little critters. Emma Beddington urges us to create hedgehog havens and suggests seven other ways to help our prickly friends

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: weird particles, Welsh conquests and web issues.

Golfing illustration: Anaïs Mims.

Guest animal: Blue

This is just a lovely interview with Peter Purves about last week, when he was surprised by being taken to a screening of two of the Doctor Who episodes he worked on that haven’t been seen since 1965 and have been recovered in something, frankly, of a miracle.

Mind you the fact that the lovely people at Film is Fabulous, who secured the episodes, had to put out A statement on Doctor Who in which they had to say basically, no we don’t have a stash of episodes we are holding back, no they aren’t for sale, no we aren’t going to reveal personal details of the person who had them, no we aren’t an archive, no we aren’t on a mission to find missing Doctor Who. This line in particular is grim, and reflects that in some quarters anger has been directed that they weren’t handed in earlier:

The deceased collector curated his films with great care, but did not necessarily appreciate the importance of each print, or their archival status. Indeed, he had no knowledge of, or interest in, Doctor Who. The original 16mm prints of the recovered episodes, with the restored digital scans, will be returned to the BBC Archives.

Sarah Michelle Gellar says there will be no Buffy The Vampire Slayer reboot. Booooooooo. Mind you, presumably the fandom would have hated it from the get-go, as we will no doubt see with Blake’s 7 in due course.

This is a really interesting point about how differently people think and work from Cassie Werber about how re-writing her second novel after editor’s notes needed to be a visceral project of physically committing things to paper.

“For a month and a half, which felt like several years, I ground along taking it step-by-step. I re-read the long email of notes I’d been sent, then wrote them out by hand. This sounds insane, but I was trying to absorb them, to understand every word and get them inside me. I wrote notes on what I planned to do, first in my notebook and then, because I was writing so much, on sheet after sheet of A4. I thought I’d study them all closely in the weeks to come. I didn’t; it was just the work of thinking, and for me that often has to be a physical thing.”

Read more here: Cassie Werber, Fierce Seasons – Re-writing my book for the third time

I’ve mentioned before that suddenly becoming interested in birds and bird-watching appears to be a universal manifestation of middle-age, but these portraits of birds against incredible wallpaper backgrounds by Claire Rosen are sensational.

I really enjoyed this extract from Alexander Hacke’s new book in the Quietus, about him discovering music at a very formative stage in a record store called Zensor, which seems to have done for him what Ugly Child did for me.

“Nonetheless it was the myriad of utterly obscure releases, often on 7-inch vinyl, that lay the foundations of my musical development and strengthened my view that music should not be produced by an elite for the faceless masses. On the contrary: the more personal and bizarre a release was, the more respect it would earn from me and likeminded music devotees. Especially productions that were clearly made on a limited or practically non-existent budget were held in very high regard. The more extreme the musical content was, the bigger the likelihood it would find extremely strong support.”

Read more here: Alexander Hacke, The Quietus – A Cave of Wonders: Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten on the Record Shop that Made Him

This post has some great 1983 photographs of Zensor, the shop Hacke was talking about.

But this is a real shame, the British Record Shop Archive website has been replaced by a holding page that just says “Due to unforseen circumstances, the BRSA website is on hiatus for the foreseeable future.”

I really hate it when bits of the web disappear, as I wrote about here when Ray Dickenson’s lovingly hand-built and intense conspiracy theory website perceptions.couk.com vanished.

I know that Brian Clough is generally regarded as an absolute hero, but he could also be a right cunt, such as calling Justin Fashanu – one of very few male professional footballers to ever come out as gay – “a bloody poof”. That is mentioned in this incredibly moving Donald McRae interview with Tony Powell, who was a teammate of Fashanu for a while, and also gay.

I grew up reading 2000AD and it should all be jetbacks, flying cars and droids by now. However, it does seem like London genuinely is on the verge of getting self-driving cabs. Steve Rose investigates.

I was pretty underwhelmed by Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet, which retells the story of Hamlet with a female lead and melds into Japanese mythology of the afterlife. Nick Chen interviews the legendary anime director, who talks up the creative process in a way which makes me wish I’d liked it more.

