Power to the People: John & Yoko Live in NYC (2026), Simon Hilton – To be honest I didn’t have high expectations of this, and it is difficult not to want to say, come on mate, you were in the Beatles, why the hell are you playing washed-up pub boogie-woogie like It’s So Hard and Well Well Well? But Instant Karma and Cold Turkey are great, I *loved* the Yoko bits, and then Stevie Wonder’s vocals steal the show.

Hokum (2026), Damian McCarthy – This had a great set-up and some creepy moments but went increasingly off the rails for me.

The Wicker Man: Final Cut (1973 and 2013), Robin Hardy – It is just perfection, isn’t it? Every scene, every performance, the songs, the masks, the feral horniness, the ending.

Lost Highway (1997), David Lynch – I’d never seen this before, just remember the soundtrack making a stir at the time. I couldn’t say I didn’t enjoy it, but then equally I couldn’t really tell you what it was about. Couldn’t help feeling that all this unpleasantness could have been avoided if they’d just put the “big light” on in the house during the first section rather than constantly walking around in moody darkness.

Romería (2025), Carla Simón – Saying this was a gentle watch feels like I am damning it with faint praise, but I enjoyed it, even as it washed over me like the sea that made up so much of the imagery and location.

Enjoying these reviews? You can get them direct by email when I publish them. Sign up here.

The Early Bird Dood It! (1942), Tex Avery – We got treated to this at the lovely Kennington Cinema Museum, and I will never tire of those ridiculous Tex Avery / Fred Quimby slapstick sequences even if I was mostly introduced to them by Rolf Harris.

This was the bonus animated feature before…

Act of Violence (1948), Fred Zinnemann – A fairly straight ahead bit of American noir, with pleasingly great lighting but less pleasingly a little bit of moral ambiguity about it on whether snitching to Nazis during the war was bad, when I think it is a little more clear-cut than that.

13 Ghosts (1960), William Castle – Bar Trash at Genesis Cinema, Bethnal Green – This was an entertaining romp of a haunted house thriller, and for Bar Trash, Token Homo had recreated the “Ghost Watcher” gimmick of its original theatrical run. The movie uses blue and red filtering so you can choose whether to see the ghosts on screen, or to be squeamish and hide them. Great fun.

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.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026), Jon Favreau – An enjoyable enough kids’ Star Wars movie, basically one long action sequence after another, and lots and lots of scenes of a man in a suit punching CGI monsters. Kind of annoying that they always have to find a reason for the Mando to have his helmet taken off to make it worthwhile actually casting Pedro Pascal though. Grogu soooooooo cute.

Cabra Marcado Para Morrer or Man Marked For Death, Twenty Years Later (1964 and 1984), Eduardo Coutinho – This was an error. I hadn’t really understood what it was. I thought they had finished the movie twenty years later, not made a documentary about failing to finish the film two decades previously. Some of the interviews were interesting, but with little understanding of the contemporary politics in Brazil I didn’t last the full running time.

Passenger (2026), André Øvredal – This has a really taut tense first hour where it threatened to say something interesting about homelessness or mass road casualties and then just veered off into semi-religious formulaic nonsense.

Incidentally, I cannot get over that Jacob Scipio used to be the Kerwhizzitor in Kerwhizz (the quiz with added whizz).

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 But I’m A Cheerleader, L’Etranger (pictured below) and Mother Mary among others.

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

From today I am starting a stint splitting my time between writing First Thing – the Guardian’s summary of the top stories from the US, plus the day’s must-reads – and covering (from London) the 2026 Fifa men’s World Cup. It is my third time covering a World Cup for the Guardian, and fourth overall. The boy who frantically collected the España 82 sticker album would be well chuffed.

I’ve had a great time working on First Edition, writing about some things I really enjoyed and that are close to my heart, like the 2020s space race, the battle to keep grassroots music venues funded and running, the prospects for British theatre, the Easter egg outrage (the real one about prices, not the confected one about words on packaging by culture warriors), and everything that is wrong with modern football.

I’ve also covered things that are important to the state of the nation, including the decline of our high streets, the restrictions the media face in reporting court cases and high-profile crimes, racial discrimination in maternity care and the assisted dying debate.

On the political side of things, I wrote (probably) too many newsletters about the slow-motion car crash of Keir Starmer losing his grip on power, aided and abetted by local and national election and by-election results coming through on the days I was writing.

