Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to another edition of Off The Fence: the greatest name in professional newslettering, brought to you by the team behind the UK’s Only Magazine. Our ‘January’ sale – launched in February; deal with it – has seen countless new subscribers furnish themselves with the entirety of our 2023 output, in addition to their sparkling new subs for the year ahead. Lucky them! Because we’re feeling generous, and we really want to get you hooked, we’re extending that deal for one solitary newsletter more. Click below to sign up for the year, and get issues 15, 16, 17 and 18 thrown into your bundle.
Eight Magazines for the Price of Four
Right, to the steak in this week’s gourmet sandwich. This time around, we’ve got paintball fights in the Hollywood Hills, some hearty praise for a Soho neighbour, and some words about our new muse. But first: our features editor has drawn the ire of the world’s most famous man.
A Bot Stamping on a Human Face, Forever
A cannonball has struck the side of our good ship. On Saturday afternoon, our beloved features editorSéamas O’Reilly found himself on the receiving end of a seemingly uncontestable Twitter suspension. The charge? Well, we’d love to report that Séamas had made some zesty, scabrous comment upon our benighted nation’s political class, or had angered the wrong corner of lovestruck Korean teenagers, but the reality is infinitely more depressing.
After posting this piece for the Irish Examiner about the ‘deadening grind of bots now littering every single layer of the internet, talking to us, talking to each other, on the off chance they might one day, somehow, trick somebody, anybody, into giving them a few quid’, he was himself bombarded with spam bot responses – an irony he raised in a follow-up post beneath the story link.
Five hours after these posts, his account was suspended for, and we quote, ‘platform manipulation and spam’. It remains suspended now, four days later. Intractably, it is both a maddeningly inconsequential thing to be upset about, and equally, a wretched kick in the teeth, in an age where writers are solely charged with building their own audiences and attracting work.
Séamas has written about all this in a follow-up piece, and there has been some coverage in the Irish press, which makes sense since Twitter is an Irish-headquartered tech leviathan, owned by the world’s most famous ‘free speech absolutist’, who has even recently pledged to pay the legal costs of Irish hate groups in the event they fall foul of Ireland’s new hate speech legislation. To lose a six-figure platform, with a corpus of content that sparked news coverage, podcasts, even a state invitation to visit Iceland, is bad enough – to lose it in a transparent act of censorship from a tech giant and its petulant owner is galling in the extreme.
What Is This? A Centre for Ants?
It’s 23 years since the immaculate satire Zoolander came out, and during those two and a bit decades we have often wondered ‘What is it like to live in a house with other male models?’ Would it be something a little like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao-GDQ488DY
Actually, it’s possibly a little bit stranger than fiction, as Harvey James relays in prose as well-structured as his cheekbones. You can read it here.
The Beckoning Grave
You may remember Nesrine Malik’s recent piece on the plight of the elderly Millennial – which you can read here – and it now appears that Joe Bernstein of the Gray Lady has written on the very same subject: ‘Millennials are the very first generation to mine their lives for social media content’. It’s gratifying to see that original thinking is still pulsating at 620 8th Avenue.
What Seems to Be the Problem, Officer?
Last week we praised Patrick Radden Keefe’s piece on Zac Brettler, the teenager who died in mysterious circumstances, falling from a building directly opposite the MI6 building. If you haven’t read it, do make the time – and it does take a good hour or so to digest – for it now. It’s the piece of the year.
There’s been a superlative follow-up investigation from Gabriel Pogrund, in which new details about the night of Zac’s death are published, alongside an interview with Zac’s parents, in which Matthew Brettler wonders whether Dave Sharma was a police informant. The Metropolitan Police would not respond to this allegation. Might this be the key to the case?
A Marlena Shaw Joint
The secretive bods at Michelin may have upgraded Brett Graham of The Ledbury to the three-star mark, but many of the capital’s foodies were expecting that Victor Garvey’s Sola – our near-neighbours on Dean Street – might be knocked up to two stars, such is the quality of the tucker on offer.
It’s Californian cuisine, and the lunch deal, at £59 per person for five courses, is probably the best-priced fine dining offering in London right now, delivered with proper service and all due attentiveness in a gorgeously decorated room. We’re still thinking about the crunch of that sardine croustade 12 days later. If you’re looking for some February cheer, make a booking immediately.
In Case You Missed It
Yohann Koshy goes deep on the underreported causes and effects of the 2002 spate of unrest among Leicester’s Hindus for the Guardian.
Tom Scocca and Tim Marchman wade through the ongoing Vince McMahon scandal for Indignity.
James O’Malley on the dizzying breadth and dazzling conclusions of TFL’s Willesden AI experiments.
The Intelligencer’s Reeves Wiedemann scores 2024’s first big ‘Profile That Might As Well Be An Obituary’ in a gloriously shade-filled piece on Bill Ackman.
Katherine Laidlaw dips into the surreal life of Jen Glantz, professional bridesmaid.
In a very beautiful piece, Oscar Rickett shares his story of how he ended up with his oldest friend, mirroring the plot line of One Day.
And Finally
There’s lots to be said about the Superbowl LVIII. We could offer some sort of dirge-like essay on the return of American cultural power as its political power wanes, but no one in their right mind would want to read that.
It was Patrick Mahomes’ third Superbowl victory (‘ring’), and while much of the post-match celebrations focused on his teammate Travis Kelce’s blossoming relationship with Taylor Swift, some of the more militant Swifties were made anxious by Taylor’s perfunctory post-match embrace with Patrick Mahomes’ younger brother, Jackson.
For Jackson Mahomes is a TikToker, a veritable ‘nepo baby’ who was charged at the beginning of this year with aggravated sexual battery charges (charges which were later dropped), a most unheroic foil to his older brother’s untrammelled excellence. Jackson, it goes without saying, is a master of cringe; on one occasion, performing a TikTok dance on a memorial to a deceased player.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVruTfXLvbI
It’s all getting a bit too much for his sister-in-law, Brittany, who is her brother’s high school sweetheart. She got a bodyguard to stop him joining her table at a pre-Superbowl gig, in a clip almost too perfect for words.
You won’t find us to be new devotees of the ‘gridiron’. You won’t see us ‘tailgating’ any time soon. But in Jackson Mahomes, we might have found a new muse.
And there we have it – another week, another newsletter. Let us know if you have any questions, queries, disputes or troubles at support@the-fence.com and we will, as the email suggests, respond with plentiful support. Until next week, that’s it from us.
All the best,
TF