My contributions to the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter this week were:
·  Monday briefing: Why Britain is becoming less charitable – and what it means for those that need it most
·  Friday briefing: What the Covid inquiry reveals about the NHS – and why it should worry us

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.

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 I’ve read 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 pope has come out against priests using artificial intelligence to write their sermons, but in this opinion piece Margaret Sullivan suggests that journalists may have to learn to live with it.

At Columbia University’s journalism school, a research fellow and I explored the question of how America’s newsrooms were responding to AI. Trying to determine that was like nailing jello to a wall, because the practices – and the thinking about them – were changing at such a rapid pace. Standards-and-practices editors were thoughtfully putting out guidelines to journalists only to find that the technology was outpacing their rulemaking. Publishers and business-side people may have one idea, and old-school journalists quite another. But there’s no denying the impact of AI or its omnipresence.

Read more here: Margaret Sullivan, the Guardian – From scripts to sermons: is AI going to be writing everything soon?

Tom Hewitson wrote on what he learned teaching thousands of people how to use AI and this quote stood out for me:

The biggest predictor of success isn’t technical ability. It’s whether someone treats AI as a skill to be learned rather than a magic box that either works or doesn’t. The people best at using it are the ones who experiment daily and reflect on how to get better results next time. The goal is to get the machines to work for us, not to think for us – that means using it in a proactive, critical and engaged way.

Read more here: Tom Hewitson, the Guardian – I’ve taught thousands of people how to use AI – here’s what I’ve learned

I found producing today’s First Edition about the 30th anniversary of the shooting at Dunblane primary school deeply moving, which is exactly why chatbots helping researchers plot deadly attacks, wishing them ‘Happy (and safe) shooting!’ is so disheartening. These products have really been released into the wild without safeguards, haven’t they?

Meanwhile over at Amazon:

More than a half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity. They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard way while also tracking their AI use, and they’re worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements. All of this, they said, is demoralizing. The Guardian granted these workers anonymity because of their fear of professional repercussions.

Read more here: Varsha Bansal, the Guardian – Amazon is determined to use AI for everything – even when it slows down work

I’ve added “regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me” to the opening blurb of Friday Reading because that is what I am trying to do, re-introduce a bit of the slow internet to my world. Polly Hudson sums up why here: I clicked on an Instagram post about a happy dog – and opened a hellish portal:

The lengthy caption on Fido’s joyful, tail-waggy photo unfortunately revealed that he’d just crossed the rainbow bridge. This information was not delivered succinctly, though, meaning I lingered long enough to inform Mark Zuckerberg that this was very much my jam.

Photos of happy couples began to pop up, people I didn’t know or even recognise, which made me curious as to why I was being shown them. Again and again, like a lab rat in an experiment failing to cotton on despite the electric shocks, I read the accompanying words, only to discover one of them was announcing the sad passing of the other.

Read more here: Polly Hudson, the Guardian – I clicked on an Instagram post about a happy dog – and opened a hellish portal

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: snarky memoirs, stylish spaniels and a debut to forget.

Wriggly worm of knowledge and the carp of ignorance illustration: Anaïs Mims.

Guest animal: the random cat that keeps stalking the Thursday quiz and following it home.

The lovely Film is Fabulous folks published this interview with legendary BBC archivist Sue Malden who was the first person to start attempting to locate and catalogue Doctor Who episodes, and the person who first realised so many were missing from the archives.

That interview felt very deliberately timed as only a couple of days later HOLY MOLY THEY FOUND TWO LOST DR WHO EPISODES – both from the early part of William Hartnell story The Daleks’ Master Plan, which I’ve barely ever even read a synopsis of, so it will be like having a brand new story for me when they land on iPlayer next month.

The vast number of overseas human remains held by UK museums is a shameful legacy of colonialism, with many items kept in ways that are sacrilegious, according to MPs and archaeologists.

“We want to at least be able to give them their names back,” says Interpol’s Susan Hitchin, in this harrowing read about the team identifying Europe’s forgotten female murder victims.