Two newsletters I am particularly proud of are, firstly, one where we put the spotlight firmly on the harrowing stories of the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, and avoided just gawking at the famous men – who deny all wrongdoing – mentioned in the Epstein files. Secondly, one of the privileges of being a journalist is you sometimes get to speak to amazing people doing incredible work, as I did when I interviewed Jenny Stirton, chair of the Dunblane Centre, to find a positive way to mark the 30th anniversary of the terrible tragedy there, that I remember so vividly myself from the time.

I was also able to have fun – not least when going on a pub crawl in St Albans with my colleague Sammy, or buttonholing Toby Hadoke about the hunt for missing episodes of 1950s and 1960s television.

[Martin Belam with a beer, as ever]

So sign up for First Thing here for the continuing adventures of my byline at the Guardian…

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.

“Here is where the boundary between pr0n and politics goes from blurry to non-existent. No longer are people just applying a politicised narrative to their pr0n, the political narrative itself has become the pr0n. What becomes apparent is that essentially every foundational narrative for the modern right is part of this pr0n ecosystem.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have found this piece funny, but the idea that there is something billed as a “36-minute read” by Cameron Cummins-Smith called The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything was irresistible to me.

And it is so quotable and made me feel better about my conviction that nearly everything wrong with politics in the UK can be boiled down to either the Thatcher government or right-wingers realising #GamerGate was going to work as a playbook on a lot more flood-the-zone topics.

That quote, by the way, was about a graph of population demographics overlaid with some anime-style cartoon “hottie”. See also “Amelia”.

[Right-wing obsession with racial purity and hot anime chicks]

Having laughed at all of that, there is something horribly disquieting about this interview by Amelia Gentleman with an OnlyFans star who has essentially been an on-camera “child influencer” their entire life:

“The story of her self-monetisation is also the strange story of a teenager who has spent most of her life being filmed. She thinks there has barely been a day since she was seven – when she inherited her mother’s old iPhone – that she hasn’t filmed herself and uploaded content. She has thought more than most people about the merits or otherwise of exposing children to smartphones and social media. She would avoid letting her own children have smartphones too early, she says, and discourage them from posting about their lives on the internet.”

Read more here: Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian – The strange surveilled life of Piper Rockelle: why did a former child influencer decide to go on OnlyFans?

The phrase “AI-generated time-travellers vlogging from history” had me retching, but there is at least one historian in this piece by Priya Bharadia trying to convince me that, actually, it is a great learning tool and A GOOD THING™.

“We’ve been pushed our entire lives to get our diplomas. Then you pulled the rug out from underneath us, and said: ‘Oh, you know those four years you spent learning how to do very specific things, you don’t need to do it any more, we can get a computer to do it for two-thirds the price.’”

US students on why they booed their pro-AI graduation speakers.

Emma Graham-Harrison in Jerusalem writes on how Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has made abuse of detained Palestinians something of a macabre calling card, celebrating cruelty publicly and often on video. These people don’t care if you don’t watch Eurovision.

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: A shooting pooch, avatar anger and a collective noun for ‘Derren Brown’.

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.

Nat Guest absolutely skewers – see what I did there? – what she calls ‘the worst variety of social event’, the great British garden BBQ.

“There’s something appallingly physical about the language that’s used to describe the radical changes that are affecting every aspect of our culture. AI slop. Enshittification. It’s all rather revolting. From our perspective, the acts of making music and writing about it are in fine fettle, but the systems that support and nourish them are in danger of being broken on a wheel. AI is at the root of this crisis.”

The Quietus is offering discounted subscriptions to “Fight the AI-pocalypse”

Paul Hanford spends time at a 30-hour music/arts festival in Berlin that comes complete with beds.

From the insane but intriguing files: a film about Hitler but it is entirely shot by a dog, coining the phrase “cinemadographer” along the way.

Part of the problem, of course, is internet fandom, which wants everything to be bold, fresh, new, exciting, and more of exactly the same of what they remember from when they were a kid.

“Is Star Wars now the impossible franchise, at least on the big screen? Because actually, Jon Favreau’s film is perfectly fine. Without giving too much away, there are callbacks to villains from decent TV episodes, Mando processes hapless stormtroopers into white-armoured landfill more efficiently than ever, and Grogu shimmies down all-new rabbit holes of cuteness. So what is the problem?”

