100 word story: nightmare: He’s woken by her twitching beside him in the undergrowth, dreaming. Small gasps and whimpers as she squirms and jerks, eyes closed, body tensing and arching in the pitch dark under the black polythene sheet. It crackles as she moves, water dripping off the branches above them. He wants to reach out …

100 words - defiance: Two of us were studying music for the exams at the end of high school, and I was the only one also in the school band, private piano lessons, the village brass band, a swing jazz band doing gigs in the evenings. Music, as someone said, was my life. But I wasn’t on the list of the school’s best …

Finished reading: The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota 📚 Very English -Yorkshire countryside, botched communication, embarrassed romance, virulent racism.

Finished reading: Hello, Transcriber by Hannah Morrissey 📚 Midwest smalltown shithole noir, feels like no-budget indie film. Enjoyably scuzzy and down at heel.

Finished reading: Torch by lin anderson 📚 Meh.

Trump’s best thought of as a social media platform in himself. He exists to keep people’s attention; that’s his remuneration. more than the money. He has to come up with more and more weird, demanding stuff to keep that attention. The rest is just a means to that end.

Mama: The woman in the supermarket queue in front of me is swivelling left to right, eyes panicky wide, combing the gaudy aisles of the supermarket. Wedged into place, she tries to bend light around people cross-currenting through the wide gutter between the cash registers and the rows of shelves to see …

Finished reading: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad - Daniel Finkelstein: Finished reading: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein 📚 Everybody should read this. It manages to put both the Holocaust and the Stalinist famines in human terms and closer to comprehensible than anything else I’ve read.

Finished reading: Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd 📚 More of the reliably cracking mid-20th century Zeligishness, somewhere in the general ballpark of Greene, Deighton and Muriel Spark.

Finished reading: The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov 📚 Snarky and charming police procedural where the police are ambivalent and making up the procedure as they go along.

On the opposite pavement, a bloke in a tracksuit has paused, phone in hand, to shout at my compost recycling bin.

Abandoned: Death Under Little Sky by Stig Abell 📚 This is what happens when an arts journalist thinks he’ll knock out a cosey whodunit during lockdown and it turns out he’s never heard a human speak and can’t manufacture a moment’s suspense. Holy fuck it’s awful. Did not finish.

Finished reading: Sociopath by Patric Gagne 📚 I had far more sympathy for sociopaths after reading this than I did before. Which is exactly what a sociopath would want, when you think about it…

I’ve lost interest in politics. British politics isn’t relevant, I don’t have the appetite to the learn the detail of Canadian politics, and anyway, it’s all mad and scary, and will happen whether or not I know about it.

Finished reading: [The Seventh Floor: A Novel](https://micro.blog/books/9781324086697) by David McCloskey 📚: As everyone says, McCloskey’s very good, and shifting more to character and personal betrayals just makes him even better.

Finished reading: [Careless People](https://micro.blog/books/9781250391247) by Sarah Wynn-Williams 📚: Another one of those tech bro biogs where all the good bits have been in the news anyway.

Grave: The sexton had seen this before. A year after the funeral, a thin strip of pale dead yellow grass outlined the shape of a coffin in the burial ground, like it had been crushed by the dark. The sexton had known the occupant of the coffin and he was happier now she was in the earth instead of on it. …

Finished reading: Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper 📚 Well executed LA Confidential/Chinatown update. Quality pulp fiction.

Song: The lino round the base of the toilet is badly cut, leaving a few millimetres of gap between the porcelain and the curled edge of the vinyl. He lays on his side just a few centimetres away, the floor digging into his shoulder. He’s surrounded by the unforgiving hardness and months of built up scum, …

Finished reading: Patriot by Alexei Navalny 📚 There’s a really good doc with him on BBC iPlayer, which would be time better spent.

Finished reading: Daughter Of Mine by Megan Miranda 📚 Murky past and the web of family tensions in small town America wrapped round a murder mystery. Smart and nuanced, if a bit complicated to keep tabs on if you listen rather than read it.

Gang: She catches up with him in the corridor outside the classroom. He’s backed into a corner, she’s holding back, swaying from her ankles, her hand gripping her shoulderbag, pulling the strap down taut. They each have thousands of words - using a few is what just turned the classroom into a killing jar …

The standard metric for measuring written English clarity in science is called Hemingway. I assume that’s because he worked hard to write clear, simple, concrete prose, rather than ending up alone with his cats, a bottle of rum, and a shotgun.: 

Motel: The reason it’s a cliché is because it’s true, Lloyd Cole sung, clunkily. But the cliché is also true, like mirrors facing each other, infinitely reflecting each other, or a fractal. And none more cliched than American motels. Neon signs, a strip of single storey down at heel rooms at the back with …

Finished reading: Don’t Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli 📚 PG Wodehouse on a bad day pastiching Raymond Chandler. Still wittier than most allegedly ‘humorous’ thrillers though, and an appealingly nasty darkness.