I’m inventing a world full of made-up people, who change and shape-shift and disappear and are sometimes reborn; who say stupid things, and then better things, and then lines of pure genius I can’t believe I wrote, and then nothing because they get cut.

Writer Cassie Werber has a new Substack – Fierce Seasons – which she says will feature “thoughts on writing … what makes me happy—like reading, books, and swimming — and what makes me angry or sad.”

For Monocle, Rory Jones and Annelise Maynard have a delightful amble visiting 10 of London’s loveliest book shops with gorgeous accompanying photos.

Have a nostalgic wander through some of the hits and misses of Apple‘s product line over the years with this Chris Stokel-Walker list. Oh iPod, I miss you.

Alexis Petridis is rather underwhelmed by the UK’s Eurovision entry. Judge for yourself by watching the video here: LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER: Eins, Zwei, Drei

I mean, you obviously would have imagined that Diane Morgan’s music taste was impeccable. Here she namechecks The Container Drivers by the Fall as a key tune in her honest playlist.

Nicolaia Rips interviews Grace Ives, whose latest single – Stupid Bitches – has been an earworm for me.

Epic Soundtracks used to be a customer at Reckless Records when I worked there before his untimely death. Michael Hann interviews surviving Swell Maps original Jowe Head about the “serious fun” of being in the very obscure but hugely influential band.

My beloved veteran art-pop brothers Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks are as eloquent as ever in this interview with Forbes magazine as they prepare to do live shows in Japan and the UK supporting their 26th(!) studio album.

I mentioned last week that Keza MacDonald’s favourable review of Poktopia and the prospect of getting Pokémon LeafGreen had finally nudged me into getting a Nintendo Switch 2. Sadly, Nintendo have screwed up the transaction and delivery, and joyously are currently experiencing “technical issues” with their support system which appear to boil down to “customers cannot phone us or email us”. That seems a bit of a rum do for a digital entertainment company in the year of our lord 2026.

I was sorry to see Martin Ling departing from Leyton Orient. He has been our director of football since the club was rescued from cunto that Italian guy in 2017, and taken us to two promotions and two (inevitably) losing appearances at Wembley in the FA Trophy and League One play-off finals. A top man, who also led the club to a promotion as manager back in the day, and has been very open and honest about his mental health struggles. I wish him all the best. It has been a torrid last few months at the club but he will always be a legend. Here is Martin Ling talking about mental health in 2019, in the wake of the tragic sudden loss of Justin Edinburgh.

How I look at it is I have some wires loose in my head and some mornings I have to put them back together a little bit. When I used to say I was strong it would be to deflect people away from really getting into me. Suppress, suppress, suppress. Then I had a mental breakdown. Now I am happy for people to talk about me or to me. I know I can cope. I know I can be there for the people who matter to me.

Then I went to see Leyton Orient away on a Tuesday night and remembered why I love away games on a Tuesday night as we won 2-1.

Iran will, under Fifa’s statutes, face disciplinary action if they withdraw unilaterally, with possible sanctions including a ban from future tournaments.

This is frankly fucked up in response to Iran’s sports minister says football team will not play at 2026 World Cup – imagine Ukraine being punished for pulling out if they had qualified but it was being hosted in Russia?

In scenes that commentators will tell you that nobody wants to see – but which everybody very much enjoys seeing – this is a video of one of the craziest, longest mass brawls I’ve ever seen in a football match. Cruzeiro and Atlético Mineiro eventually picked up 23 red cards between them for this dust-up.

“A Tottenham relegation may just rank as the single most spectacular failure in the history of English football,” writes Jonathan Liew in this excoriation of how the club has been run. It would also, it must be said, be really fucking funny.

My contributions to the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter this week were:
·  Monday briefing: How are Iranians abroad grappling with loss and uncertainty from afar?
·  Tuesday briefing: Inside the increasingly heated debate about who can – and can’t – vote in the UK
·  Wednesday briefing: From missing billions to nonexistent datacentres, inside Britain’s AI drive
·  Friday briefing: The legacy of the Dunblane massacre, 30 years on

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.

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 I’ve read 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.