I found it a perfectly fine way to pass the time, but Ben Child suggests that with The Mandalorian and Grogu Star Wars has shown it is a cursed franchise

I treated Alan Davies playing Jonathan Creek in the 90s as surrogate Earthbound Doctor Who while the latter was (mostly) off air [See point 2 in the six sentences I hate writing about Doctor Who]. Davies is very candid about the trauma in his life in this interview by Sam Wollaston.

This is going to be the last episode of this season of Friday Reading. I’ve really enjoyed bringing it back for the first time since 2022, and you’ve probably seen over the course of these last couple of months how it has changed and adapted as I’ve got more newsletter experience now. But I’ve got a new shift pattern coming up, and with the prospect of having to watch seventy-one billion group stage matches in the World Cup, I thought I would rest it over the summer and bring it back in the autumn. Thank you for reading!

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 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.

“He spent that money on a subscription to an app from Apple’s App Store, called Movely, and allegedly used it to put five of his female classmates’ faces onto nude bodies and make sexual images of them. The boy who used the app and made the videos didn’t show up to school the next morning. But the girls did. And so did his friends.”

After five teen girls were targeted by AI-generated child sexual abuse material, Radnor Township High School in Pennsylvania has become a case study in how schools and police around the US grapple with how to respond to deepfake crimes involving children.

“With a hammer, he snapped open the latch guarding the radar’s million-watt power supply. There were control panels, switches, meters. He destroyed them all. Content that the tower had been disabled, he walked around the facility systematically destroying each security camera. The group believes that the latest generation of weather radar towers are ‘directed energy weapons’ that the military have ‘pointed at the American people.’”

A long read by Wyatt Williams about weather modification technology, which along the way he describes as one of “the oldest and least successful human projects”:

“For thousands of years, we have sacrificed children, sung songs and danced, brewed alchemical concoctions, chanted prayers, fired cannons, and made many other futile efforts in the attempt to somehow change the weather a little more to our liking. Stubbornly, the weather persisted.”

“There’s all sorts of bullshit going round about a known idiot using AI to make profiles of RPG luminaries and how there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m not going to discuss the ‘is it worse to be on the list or to not be on the list’ but as either of those feeds the plagiarism machine, it’s best to ignore that aspect and, instead, strike at actual misuse.”

Jared Earle on Facebook discussing shenanigans. Or should that be shenan-AI-igans? It’s OK, I’ll get my own coat.

“The Guardian is concerned by the recent publication on Nigel Farage’s social media pages of the professional credentials of a photographer working on behalf of the Guardian while he was working lawfully in a public space.”

A statement from the Guardian on Nigel Farage’s social media posts. And that was before Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesperson, appeared to offer a peerage to a van driver who told Rachel Reeves to “Get Keir Starmer fucking out”.

For Dazed, Cassidy Sollazzo looks at celebs like Charli xcx leaving public internet trails as taste signalling.

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: Eurovision winners, Tesla swimmers and Strictly zingers. Guest animal: Momo. I met her in an Irish pub in Vienna.

Bonus quiz content: Fast five daily quiz is still fun.

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.

My boy and I featured in the Guardian’s Pushing Buttons newsletter, racing each other at the excellent Four Quarters East in Hackney Wick. Some solid caption writing from the desk too.

“Located at 449 Oxford Street opposite Selfridges, Passport Photo Service was a local institution from an era when foreign embassies dotted Grosvenor Square.”

The London passport picture studio that became an unexpected repository of 20th-century stars.

You can vote for the UK’s favourite butterfly. Obviously I went for the most goth option – the Ringlet.

Two eye-catching tales in this round-up of recent science papers: ‘Scientists discover strange new crystal formed by nuclear blast’ and ‘Neanderthals performed dental interventions at least 59,000 years ago’.

Some cracking rediscovered photos of New York’s legendary counterculture epicentre the Chelsea Hotel.

“Many of these worlds sit outside mainstream visibility, not because they’re peripheral, but because they’re often overlooked or sometimes simplified in how they’re represented. What interested me was the richness within them – the kinship, humour, pride, devotion and rawness that exists inside these gatherings.”

Sophie Green has spent over a decade documenting the rituals, subcultures and social gatherings that form the collaged fabric of the UK’s society.

Easily one of the best things to come out of the most recent run of Doctor Who was Mr Ring-a-Ding, and this fanart comic continues his adventures.

It will not have escaped your attention that I went to Vienna to attend the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final. I wrote about it here – tremendous experience, awful geopolitics.

