Odds and Ends #26: Least crazy candidate wins

Plus American Fiction, some good decarbonising news, and the importance of "Taylor Swift Democrats".

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your newsletter-within-a-newsletter where I share links, short takes and other ephemera that I think you might like.

This week I offer my thoughts on Oscar nominee American Fiction, we’ve got some cool graphs illustrating our decarbonisation progress, and I continue to pick a fight with the New Statesman. Plus an interesting essay that gives me an excuse to mention “Taylor Swift” in my marketing for this edition, and a funny geospatial spot that caused my irony meter to explode.

So let’s get started!

Send me your Nuremberg, Prague, Bratislava and Vienna tips

My partner and I have been planning our summer holiday, and this year we’re going on a railway odyssey around central Europe. I know that my readers are an incredibly smart and well-travelled bunch, so I would love to hear any suggestions you have for things we should do in Nuremberg, Prague, Bratislava and Vienna (we’re also planning to visit Auschwitz but it feels slightly weird to tell people that).

We’re not foodies, so what I’m really angling for is weird stuff that you think I might like (eg, places where interesting treaties were signed, locations of geopolitical intrigue, interesting tech/science things, or maybe some celebrity graves.)

Plus if you happen to live in any of those places and would like to hang out, let me know, as I always enjoy meeting locals when I travel and making them explain the local electoral system to me.

Only you can correct this historic injustice

I was looking at the list of the top newsletters in the Substack World Politics charts the other day – something I, er, definitely don’t do obsessively – and noticed an unfortunate reality: Matt Goodwin, the audience-captured, anti-woke controversialist is somehow forty-five places above me, an audience-captured, mildly woke-skeptic liberal centre-lefty, in the rankings.

I know what you’re thinking – I can’t believe my writing about postcodes hasn’t elevated me to the top of the charts either.

Anyway, we can only fix this grand injustice together. So if you want to stand up for the New Elite, why not subscribe today? Hell, I’m so committed to the cause of sticking it to Goodwin that if you use this button to subscribe, I’ll even give you 20% off an annual subscription if you upgrade your subscription in the next few days:

Now let’s get on with some links.