The one downside of being a contact lens wearer is that, very occasionally, I put them in the wrong eye. And sometimes it takes me a few hours of mild fuzzy-headedness to figure out what’s wrong, and swap them around.
Today has been one of those days.
Cultural whiplash - from a graduation ceremony at the Barbican to watching K-PoP Demon Hunters with my youngest.
Still, it’s a varied life.
Today, I shall be attending my first graduation ceremony since my wife got her PhD nearly two decades ago. And I shall be wearing a gown for the first time since my own graduation over three decades ago.
And so, farewell, Firewire. Decades ago, you defined my music listening and early video editing experience. We haven’t seen each other in years, but I still mourn your loss.
Thesis: AI illustration is now baseline, human art and photography becomes value added. Human creativity becomes a signifier of a premium product.
Thoughts?
Some (slightly meandering) thoughts on The Observer’s cracking investigative piece into the truth behind The Salt Path story, and the audience and media reaction to it.
With bonus description of my media theorist’s hat.
Having a big life re-evaluation moment with my wife. My City lecturing and my family are the non-negotiable bits, as is my wife’s (new) job, but we’re putting everything else up in the air: where we live, the rest of my working life. How we spend our free time.
It’s frightening but exhilarating.
It’s difficult to articulate how angry this piece about failed crowdfunding publisher Unbound makes me.
It’s one thing to fail. It’s quite another to lie consistently to authors and backers over what appears to be years.
20 years ago today, my commute was disrupted by the 7/7 bombings in London. And I accidentally stumbled into the beginnings of the “citizen journalism” age of news…
Doing my bit for the City St George’s undergraduate open day - persuading potential students that we’re the best place in the country to do journalism…
At this point, however, Medium is the pioneer that got Substack’s arrows in its back. And frankly, I don’t like either one of them, because they’re both silos, each with their own quirks and shortcomings.
Vogue editor-in-chief of 37 years and fashion mogul icon Anna Wintour will step down after the magazine’s next cover release. The inspiration for The Devil Wears Prada will continue her roles as Vogue’s global editorial director and chief content officer of publisher Condé Nast.
For context, I’m in my early 50s - so I was still at school when she took on this role.
Against AI: An Open Letter From Writers to Publishers:
At its simplest level, our job as artists is to respond to the human experience. But the art we make is a commodity, and our world wants things quickly, cheaply, and on demand. We are rushing toward a future where our novels, our biographies, our poems and our memoirs—our records of the human experience—are “written” by artificial intelligence models that, by definition, cannot know what it is to be human. To bleed, or starve, or love.
The iPad is already my preferred video editor for most tasks. It looks like that’s only going to get better with iPad OS26 later this year.
I’m excited! But not excited enough to risk the betas…