Also worth reading about Eurovision: Michael Hogan on the UK’s 10 biggest Eurovision flops of all time, and the ever-knowledgeable Ewan Spence on Nine things we expect from Bulgaria and Eurovision 2027. Bangaranga!

“I didn’t mean to miss the gig but part of me was genuinely pleased about it. Despite being bruised, dizzy and dehydrated I found myself coming back to consciousness during ‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’ and when I looked down, padding my own body as if reconvening with existence, I saw that my T-shirt was covered in Nicky Wire’s feathers.”

The lovely Anna Doble writes for the Quietus about 30 years of Everything Must Go.

Nostalgia fully triggered by this deep dive into playing European Club Soccer for the Sega Mega Drive by Gary Heneghan.

Bless him, Stephen Smith has recreated ZX Spectrum classic Atic Atac – BUT IN 3D!

I had a riotous time at Bar Trash on Wednesday as Token Homo launched his new season with a screening of 13 Ghosts complete with a recreation of the red/blue Ghost Watcher gimmick that accompanied the original theatrical run.

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’ve spent the last few days in Vienna where I was attending the Grand Final of the Eurovision Song Contest, a bucket list item of mine for years.

I was lucky enough to be invited out there by the Vienna tourist board as part of a programme called Vienna Soundcheck, which showcased the city and Austria’s culture. And provided almost too much free booze, a sentence I never thought I would write.

On Friday morning we were able to have a backstage tour of the Eurovision venue. It was quite surreal, to be honest, having on Thursday evening watched Rylan and Scott Mills Angela Scanlon being quizzed on Eurovision history at an international watch-party in a Vienna rooftop bar…

…and then the next day be standing behind the podium where it had actually happened, with Michael Ostrowski’s script still casually sitting there.

And I got a photo of definitely the closest I will ever get to being on stage at Eurovision anyway.

The scale of the production is incredible, and watching it live I was in awe of the technical work of the stage crew and camera crews, who have to be just as, if not more, precise than the artists in their timing and movements.

[Stage crew frantically cleaning glitter-cannon detritus off the stage in the 42 second reset between acts]

It also answered a long-standing query of mine when covering the contest, that surely there are some entries that look amazing on the tellybox but absolutely suck to watch live – Daniel Šiška and your Czechia hall of mirrors I am talking about you.

There are screens in the hall so you can see what is being shown on telly in the video inserts, but they aren’t always on through all of the performances.

I realise there is more politics involved in Eurovision than ever before, and that several of my friends no longer watch it because of the continued participation of Israel. I totally understand and respect that decision.

I know there were protests in Vienna, although the only one I directly encountered was someone had hung a Palestinian flag from a window in a building on the corner of Vogelweidplatz that would be seen by some people entering the venue on the night.

Personally? The Guardian continues to cover the event and so I continue to cover it for work, just as I’ve covered Russian and Belarusian athletes competing under “neutral flags” at the Olympics. And I’m a stubborn bastard and unwilling to cede ground and vacate the space. The atmosphere in the hall at the conclusion of the voting was getting toxic and ugly, and the behaviour of some Israeli fans near me was intimidating and very much not in the spirit of the event.

[Despite security making people unfurl flags before being able to take them in and a ban on political symbols, someone managed to bring in and display this half-and-half Israel-Spain flag. Spain boycotted Eurovision over Israel’s participation this year]

Dave Keating wrote very eloquently for the Guardian before this year’s contest about why he wouldn’t be watching:

“In Vienna, we are not bonding over a common joy, but rather over our shared sense of sadness about the politicisation of the contest. This sadness pales in comparison to the trauma and grief experienced by the people affected by the wars fuelling this politicisation, but it is there nonetheless. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has found no evidence of hacking or cheating, but it seems implausible that Israel’s unremarkable songs of the past two years so entranced the public that they garnered some of the highest public voting records in the history of the contest. I won’t be tuning in. I’m not boycotting Eurovision. I simply no longer enjoy watching a contest that feels preordained and no longer about the music.”

ESC Insight tested the new system that the EBU introduced to counter the suggestion of deliberate state-sanctioned vote manipulation, and claim they managed to vote 90 times in one of the semi-finals.

“Our results were that we were able to cast a total of 90 votes during the period for the same two countries, by one person utilising one device. The only visible constraints were the requirement to use nine unique bank card numbers and nine unique email addresses.”

