James Marriott

Bleak Bonnie Blue exposes our morality gap The West’s 21st-century secularism means it’s easy to condemn the porn star’s antics but much harder to explain why

www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

Excellent commentary by #JamesMarriott. #Internet thralls confuse #liberty with #license, meanwhile egging #capitalism on to new lows. Coincidence that #BonnieBlue's grooming conforms to beauty tropes of #snatch-jawlined #influencers?
@j-amesmarriott.bsky.social

“It may turn out that liberalism needed some restraints to survive” @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

Bleak Bonnie Blue exposes our morality gap The West’s 21st-century secularism means it’s easy to condemn the porn star’s antics but much harder to explain why

@j-amesmarriott.bsky.social spot on re the Haidt "harm" justification around Bonnie Blue. Equally interesting: if pointed out that she's no more harming herself than many sex workers, whilst getting v well paid, it shifts to "well, then she must be harming SOCIETY"

www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

Today - 29/07/2025 - BBC Sounds News and current affairs, including Sports Desk, Weather and Thought for the Day.

On BBC Radio 4 yesterday @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social used a brilliant junk food metaphor to describe search results produced by AI chatbots, calling them "ultra-processed information, superficially nutritious but actually pretty empty." Listen at bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... (starts at 2:47:42).

very kind - thank you!

Cultural Capital is always good, but this week's edition is outstanding.

Interesting links and quotes: cat massacre, Hunter Biden, diamond factory, political gender gap, superiority of C18th Plus more links and quotes

My latest newsletter rounding up everything interesting I read in books and on the internet last week: the great cat massacre, Hunter Biden, Chinese diamond factories, the political gender gap and a reader poll on which is the best century
jmarriott.substack.com/p/interestin...

Brilliant Barry Lyndon helps us see our past Stanley Kubrick’s brutal, authentic depiction of 18th-century life is a corrective to the modern, narcissistic view of history

I wrote this about the genius of Barry Lyndon, my all-time favourite film which is unique among historical dramas for really getting the strangeness and distance of the past

www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

Brilliant Barry Lyndon helps us see our past Stanley Kubrick’s brutal, authentic depiction of 18th-century life is a corrective to the modern, narcissistic view of history

Barry Lyndon is almost unique among historical dramas in unblinkingly confronting the fact that the preindustrial past was an alien world; intensely formal, rigidly hierarchical and arbitrarily violent.
(£) www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...
Another good one by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social

James Marriott on Reading EconTalk · Episode

I really loved this conversation with the EconTalk podcast about how to read and why.

In an age of infinite digital distractions books remain the greatest information technology ever invented. Nothing else even comes close.

open.spotify.com/episode/3VS2...

I have James VI and I on the brain at the moment, but the guy - the first king of the whole of the British Isles! - buried five of his children and died in his 50s. Three of them died before they were two.

Thanks! Yes the awareness that for most people for most of history existence involved being constantly on the verge of starving to death while watching most of your children die of disease is almost enough to challenge even my pessimism about the world...

Very good column this - ultimately we should view the past with considerable horror. It wasn’t better, we should not wish to return to it. It was a bleak, scary place.

Brilliant Barry Lyndon helps us see our past Stanley Kubrick’s brutal, authentic depiction of 18th-century life is a corrective to the modern, narcissistic view of history

I wrote this about the genius of Barry Lyndon, my all-time favourite film which is unique among historical dramas for really getting the strangeness and distance of the past

www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

"..the most important and the most interesting thing that we're living through as a society right now..."

I think James is right. The post-literate society is causing the dissolution of shared realities with many unpredictable consequences, in politics and beyond

YouTube video by The New Statesman Is English Literature dying? | Culture | The New Statesman

I spoke to the New Statesman about the dawn of the post-literate society. A culture of reading is rapidly being destroyed the advent of addictive screen slop. In my view it is the most significant cultural and political and crisis of our time
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAVs...

YouTube video by The New Statesman Is English Literature dying? | Culture | The New Statesman

I spoke to the New Statesman about the dawn of the post-literate society. A culture of reading is rapidly being destroyed the advent of addictive screen slop. In my view it is the most significant cultural and political and crisis of our time
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAVs...

The Times have allowed me to print the distilled essence of my life philosophy - I wrote this about why everyone should be a pessimist.

www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

I didn’t have a great deal of hope for this column, but it turned out to be a damn good read.

The Times have allowed me to print the distilled essence of my life philosophy - I wrote this about why everyone should be a pessimist.

www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

Age of chaos may be no match for inertia Time and again, history shows that predicted technological revolutions turn out to be gradual generational shifts

History is slower than we sometimes think — a fact obscured by the human preference for drama and by the tendency of historical distance to collapse long-past events into illusory proximity.
(£) www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...
Another interesting one from @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social

Absorbing novels to read on holiday Hello, Welcome to Cultural Capital.

For years I have nurtured and refined this list of books which I have mentally filed as "novels you absolutely can't go wrong with if you take them on holiday".

I've shared it with many friends over the years but this is the first time I've published it:

jmarriott.substack.com/p/absorbing-...

Absorbing novels to read on holiday Hello, Welcome to Cultural Capital.

For years I have nurtured and refined this list of books which I have mentally filed as "novels you absolutely can't go wrong with if you take them on holiday".

I've shared it with many friends over the years but this is the first time I've published it:

jmarriott.substack.com/p/absorbing-...

🙇

Continuing with his favourite topic, another fine piece by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social on the necessity of reading:

Not reading or writing would be unthinkable The evidence is clear: those who don’t read or who outsource their essays to AI lose the facility for complex thought

This is a great piece by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social on the importance of reading. tinyurl.com/ms66muuu I confess I am far from unbiased on this topic. tinyurl.com/yrzm389t

Not reading or writing would be unthinkable The evidence is clear: those who don’t read or who outsource their essays to AI lose the facility for complex thought

Writing is the most reliable (and often the most painful) method our species has devised of transforming half-formed notions and stray fancies into rigorous, logical thought.
(£) www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...
Very good again by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social

In the US in the Fifties it was possible to watch “a regular TV programme… featuring Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and WH Auden”. (Kenneth Tynan's 1960 review of said programme)

I'll take "made a great point"

The ‘end of history’ was the source of our ills It’s fashionable to romanticise the late 1990s but, from political correctness to TV addiction, it was far from benign

There is a lot of nostalgia for the "end of history" moment at the end of the 1990s but a lot of the ills of modern society can be traced to that era of complacency and spiritual vacuousness
www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...