Hey, stick around! 20% off annual subscriptions for the next few days.
And hello to new subscribers!
Programming Note: Your regular ‘Odds and Ends’ mini-newsletter rounding up links and shorter takes will be arriving over the weekend.
It turns out picking fights is a great way to sign up new subscribers.
It’s been very exciting watching the reaction to my most recent post on how to fix the New Statesman. Because of my clever business strategy of putting my worst opinions behind a paywall, it meant that for the 24 hours after it went up, every few minutes my inbox would ping with news of another paid subscriber – or to be more accurate, another person signing up to the free trial1.
It turns out that media people really love talking about the media. Who’d have thought?
In any case, I’m under no illusion that many of you are probably not going to stick around for the long haul – you were signing up for the drama, not the annoyingly sensible take hiding behind the incendiary headline.
But now that I’ve got you anyway, and you’ve gone as far as putting in your credit card details, so I’m going to try and persuade you to stick around.
Because if you enjoyed my thing about the New Statesman, you might enjoy my other writing too. It’s not entirely about the Postcode Address File.
More sincerely, it is only with your support that I’m able to write regularly on this Substack – and even the posts I put out for free take time to write. I hugely appreciate your support for my work.
So if you sign up for an annual subscription with THIS SPECIAL LINK, you can get yourself 20% off of the usual annual fee – that’s a discount, on top of a discount, compared to paying monthly.
Now to seal the deal, here’s a short digest of some of favourite posts – to give you a flavour of the sorts of things you can expect to find on Odds and Ends of History.
Building luxury homes for millionaires is good for poor people
A couple of years ago I was radicalised.
It wasn’t that ISIS managed to persuade me that blowing stuff up was a wise idea, nor was I seduced by the allure of becoming a right-wing controversialist.
But I became a die-hard YIMBY supporter.
This is the secret plan for Keir Starmer's big Brexit U-turn
I will be the last Remainer in the jungle.
20 years after the Brexit wars have ended, anthropologists will discover me deep within the forests of Brussels, surrounded by straightened bananas, clothed only in GDPR cookie notices, and babbling under my breath something about “meaningful votes” and “backstops”.
As far as I am concerned, Guy Verhofstadt is too moderate on the issue of European integration. And ‘FBPE’-Twitter isn’t embarrassing enough.
"Woke" is a new ideology and its proponents should admit it
I find it strange that some of the new ideology’s most vocal supporters seem almost afraid to admit that their ideas are new and that the term “wokeness” captures more than just being kind.
But I don’t think they should be afraid. Whatever side of the debate you are on, it should be possible to admit that yes, these ideas are new, and yes, they form a somewhat coherent ideology, and yes, we should seek to understand the implications of this.
Stop letting Elon Musk break your brain
A couple of weeks ago, humanity hit a significant milestone in the history of spaceflight. For the first time, the full-sized, fully-stacked version of a rocket that could conceivably, one-day, for real, take humans to Mars blasted off from its launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas.
And then shortly after take-off, the denizens of Twitter collectively shat the bed.
Twitter's transport experts are wrong, and I know better than them
If there’s one phrase that sums up all of the problems that Britain has faced since 2016, it is probably the one from Michael Gove’s infamous interview on Sky News just before the referendum, when he uttered the immortal line: “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts.”
It’s hard to think of another combination of words that could cause me such an instantaneous fury, short of “James Corden wins lifetime achievement award”.
We should save the High Street by densifying our town and city centres
Today, it’s easy to get sacked from your real life job because of something you’ve posted on social media. Send a poorly worded tweet, or upload an unwise Tiktok, and you can expect to be hauled in front of your bosses first thing on Monday morning to explain yourself.
But the kids today have it so easy. Back when I was a lad, we really had to work hard to get in trouble for unwise internet posting.
The left should stop being 'Intellectual Zambonis' for bad ideas
During the Trump era, the Pod Save America podcast host Jon Lovett coined the phrase “Intellectual Zambonis” to describe the strange phenomenon of serious people who essentially took it upon themselves to clean up Trump’s mess.
The BBC is heading into a death spiral and we should worry about it
The BBC is, regrettably, doomed. Don’t get me wrong. I love the BBC, and I’m always the first in line to defend it from its many stupid critics. But I think it’s impossible to deny that the corporation, as it is currently constituted, is not long for this world.
The Green Party is being bad at being Green
Whether we’re building railway lines or factories to produce batteries, we will inevitably have to chop down some trees, tarmac over some fields and generate some upfront carbon emissions in the process5. A net-zero Britain is not a green and pleasant land, it’s an industrial estate in Slough without any chimneys, and an eight-lane motorway packed with battery-powered heavy goods vehicles.
Nobody cares about local government – but we can make them
I hate to say it, but I really like my local Tory councillor.
Yes it really is only two years since my partner and I, both lefty-liberal types, reached our mid-30s/early 40s, bought a house and moved out of London to the Kent commuter belt.
I didn’t think we’d go native this quickly either.
We should be more honest about the role that status-seeking plays in debates
My least surprising opinion is that, of course, I loved Succession. I don’t say this lightly, but I think it might be the greatest television show of all time. What I love about the show is that it doesn’t need to use many of the hackiest tropes in TV to tell the story. There are no flashbacks. There are no dream sequences. And the show only seldom uses cliff-hangers.
It's crazy how much Transport for London can learn about us from our mobile data
Something that EE, O2 and Vodafone all do, but don’t really love to shout about is sell anonymised, aggregated data on our physical movements to local authorities, transit agencies and any other companies with a chequebook large enough.
And that’s why today I’m going to tell you about some of the really mad things that Transport for London (TfL) can figure out about us by using our location data, provided by the O2 mobile network.
And finally, the most important post on the Odds and Ends of History canon:
This one weird trick could fix the British economy
If you have the sheer audacity to imagine that you might want to use address data on a website, then the fees hike even more, to at least £6,150. Or if you want to use the data across an organisation, you can look forward to paying £18,400. Every. Single. Year.
Here’s THAT SPECIAL LINK again – I hope you newbies will stick with me and join us on Odds and Ends of History!
Shame on the cheapskates who used a clever paywall avoiding trick, taking Dreamies from the mouths of Hashtag and Boudicca.