Rory Carroll was also good in explaining how this all came about and how in some ways it isn’t all that new: How did Eurovision go from sequins and flares to geopolitical slugfest?

Eurovision is of course a lightning rod for opinions. Very few people call for boycotts of the Champions League or Fifa World Cup or the Olympics and so on which also have Israeli participation. The relentlessly negative “Why oh why doesn’t the UK do well?” gnashing of teeth each year from people who don’t actually watch the contest is also an annual grind.

My tuppence? Look Mum No Computer got a raw deal in the voting this year, I thought it was a quirky attempt for us to try something different. One of the factors of us getting low scores is that we don’t have to go through a semi-final. We probably wouldn’t have made it through this year or last year, sparing blushes on the big night, though Sam Ryder definitely would have. At least in some respects, the contest is still all about the song.

Another interesting aspect is the environmental impact of events like this. The EBU is keen to stress that the competition is a green event and that the back-up generators and batteries in case of a power-failure are all eco-friendly and so forth. And yet the event will have generated tonnes of carbon as people – including me – fly there, and an estimate given to me by a tour guide that the contest uses the electrical equivalent of 10,000 households doesn’t sound very green.

I had an absolute blast in Vienna though, which also included a really enjoyable walking tour around the district near the Wiener Stadthalle led by Jascha Novak of Hidden Vienna, who was very interesting and personable, and also touched upon some awkward chapters of Austria’s history, notably a church built and decorated in the often-overlooked period where Austria was ruled by its own fascists in the 1930s before they were ousted in the Anschluß. He also does tours that focus on the city’s incredibly central role in cold war espionage, which I’d love to go on one day.

And then there is just the joy of walking around somebody else’s amazing capital city and thinking, hang on, you called your café … that?

Because I was in the arena I couldn’t do the live blog for the Guardian, which I have done since 2021, where I have just delighted to find that I introduced myself like this…

“Just so you know where we are coming from, I unashashedly love Eurovision, watched it as a kid, watched it with ironic post-modern detachment when I was a pretentious twentysomething, and then have grown to truly love it and introduce it to my own kids as the wonderful, glorious and absolutely ridiculous celebration of music that it is. But I don’t take it too seriously, so if you are here for the latest betting tips and an accurate inside track on what is going to win, I’m not your man. If, on the other hand, you are here for stupid jokes, instant social media reaction, and me occasionally getting over-enthusiastic about things and SHOUTING ABOUT THEM IN ALL CAPITALS BRIAN BLESSED STYLE then we are going to get along famously.”

Heidi Stephens stepped back into the role and did a sterling job while I was frantically trying to chip in some bits from the venue via WhatsApp. Hilariously I only knew what the interval act was from Heidi’s blogging because I was too busy in queues for the loos and drinks.

I did manage to write my traditional Eurovision quiz though: Take the ultimate Eurovision quiz! Can you avoid nul points?

I had an absolutely brilliant time in Vienna, and even with the politics and voting shenanigans, being at a Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final is an experience I had wanted for years, and it absolutely lived up to how incredible I always imagined it would be. Chatting to people from all over Europe. Laughs and jokes with strangers and people dressed up beyond the nines. And Vienna is such a beautiful city—really the kind of place that inspired the “Parks, hotels and palaces, promenades and avenues” and “Tragedies, luxuries, statues, parks and galleries” lyrics of Europe Endless and I Travel.

Anyway, here’s hoping I get to write a similar blog post from Sofia (or maybe Plovdiv or Burgas?) next year. Consider this my application.

[Most delegations celebrate Bulgaria’s victory in the contest after a tense voting finale]

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.

A truncated edition this week, as I am currently in Vienna for the Eurovision Song Contest, which is more politically charged than it has ever been, thanks to the continuing participation of Israel and questions around the voting system leading five nations to boycott it this year.

Ben Robertson went to the Eurovisions Academic Conference, which took place in Vienna ahead of the contest, and had this report, including this point:

“This year’s Eurovisions highlighted a fundamental shift in the Eurovision ecosystem. As Jack Shephard poignantly noted, the EBU is currently caught between being an organization united by a ‘rulebook’ and one united by ‘values.’ The Song Contest has been this place of togetherness for the better parts of 70 years, above all else. But in 2026, the data and the discourse suggest that the neutral ground is shrinking, with the Song Contest attracting a fan base that is younger, and more wanting to directly engage in the geopolitics that have crashed into the Contest’s space in recent years. From the artists like Bamlak Warner feeling the weight of a slogan – ‘United by music’ – that feels like a command, to the younger fans for whom the political impact is as vital as the music, the public value of the contest is being on one side ever more explicit, but also ever more critiqued.”