Think public involvement is just a tick-box exercise? So did a lot of the researchers whose grants got rejected. Here’s how to actually get funded: bit.ly/ppiefundi…

Finished reading: Lucifer’s Banker by Bradley C. Birkenfeld 📚 Messianic blowhard international banker turns dickwaving/self pitying whistleblower after his employers clip his self aggrandising ego. Worth reading for the epic lack of self awareness.

The secret grants panels won’t tell you… Many applications are rejected for bad public involvement plans. Not the science. Not the budget. Just how you involve the public. Most researchers treat it like paperwork. Here’s how to play the game — and win: bit.ly/ppiefundi…

Want to know the one thing that could make or break your next research grant? (Hint: It’s not your methods or budget.) Too many applications fail on public engagement — but almost no one talks about how to do it well. Here’s how to stand out: bit.ly/ppiefundi…

Public involvement is the most underrated skill in clinical research. It’s not just a box to tick — it’s how you get funded. Many rejected grants fail on this… but most researchers treat it like an afterthought. Do it properly, and outshine the competition. Here’s how: …

Butterflies: You wouldn’t look twice at the Butterflies Of The Night. The secret of their international dominance has been keeping it drab. Even their outer clothing is matte, as though absorbing light and reflecting none back. You have been surrounded by them and never noticed, I guarantee. When the emergency …

Fishing: The winches at the back of the Jerry’s boat creak and haul the net into the stern, and Jerry’s eyes are pinned on the winch, his hand tight on the throttle lever, his breath tight in his chest. Finally the net’s all reeled in, except for its end coiled up in a layered tube, like a bright orange …

Just watching the Trump Not State Of The Union. Do you think Americans understand what a bunch of thick twats they come across as when they chant ‘USA USA USA’?

Family: He knows where each stair creaks, whether it will groan when his foot hits the left, the right, or the middle, as he creeps slowly down from his bedroom. Through the living room door at the bottom, he maps the peaks and crevasses of his parents’ war. Or worse, he hears nothing but the burning fuse …

Finished reading: Fire Weather by John Vaillant 📚 Scary and inclusive, with a nice linking of the fire’s voraciousness with the oil industry’s greed.

Saloon: Amongst the increasing dross on Substack, there’s someone putting up a word each day as the prompt for a 100-word ‘story’. Plot’s pretty limited at that length, but there’s room for brief character sketches. Here’s a first bash. “Saloon to the left. Snug to …

I was never lost on boyhood bike rides, until I got home: As a child, I never got lost when I was out. That only happened once I got home.

Trump planned the ambush to make up ground with his base after he was nice to other foreigners earlier in the week, but the angle of attack was a straightforward narcissistic rant because Zelensky wasn’t being grateful enough to placate the big fragile orange ego.

The stroppy, awkward independence of open source: For at least the last 25 years, since I read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, I’ve flirted with Linux every so often, and it’s so much better now than it was. I think Apple’s pricing and Windows' cruft and AI might be making it time to move. My latest flirt is with the Linux …

Up your Chromebook game with this simple file manager trick: I’ve been using a Chromebook as my main computer for months now, and for almost everything, it’s a great laptop. Almost everything. The one thing it lacks is halfway usable file management. The ChromeOS file manager is like using a particularly clunky website from 2009 which needs to sync to the …

How it feels to not grieve your parents: When Logan Roy died fishing his iPhone out of the toilet on his private jet in Succession, his daughter Shiv hesitated over whether to go and see his body. Her brother Roman clocked what was going on in her head, as co-traumatised siblings tend to, and said ‘he’s not going to shout at you if you …

Finished reading: Harlan Coben - Win by Harlan Coben 📚 His books are so much smarter and snarkier than his TV series.

At the diner table next to me, a middle aged man monologues about painting his house, taxes and other middle aged man things to his largely silent adult daughter. Eventually he asks about how her mother’s doing.

Snotty upmarket opticians: no sir, that loose hinge on your glasses is irreparable. You will need a new pair. Walmart opticians: give me five minutes, I’ll glue it, no charge.

Writing across iOS and Chromebook - the options: I’m spending far too much time recently figuring out my best options for writing apps across a bunch of platforms, and having finally been forced to tabulate my findings for my own benefit, though I might as well stick them as a blogpost. Table below, for the impatient, but for the more patient, …

You know when you're researching one thing and you discover something else entirely? That's how this piece started.... it's about recruiting patients into clinical studies.: Latest sciencey comms newsletter open.substack.com/pub/trues… newsletter.

Finished reading: We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets 📚 Douglas Coupland lite, hyped because of the social media moral panic.

Finished reading: Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra 📚 I read it fast, which is a good sign. One of those ‘does what it says on the can really well’ books.

TIL that Google Keep doesn’t have a way to add photos from Google Photos. Image files from your drives, yes. Photos Google already knows about, not so much.