I am very excited to be getting a new entry in the main Pokémon line. Keza MacDonald, however, seems to have Pokémon fatigue.

“The advert for that Pokémon Lego features a bored, tired-looking elder millennial guy in a grey suit glumly rifling through bills and invoices before donning a trainer’s cap and an expression of wonder and joining his friends outside. ‘Your time has come! And destiny doesn’t care about lower back pain!’ the ad says. AAAARGH! It’s so humiliatingly transparent! I feel both patronised and called out. Pokémon Go away.”

Keza has given Pokopia a rave review though, which has finally nudged me to get a Switch 2.

This is long – Teacher v chatbot: my journey into the classroom in the age of AI – and a topic I am preoccupied with, for journalism, not the classroom. Is AI filling the internet with slop? Yes. Is using tools at least labelled as “AI” an important part of my workflow now? Also yes. Peter C Baker writes:

“Throwing AI into the mix felt like downing a coffee in the middle of a panic attack. I started frantically seeking out perspectives on AI and the English classroom wherever I could find them: podcasts, Substacks, YouTube. My algorithmic feeds picked up on this interest and started catering to it, serving me an apparently endless supply of content – including endless advertising from tech companies – that promised to help me think through these urgent questions and ensure I did right by my students. I quickly learned that this was a world of heated, often acrimonious, debate.”

This self-exchange was illuminating:

Also me: “What if, after your AI-free reading and discussion, when students sat down to write, they each had access to an AI chatbot that could give them feedback tailored exactly to their existing comprehension level and learning style? What if you, the teacher, could train that chatbot, aligning its behaviour precisely to your goals for the assignment and the class overall?”

Me: “Well, that’s already my job – to give them personalised feedback.”

Also me: “But how much time do you have for that? Can you really intervene every single time it would be useful? What about when your students are writing at home? What about when it’s the night before an assignment is due and they’re off to a completely wrong start? Why wouldn’t you want them to know that?”

Talking of AI at work, the Guardian has updated its editorial code on the use of generative AI. It now says:

Generative AI is a broad label describing any type of artificial intelligence that uses unsupervised learning algorithms to create text, images, video, audio or code. The technology is rapidly becoming more sophisticated, integrated and accessible and can be responsibly used in many different ways. AI tools can be used, carefully and responsibly, as part of the creation of journalism. But the material created or adapted using generative AI can raise significant issues around bias, ownership, plagiarism and intellectual property rights. Most importantly for journalism, it is not reliable or consistent, and tends to introduce errors and inaccuracies in unpredictable ways. Guardian audiences are entitled to expect that work that appears under your byline has been authored by you. Journalists are always accountable for the journalism they create and the use of these tools requires absolute rigour and responsibility. Generative AI should only be used in line with the wider Editorial Code and the Guardian’s Generative AI principles. Gen AI can be used to enhance our journalists’ expertise but not replace it; active human oversight and control is essential. Any significant use of GenAI in a piece of journalism must be explicitly approved by the relevant senior duty editor and must be clearly signalled to the user, in line with our guidelines on transparency.

Ooooooft. Telegraph censured for story of fictional family’s struggle to pay school fees. There but for the grace of god etc etc …

Last year, after suggestions the whole article was generated by AI, the Press Gazette revealed it was written by a real journalist, based on a real telephone interview with a man who appears to have deceived the reporter and given them a fake name.

BUT ALSO the headline was “We earn £345k, but soaring private school fees mean we can’t go on five holidays”, LMAO, how did that not raise questions?

For Collegetown Magazine, Dylan Alphenaar takes a deep and disturbing dive into a mostly forgotten hostage-taking and shooting situation that unfolded at a college in Iowa in the 1980s.

It would be easier to write that as days became years and years became decades, friends and families of the victims overcame this senseless tragedy. That in the four decades since the killings, wounds have healed, and love, as our former president endorsed, has prevailed. The reality is different.

Read in full: Dylan Alphenaar in Collegetown Magazine – The Shooting of Two Cornell Freshmen, 42 Years Later.

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: Pokémon, a ‘Pastafarian’ and Cheggers plays population!.

