Friday Reading S02E01

A round-up of some stuff that I enjoyed reading this week which you might enjoy reading too…

Christopher Eccleston: ‘Dementia dismantled my father’s personality’

A genuinely moving piece from Chris Eccleston about dealing with his father’s slide into dementia. Read.

Sheryl Sandberg on grief

Also very moving, but like the Eccleston piece, contains some practical things you can actually do when faced with such a dreadful situation. Read.

Believe In A Land Of Love: New Order’s Low-Life 30 Years On

Great essay about New Order’s “Low-Life” album. I think I was one of the new generation of fans who got into them because of the tunes on this LP, much to the angst of the doom-merchants who’d been following them post-Joy Division. When I first went to see them live, there were people wearing “Hang John Robie” t-shirts in protest at his remix of Sub-Culture. Read.

Pressed to the Edge: Why vinyl hype is destroying the record

Again on a music tip, fascinating piece about how the nostalgia boom in vinyl is actually endangering the small labels who always kept faith with it as a product, and in fact the entire vinyl record production chain itself. Read.

The undoing of Ed Miliband – and how Labour lost the election

Absolutely devastating analysis of the Labour election campaign and Ed Miliband’s leadership. Got to be honest though, it was very difficult to get anybody associated with the party to say a bad word about Ed in the run up to May. Afterwards? Not so much. Read.

Ex-UsVsTh3m and Ampp3d journalist Helena Horton has joined Dazed & Confused.

Read her stuff for top bantz.

A Few Thoughts About Writing (And Quitting) A Newspaper Column in 2015

Text-book blog post on how not to leave a job with grace – complaining about being subbed and given word counts to adhere to in a long clearly unsubbed rant. As was pointed out on Twitter, if you want to write about whatever you like, with an unlimited word-count and no editorial direction, you probably need Tumblr or a blog, not a column in a national newspaper. Unreadable.

What Does It Mean To Be Caitlyn?

Excellent from Miranda Yardley about the way Caitlyn Jenner has been presented in the media – and what that might mean for a transwoman who hasn’t spent nearly a lifetime in the public eye as a powerful and successful white man. Read.

We’re Not Pegs

Thought-provoking about how the way we organise ourselves in games dev and other technology-driven disciplines actually makes our products worse as we all desperately try to make everybody conform to our notions of what people should be like in the workplace. Read.

Panini World Cup stickers: How to pull the ultimate prank on a child

This time last year I was pulling the best dad-prank of my career so far… Read.