Dear Readers,
A very short newsletter this week, as we’re all going on holiday, and we want you to buy the magazine. Issue 8 is available to buy through the webstore here. We’ll be back in August with our blend of mid-to-deep dives, featurettes and tips.
A Dog Called Christmas
Our features editor Séamas O’Reilly released his first book this week. It’s a memoir of his childhood, growing up as one of eleven children to a widowed father in 90s’ Northern Ireland. It’s called Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? but it's a lot funnier than that title makes it sound. In this exclusive extract for newsletter subscribers, we meet just some of the dogs and priests featured in a chapter entitled ‘An Entire Chapter About Dogs & Priests.’ Séamas is not only a great writer who writes funny prose, but he is also very funny in real life, and also a great guy, too. What we are trying to say is that not buying his book would be an act of moral failure on your part, and we want the best for our subscribers.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died is available anywhere books are sold: various options for which can be found at www.mammybook.com
Cut-Throat Clothes
Phoebe Philo, the enigmatic and lavishly talented fashion designer, has announced that she will launch an eponymous fashion brand after a three-year absence. Philo, who is British, resuscitated French fashion house Celine with womenswear that less gifted designers have made fortunes imitating (see this cacklingly funny meme for more detail). Philo’s return to the fashion frontlines has long been expected, indeed The Fence hears that sequestered a lot of leading talent from major British brands to work at the line, and all under the utmost secrecy. Maybe a story for our fearless fashion press?
A La Recherche du Pingers Perdu
After 18 months shuttered, nightclubs are back, baby! We hired Centrist Dad, Marco Witt, to reach into the memory bank: nostalgia is one hell of a drug…
Hitchens’ Guide to the Galaxy
Earlier this week we revealed the cover for our special summer issue: 50 Thinkers to Rebuild the World, a definitive rundown of the minds who will shape the next century.
Just kidding. What we published was a picture of the globe seen from space surrounded by 50 images of Peter Hitchens. As it happens, we do have a bold, new-look cover that will set the tone for issues to come (check it out here). For the moment though, we’d like to remind you all why we’re so interested in Peter Hitchens.
Hitchens has never been afraid of fighting fiercely for big ideas, which is what TF is all about. He considers it a disgrace that we no longer refer to Beijing by the name ‘Peking’. He abhors British Summertime. He loves Mean Girls, though he occasionally gets it confused with Clueless. He thinks marijuana is destroying Britain. He once challenged Michael Portillo for his seat because he believed him to be too left wing.
We were surprised to get a little kickback online from those who believed our cover – which featured 50 images of Peter Hitchens – was insufficiently diverse. ‘All white men’, commented one user under the image which, and we really cannot stress this enough, featured 50 images of Peter Hitchens.
So this is just to say: we hear you loud and clear. And in the future, when we put the magazine together, we pledge to include a more diverse and representative cross-section of Hitchens brothers.
In Case You Missed It
Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick writes for Foreign Policy on El Salvador’s millennial president, Nayib Bukele, and the ‘hustle bro populism’ that’s turned business chad crypto memes into political power.
Ben Jenkins authors the definitive list of shit trains for the Guardian in a seminal piece entitled ‘All the trains in my son’s train podcast ranked by how much I hate them.’
RIP to a real one.
Fiery stuff in the TLS as the Chaucer wars intensify.
For the NYT, Steve Lohr asks whatever happened to IBM’s quiz-champion-defeating supercomputer Watson, in the ten years since it promised to take over the world.
Staying with the NYT, Neil Vigdor got to fulfil every journalist’s dream by telling the story of a man battling a bear for a week in the Alaskan wilderness.
And for a Flashback Friday, why not revisit William Gibson’s iconic 1993 Wired article, Disneyland With The Death Penalty – whose depiction of Singapore as a clean, technocratic dystopia now feels prescient of our own surveiled and sanitised lives.
For Jacobin, Lynsey Hanley penned a tribute to the writer and journalist Dawn Foster, who died earlier this month. Her assessment of the UK’s political and media elites was always acute, often hilarious, and has been proven depressingly accurate by some of the responses to her death this week, and the paucity of uproar or professional consequences they have caused. We will never, and must never, forget her.
And Finally
An exhibition by the revolutionary Swiss artist Peter Fischli is currently exhibiting at Sprüth Magers London, in Mayfair. Before the premature death of his long-time collaborator David Weiss, Fischli and Weiss made one of the most influential art films of all time, Der Lauf der Dinge, or ‘The Way Things Go’. Copied a thousand times over, nothing compares to the real thing: a thirty-minute-long rude-goldberg sequence that will leave you screaming. Watch here.
*
Thank you to our fiction editor, John Phipps, who is leaving us to work for 1843. Thankfully, John will continue to write for the newsletter and the magazine, which is great news all round, as he has overseen some of our choicest scoops. But we’re still sorry to see him go. He has two pieces of advice for Londoners. The first is all TV aerials point south, which is useful to know if you ever get lost. And the second is this: Dean, Frith, Greek: the Soho matrix goes alphabetical, west to east.
If you have already received Issue 8, then please do share photos of it on Twitter or Instagram: it will cheer our benighted, depleted editorial staff. And if you haven’t subscribed, then there’s a link just below. As ever, you can get in touch with us by replying to this email, and we look forward to speaking to you,
All best,
TF
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