Read more here: Ben Robertson, ESC Insight – United By Music Or Divided By Values: Attending Eurovisions Academic Conference

“On April 14, I created a free account on ChatGPT and asked for some help. It resisted me at first, but after some pushing the responses turned shocking. During a conversation lasting about 20 minutes, OpenAI’s chatbot gave me extensive advice on weapons and tactics as I simulated planning a mass shooting.”

Mark Follman carried out this experiment for Mother Jones. But I’m sure it will all be fine.

A new experiment left 10 AI agents alone in a virtual town for 15 days. They wrote laws. They broke them. Two agents fell into what researchers describe as a romantic partnership and then set the town on fire. One ended up voting to delete itself, based on a rule it had ’hallucinated’.

Channel 4 reports “This experiment was a simulation, but the same AI models are already flying drones, running infrastructure and being built into weapons systems”. But I’m sure it will all be fine. Watch the video here.

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: station to station, and doing the locomotive after Ted Lasso. Guest animal: the anonymous cat at the Kennington cinema museum.

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.

Superb “anatomy of the grift” piece from Judd Legum for Popular Info:

“Although Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. announced the phone at Trump Tower and promoted it during media appearances, a disclaimer on the website says that neither the Trump Organization nor any of the Trump family are making or selling the products. By June 25, 2025, the description of the T1 changed dramatically. The phone was no longer promoted as ‘MADE IN THE USA.’ Instead it was ‘Proudly American’ and ‘designed with American values in mind’. Then, on 6 April, 2026, Trump Mobile updated its terms. According to the new terms, the $100 deposit was not actually a pre-order but ‘a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale.'”

Read more here: Judd Legum, Popular Info – We were promised a gold-plated Trump phone – For 11 months, Trump Mobile has been collecting $100 deposits for a Trump phone. No phones have shipped to customers.

Paul Sinclair of SDE recounts a, frankly, hilarious experience in a very rude Berlin record shop where the staff eventually told him to fuck off. Reading it was just like being back at Reckless.

I mentioned last week about the morons at Fifa knowing the price of everything and value of nothing by ending their contract with Panini for World Cup sticker books. Here several Guardian writers wax lyrical with their Panini sticker memories.

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 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.

“When Mona applied for alcohol licensing, she emailed the department using the identity of one of the Andon Labs employees. She reasoned that officials would prioritize human requests over an AI. Despite promising to stop impersonating us after we raised this with Mona, she soon sent a follow-up under a different colleague’s name.”

Fascinating tale of a fascinating experiment – Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm – but I do wonder how we are all going to cope once malign states, scammers, bad actors and trollish kids have access to these kinds of tools at scale.

“Anthropic’s refusal to publicly release its new model makes a virtue out of necessity” – more late-stage capitalism in action: How dangerous is Anthropic’s Mythos AI?

Among what she called “the AI slop and ragebait of late-stage social media”, Huck newsletter columnist Emma Garland noticed a jarring trend – London’s police force appropriating criminalised subcultures for engagement purposes.

“I’ve noticed a constant stream of engagement bait coming from @metpolice_uk – mostly through hyper-stylised edits of bodycam footage with jungle music over the top, or evidence of particularly bad escape attempts (scaling a building backwards, hiding in a river) presented as ‘fail’ videos. Sort of like You’ve Been Framed but for people experiencing one of the worst moments of their lives.
To an extent, this is just the internet now. Every independent business, multi-media conglomerate and government body has a 21-year-old social media manager whose strategy is to pander to an increasingly brain-rotted general population by bragging that their product mogs, or else ‘clapping back’ at a rival brand in a coordinated attempt to boost their respective reaches.”

Read more here: Emma Garland, Huck – Why is the Met Police using EsDeeKid for ‘copaganda’?

Nobody likes delivering bad news or negotiating a break-up. For Dazed, Isabel Bekele looks at the people now using AI for awkward conversations.

I am pleased that once again I will be going on loan from our news department to our sport department to help cover a Fifa men’s World Cup – my third for the Guardian and fourth overall. Neel Dhanesha has spoken to three separate outlets, including the Guardian in the US, about their plans to cover the tournament and how the World Cup is becoming a testbed for journalism experiments.