As a Leeds United supporter it was disappointing seeing fans boo Manchester City players breaking fast for Ramadan, something that the ipaper’s chief football writer, Daniel Storey, says was “introduced in 2021” and “for most of the last five years, it has barely merited a mention because, well, it just happened”.

That quote was highlighted in Jason Okundaye’s piece about increasing intolerance of minorities in British society. He wrote:

“As a republican, I’m surprised to find that perhaps the most authoritative figure, in this light, has been King Charles, who used his Christmas speech to talk about the importance of unity in a divided world, and the importance of “simply getting to know our neighbours”. But it is sobering that Charles is the only figure I could conjure up – at a time when our politics is so depleted of moral authority and doing what is right for its own sake, that royals begin to sound like radicals for coming out with simple and elegant calls for compassion. Who’d have thunk it?”

I’m a big fan of “old man pubs”, where I can often be found in the corner on my laptop. Social media is giving them a new lease of life among younger visitors, as Tomé Morrissy-Swan discovers.

Ben Robertson writes for ESC Insight about the selection of Finland’s entry for Eurovision, which has served to show that the issue of Israeli participation in the contest is not going away any time soon.

“ The duo could have accepted the Eurovision invitation without further comment. They could also have chosen to take the statement and withdraw from the competition entirely. This middle ground, competing yet speaking out about Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest, might feel principled, but it risks being dismissed as cosmetic resistance by those critical. In the end, Parkkonen’s pivot that “this is about music, and we are here as artists” suggests the dilemma of ultimately wanting to be a pop star yet having to navigate the world’s toughest political decisions when others choose not to speak.”

“This is an issue that still drives media attention, with journalists seeking every opportunity to put opinions on the record. This is an issue that campaigners still protest about, working hard to keep it high up the agenda. And this is an issue that follows the Song Contest as a dark shadow, making an environment where artists are not free to focus purely on their art and enjoy it.”

I mentioned this week in my movie reviews that one of the highlights of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert for me was seeing Elvis in the musical director role in rehearsals.

Jim Farber’s feature on the movie touches on the same theme, with Jerry Schilling, who worked with Elvis in the 1970s, making a similar point:

“That comes through most clearly in the rehearsal footage included in the film. “That’s where you see that Elvis was the most underrated producer in music,” Schilling said. “He’s fixing the musicians, fixing the backup singers, and fixing the music overall. Elvis wasn’t just a great artist, he was a great listener.””

“Case in point is an extended version of Suspicious Minds where Elvis’s patterns of calls and responses with his backup singers, the Sweet Inspirations, so delight them they giggle with joy. “It wasn’t like it was Elvis and then the back-up singers and the band,” Schilling said. “He saw himself as part of the band.””

Shaad D’Souza interviews Robyn for The Face as she prepares to release her first album for eight years, although frankly these lyrics in the title track Sexistential have given me the ick:

My body’s a spaceship with the ovaries on hyperdrive
Got a whole universe inside that exists in between my thighs
Do I have a consistent will to persist and finish this ride?
My babymaker’s got twenty in the clip, ready to fire

Blue Horizon is one of those record labels I really remember from being allowed to play my parents’ 45s as a kid and them having records by Fleetwood Mac and Chicken Shack. The founder has died. Garth Cartwright writes about Mike Vernon here, making sure to note that “he once told me he always thought [David Bowie’s] The Laughing Gnome, which he also produced, would be a hit.”

For those of us of a certain age, the prospect of being with a load of adults belting out primary school bangers like Shine Jesus Shine and Give Me Oil in My Lamp will either trigger nostalgia or nausea.

Jennifer Shahade tells Donald McRae ‘There’s a long and embedded history of abuse in chess’ in one of his typically thought-provoking interviews.

Is it a truism that as you get older you suddenly find yourself drawn to bird-watching? I really enjoyed Kevin Rushby on bird calls on a North York Moors walk.

My contributions to the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter this week were:
·  Monday briefing: What does the escalation in the Middle East mean for global stability?

·  Wednesday briefing: Was the chancellor’s spring statement already out of date?

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.