Owen Booth

‘Bring it on!’: growing support in England for four-day week in schools Why proposals for a shorter working week are winning over teachers and parents – despite the logistical headaches

I think the four-day week movement in general could do a lot of good, but it feels peak Guardian that there's nothing here about how closing schools for an extra day would affect working-class parents with less flexible arrangements than, say, lawyers, development directors and project managers

Say what you like, that guy was so far ahead of his time.

Think of a movie. Double it. Add 6. Take away the movie you first thought of. The answer is 3.

And also this one: owen-booth.com/2025/12/05/h...

Other ends of the world are available… owen-booth.com/2025/11/25/h...

If you don't know Mosley, you may get quite a lot of fun out of this making of a legend. If you have ever known him, you will want to close the book half-way through, and retire to the bathroom to be quietly sick.

Completely in love with this review, by Mancunian suffragist, socialist and Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, of an adoring 1934 biography of Oswald Mosley.

The Obesity Tsar is of course the cousin of the Obesity Kaiser and the Obesity King

Sold!

Some great short story recommendations here…

Pretty sure these were the Oblique Strategy cards that Brian Eno used when producing that Coldplay album…

Same!

How the World Ends #53: Ghosts The world ends when the spirits of the unforgotten dead grow so huge in number that there’s no room left for the living.

Also available on Substack open.substack.com/pub/owen8726...

How the World Ends #53: Ghosts The world ends when the spirits of the unforgotten dead grow so huge in number that there’s no room left for the living. Nobody knows why. The list of ghosts includes: The ghosts of everyone who ev…

I gave up and started writing about the end of the world owen-booth.com/2025/12/07/h...

Newspapers are not on your side

pete_wharmby_books & ••• HADLEY FREEMAN Wes Streeting must stand up to the ADHD activists I can help with the minister's review: some people are just confused by life Hadley Freeman pete_wharmby_books Ah, as expected the right wing press (and Freeman's pipeline from the Guardian op-Ed pages to the Times is worth looking into) is now piling on, suggesting that these scary ADHD activists are just trying to ruin things for everyone. Not, like, try to improve people's self esteem and sense of what is going on. 2025 is so horrifyingly, predictably *boring*

then, the transphobes , feeling victorious at how many people they have made unhappy and despairing in the previous week, move on to anything else that has a spectrum and the possibility of more colours than they can conceive - such hateful people - they cannot understand anything that is not THEM

They pinky promise not to monetise NHS data, though. www.england.nhs.uk/digitaltechn...

NHS England » Report of the independent ADHD Taskforce: Part 1 April 2025

An independent taskforce *just* did a huge review of ADHD in England, and the conclusion was that it's "under-recognised, under-diagnosed and under-treated."
www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/re...

Surely ‘tackling a rising demand for services’ means ‘denying people with ADHD the right to diagnosis and appropriate care’ which: do you want the number of folk on benefits/out of work to drop? Then you need: diagnosis and appropriate care!

It’s almost as if they just want the headlines…

What’s it called when you get shadowbanned except it’s in real life and it’s your friends and family doing it?

The author joyously wearing a Christmas elf hat while swathed in fairy lights

CHRISTMAS IS ON

She's removed Christ's message from Christian times, she's talking about Ian times.

Definitely. And with all toes, God willing. I’ll wait for your nod.

“First Person Wanker”

Screen shot of the words “your order has been cancelled”

And now chaos reigns

Men aren’t vanishing from fiction. The truth is much more complicated As debates over the ‘disappearing’ young male novelist rumble on, some authors and critics push back against claims that fiction has closed its doors to men. Hannah Ewens learns that the real problem ...

It took 7 yrs to find a publisher for my 1st novel because young women writers in the early 2000s weren't currency. Finally a balancing out & the menz are unhappy. Good points here:
'Men aren’t vanishing from fiction. The truth is much more complicated' | The Independent share.google/r26w5CexAUon...

If you find something dull on social media, pass on by. If you walk by a display of power tools on the high street and have feck all interest you don’t go into the shop and tell the staff you have no interest in power tools do you? No. That would be madness and everyone would think you a pisspuffin.

No we don’t! We literally do not! Do I have to engage with my air fryer? Do I have to have a co-dependent relationship with Google Maps?

That would certainly get my vote