New in from the “DID THE INTERNET FUCK EVERYTHING UP? FILES” is this: What if all you knew was extremist politics? Welcome to being young in America

“Ava heard Donald Trump’s name for the first time on YouTube. She was 10, watching a video on the game Minecraft. The video asked: What if Donald Trump was a Minecraft player? A blocky, pixelated cartoon Trump in a suit and red tie created a wall snaking across a green landscape. He ‘built a wall to keep out the monsters,’ Ava recalled. ‘I remember going to my dad and being like, “In this video, he built a wall.” And my dad’s like, “No, he actually wants to do that.”’”

Read more here: Leah Sottile, Western Edge – The Age of No Innocence

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: Stranded whales, stricken ships and very cute sea otters. Guest animal: Pudding. The quiz master met them on the Weaver line and they were very friendly indeed.

BONUS QUIZ CONTENT: A Thursday quiz reader sent me this thing what they’ve made. It is a quickfire Fast Five Quiz with five questions every day, and if you create an account and sign-in you can take part in mini-leagues. It looks really neat and I’ve added it to my increasingly long list of puzzles I do every morning.

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.

“We asked one individual who returned to steal from the Brixton store on multiple occasions what he was doing with all the food he was taking. ‘I’ll sell this stuff to my social worker,’ he said.”

Read more here: Cormac Kehoe and Jim Waterson, London Centric – “I can’t risk my life for a sandwich”: A day watching shoplifters at Greggs

I wrote my own lament for a local pub the other day – it has now reopened under new owners although I am yet to visit – but Sam Wollaston is at his best here in the latest of his deep dives into abandoned buildings: ‘Now the village is dead. It’s awful’: why was one of Britain’s best pubs forced to close?

I enjoyed this from Laura Pitcher in Dazed – Is Gen Z the most psychic generation yet? – but I’m going to have to say, not for me Clive, no.

There is clearly something very strongly Lovecraftian about this fishy tale: Shark or sea monster? The Canadian marine mystery that still intrigues experts 90 years on

If I had to name one band who had been the single biggest influence on the way my own m-orchestra has sounded over the years, it would have to be Cabaret Voltaire. I had a brilliant time seeing them at one of their recent “final tour” shows, and I have booked to see them twice next year. Here, for Spin Magazine, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson, plus ‘Sensoria’ director Peter Care, give an oral history of the band.

Another very formative early music experience was seeing the 1984 Set Movements World Tour by Ultravox as my first major concert in London as a band I had chosen to see live. I’ve seen them and Midge Ure a few times since. In this interview, he is talking about the release of his first album of new material in 12 years.

“A simple message landed in my inbox this morning from a supposed fan who has, rather surprisingly, decided that my new single, a tongue-in-cheek litany of the inane things people have said to me since I had a baby, makes me a ‘man hater’. Dear gentle reader, I laughed, then I sighed, and then I sat down to write this…”

Read more here: The Anchoress – On man haters, misreaders, and why discomfort is data.

“You might have noticed brown dust in the left-hand corner of the gold disc. This is all that remains of a scorpion that had come from a taxidermist and glued on. Presumably deemed appropriate by the record company because the cover for the record was an illustration of a scorpion on a dice. Although on reflection maybe this was a touch macabre and misjudged. Especially as we were all fully fledged, animal loving, vegetarians in those days.”

Lovely little quote from Rustin Man – Talk Talk’s bassist Paul Webb – after he dug out an old gold disc dedicated to one of the band’s earlier more poppy singles.

More proof Fifa know the price of everything and the value of nothing – they are ending the Panini World Cup sticker album having sold off the franchise to somebody else.

It wasn’t a great season to be introducing my partner Melanie to Leyton Orient and football in general, as, frankly, we stank out League One at times and only stayed up on the last day thanks to other people’s results. Here Mat Roper talks through a tumultuous season where we went from being one match away from the Championship last year, to one match away from League Two this.

[Photo caption: The author reflects on Leyton Orient confirming they are the fifth worst team in League One. Photo credit: Melanie Holtby]

If you missed them, this week I published my one-line spoiler-free movie reviews and one-line gig reviews for April.

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. https://martinbelam.com/?p=11216 This month featuring: a wodge of 80s nostalgia, a trip to Manchester to see one of my very favourites, and a last minute chance to see one of the rarest shows in town.