Roses are read Violets are blue The ASCII for ‘space’ Is Code 32

Snowy, innit.

Another sciencey communicationsy newsletter, about explaining your work to your mother. And other civilians. open.substack.com/pub/trues…

When I log into iCloud in Chrome I get a weird serif font in Reminders. On the other iCloud account, same browser, literally logging out of one account and into another, I get the right design. I’ve cleared the cache, logged in and out, and the wrong font has persisted for months. Thoughts?

I find I’m filtering all the coverage of the US through my ‘what would the Germany-in-1933 version of that be?’ touchstone to gauge implications.

Disturbed to find Martin from Friday Night Dinner as a murderous baddie in the very bad final Da Vinci Code film. He has yet to say ‘shit on it’ and his shirt remains on, however.

Most journalists (some of my best friends etc.) want to get the story right, but they need your help. Find out what you can do in this close analysis of me getting the wrong end of the stick over a story this week. truesciencestories.substack.com/p/how-to-…

Most journalists (some of my best friends etc.) want to get the story right, but they need your help. Find out what you can do in this close analysis of me getting the wrong end of the stick over a story this week. truesciencestories.substack.com/p/how-to-…

A planned post for my True Science Stories substack about how a study got covered in the media didn’t turn out how I expected. Always good to figure out when you’re wrong why you got it wrong. Full confession in tomorrow’s newsletter. open.substack.com/pub/trues…

I think humanity is safe from AI for the moment. I just had to beat Google’s Gemini into submission after it had come up with four erroneous ‘solutions’ to a thing I wanted to do on Substack before admitting it couldn’t be done. It’s like dealing with a toddler who’s just discovered lying.

Et tu, BBC? : Just heard Fi Glover on Times Radio being immensely dense about a study saying banning phones in school doesn’t materially affect educational benefits. However much the lead researcher patiently explained the point was that school use made little difference because most use is out of school, Glover …

Trump trying to outsource taxation and make other countries pay for the US via tariffs is a kind of analogy for how he wants likes to manage his narcissistic emotions, by forcing other people to make him feel good inside.

Finished reading: Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks 📚 Really interesting stuff about early psychiatric/neurology research, but not enough plot and too much about building cable cars.

A dudebro behind me in this café, having grown weary of praising Trump oh-so-ironically, is now explaining to a fellow dudebro how Kraftwerk invented synthesisers.

My attempt to provoke Gemini into an existential crisis by asking what the point of it was just failed.: I asked it to collate contact names from public websites like LinkedIn and employee profile pages. But it can’t use that dataset. It can make up researchers, departments and institutions and only admit it when you point this out. I’m only getting scared of AI when it stops recommending I …

When you realise that of your five Substack readers, one is yourself, another is your ex wife keeping tabs, and another is a bot. The other two are old clients.

How the fuck does anyone ever break through Substack if they don’t bring followers with them?

Things coming together : Reading through some old journal entries about the whys and hows of my writing. I’d come a long way when I wrote them nearly theee years ago, and I’ve come further now. I needed the healthy, supportive relationship I have now and also, I’m realising, the time and distance I’m getting by moving to …

When accidentally leaving your laptop at home reminds you that sometimes scrawling stuff into an actual physical paper notebook hits a vein of way better ideas.

Oscillating between anxiety about paying bills (unwarranted because I can afford them) and reassuring myself that Big New Plans are panning out as I wanted, just slowly. Which I also expected.

Today I found out that Canada could’ve joined the nukes club at the start of the Cold War but chose not to, unlike the UK, which should’ve made the same decision.

As a Brit in Canada, this whole Trump Tariffs insanity is sounding very much like Brexit - the triumph of deluded bigotry over the mutual benefits of trade and compromise.

Alistair Campbell on TRIP: “I don’t consider myself part of The Establishment” Also Alistair Campbell on TRIP: “As I was saying to Al Gore…”

Trying to file the current lunacy south of the border as some half arsed mafia state rather than the demise of a country I used to think of the least bad option for a world power. But sometimes things get close to home… like POTUS cancelling all government funded clinical research. I mean. WTAF.

Talking to a friend in the UK today and realised I’m actually used to -5c being ‘warm’. This is what two months in Canada does to a Brit….

Turns out going to the pub to watch jazz and get drunk with your partner is a very nice way to spend Sunday afternoon

Finished reading: Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore 📚 The chapters on his death and the subsequent manoeuvring, with some of the players and their relatives hanging on into the Gorbachev era are actually the best bits. Makes me want to rewatch Ianucci’s Death of Stalin.

The Paramount version of Le Bureau (The Agency) doesnt have the panache and elan and sheer … Frenchness …of the original.

Currently reading: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann 📚 Wish me luck. It’s a long climb.

A lot of Canada so far has been white snowy parking lots at night hard cut with near-empty zombie mall stores.

Currently reading: Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore 📚 There’s a lot of juicy gossip in here, but you have to wade through a lot of tedium too.