Nick Hilton

Curtis Sittenfeld in @theobserveruk.bsky.social confirming that her much loved coming of age novel is being adapted by Netflix as a limited series… 👀

observer.co.uk/culture/inte...

I don't know if this is part of the discourse about the show, but How to Get to Heaven From Belfast (which I'm largely enjoying) has one of the worst title sequences I've seen in the several years I've been reviewing telly.

Will be fascinating to see what this guy's idea for "how to save the media" is.

I adore these nostalgia Facebook groups which are a bizarre combination of incredibly banal observations ("remember this specific advert for grout from 1982?") and Nabokovian unreliable narrator auto-fiction.

Babysitters are woke nonsense!!!

Front Row - Ukraine Unbroken - New Plays Responding to the War - BBC Sounds David Edgar on his play about the war in Ukraine. Mariia Petrovska plays the bandura.

I was on Front Row last night talking about changes to Ofcom's remit and the question of whether they'll ever be given powers to regulate content on social platforms like YouTube (chat from 35:39).
www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Perfect reading for the train

Brilliant that WH Smith are still championing print media through their Magazine of the Week selection in newsstands. Now to check which worthy publication they’ve opted for this week…

ITV’s Sarah Ferguson drama The Lady just feels uncomfortable – review Four-parter tells the story of how Fergie’s assistant Jane Andrews ended up in prison for commiting a brutal murder

I thought ITV's The Lady was more than a little icky, and exposes how the pollutant powers of the royals can extend even to true crime commissioners.

www.independent.co.uk/arts-enterta...

Gisèle Pelicot and the language of rape culture In her memoir, Pelicot examines the vocabulary of sex and violence in the bedroom, the chatroom and the courtroom. She insists that the way men talk about women matters

The Pelicot case is about rape and violence, of course, but it’s also about misogyny and the internet. The horror of the crime is easy to condemn; the quotidian horror of internet rape culture, harder.

observer.co.uk/style/featur...

Beyond my control, my Instagram algorithm is dominated by two competing forces: the sports algorithm, and the pervert algorithm. As a result, I am currently getting 99% figure skating content.

Thank you Instagram for suggesting me this post: John Patrick Shanley, Oscar/Pulitzer winning writer of Moonstruck and Doubt, taking a creep shot of some woman on the subway 🫠

One of my main takeaways from the movie SEND HELP (which I just watched) is that it should, surely, be called GET HELP.

The Spectator is asking the question, but I fear they may not like the answer...

Being Gordon Ramsay is sanitised propaganda that lacks proper honesty – review There’s a psychologically compelling show to be made about Gordon Ramsay, but this isn’t it

Kitchen Nightmares superfan disappointed by show that is not Kitchen Nightmares.

www.independent.co.uk/arts-enterta...

This guy spent $16.5m on a Pokemon card in further late capitalist nonsense. This is the opposite of doing the impossible - doing the eminently possible and making it look very, very hard.

Macclesfield v Brentford in the 4th round of the FA Cup not being on BBC One is a disgrace. Sleepy Keir Starmer should've intervened.

The latest way that one AI service is interacting (negatively) with another: setting terrible memes against a backdrop of images of nature, to trick the algorithm into thinking it isn't just regurgitated slop. Dead internet, dead planet.

The TsunamAI: are our systems ready for the coming flood of vexatious AI? Shortly I will send out my subscriber-only email, The Frigest, with stray thoughts, recommendations and gossip.

I see that people are writing again about "the AI tsunami" without the courage to use my, hard to pronounce, coinage.
open.substack.com/pub/futurepr...

I pay(!) for a West Ham patreon that has started distributing a podcast dedicated, bizarrely, to all things non-West Ham. Today's episode is about "the weird and wonderful world of Science". Enough to restore your faith in the power of the podcast.

Dream line-up!

Is the ‘Internet craze’ the fact that chicken and chips cost like £4 whereas fish and chips now is at least £15 most places?

The Night Manager’s grand finale was merciless, and often implausible – review Hugh Laurie’s weight of charisma has been a gift to this series, which in its latter stages has been let down by implausible character development

I found The Night Manager’s season two finale unconvincing…

www.independent.co.uk/arts-enterta...

‘Melania’ Arrives With Strong Box Office Showing for a Documentary

Lots of things can be true simultaneously:

• Melania is a very bad film.
• Melania is (probably) the most expensive feature documentary ever made.
• Melania's marketing budget is likely 10x any other doc ever.
• Melania will do well at the box office, for a doc.
• Melania is a very bad film.

Global Britain is back, baby!

Living our best/worst lives.

These are the last two movies I watched.

Melania Trump is a scowling void of pure nothingness in her ghastly film – review

REVIEW | Melania Trump is a scowling void of pure nothingness in her ghastly film

Melania Trump is a scowling void of pure nothingness in her ghastly film – review Hitting cinemas as the streets of America remain filled with the angry and grieving, the vulgar, gilded lifestyle of the Trumps makes them look like Marie Antoinette skulking in her cake-filled chatea...

I went to the 1pm screening of Melania at the Vue in the Fulham Broadway shopping centre, alongside a dozen other masochists. It was worse than I thought it would – a pure distillation of cinematic malevolence. Half-propaganda, half-bung; all-unwatchable.
www.independent.co.uk/arts-enterta...

Bridgerton season 4 feels like AI slop but is somehow still enjoyable – review Luke Thompson and Yerin Ha lead the new series which, for all its predictability, is reliably pleasant to watch

My thoughts on Bridgerton, now in its fourth series, providing much the same as ever.