Friday Reading S14E14

A weekly round-up of what I’ve read and enjoyed from around the web.

I’m interested in journalism, media, technology, and nerdy things found down the back of the world wide web’s sofa. Most weeks I publish a handful of things that caught my eye – regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me. You can subscribe to get it by email here. And if you read something odd and wonderful you think I’d enjoy, feel free to send it my way.

It used to be our parents warning us about the dangers of the internet, but that seems to have flipped around. Simon Usborne talks to the families torn apart by older relatives going far right.

“The 1980s or 90s setting of much of this generative content reveals its origins in the hands of gen Z creators. They are feeding demand for nostalgia among fellow young digital natives who fetishise a pre-smartphone era of mix tapes and Blockbuster stores; think Stranger Things without the monsters. But their videos are hitting a nerve among older cohorts becoming accustomed to a diet of ‘boomerslop’ – clips that range from weird AI twists on traditional cat content to the kinds of unhinged videos being shared by rightwing influencers including boomer-in-chief Donald Trump.”

Read more here: Simon Usborne, The Guardian – ‘I feel like I’m losing her’: the families torn apart by older relatives going far right

It is behind a paywall but the Observer has an investigation into whether AI psychosis is a mental health crisis for the 21st century

Daniel Engber goes out on a limb for the Atlantic and describes the current mania over missing US scientists as – in a strong field – the single dumbest conspiracy theory of 2026.

Incidentally I watched The Conspiracists (2024) this week, which follows a couple of people involved in the 6 January Capitol insurrection in the US, and I began to feel uneasy about the voyeuristic nature of watching these people who have had to deal with trauma in their life and then somehow – thanks to the internet, mostly – converted it not into helping out at the local evangelical church to give them the faith, certainty, community, participation and the false promise of a better tomorrow they need, but instead have latched on to conspiracy.

Tammy, one of the Trump supporters featuring in the documentary

“I found myself withdrawing little green men from the nonsense box in my mind. Either an alien invasion was taking place under our noses or there were some very confused people in the upper echelons of US intelligence. Either way, there was a story to tell. So, much to the surprise of my close friends and family, in the autumn of 2023, I dropped everything and headed to the US to chase aliens.”

Read more here: Daniel Lavelle, The Guardian – The Pentagon released its UFO videos – so I went to the US to chase aliens. This is what I found

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: insurance scams, drinking games and errors of biblical proportions. Guest animal: Jimmy from the Cinema museum in Kennington.

Enjoying Friday Reading by email? Feel free to forward it to a friend – they can sign up here. And if you’ve recently read something you think I would enjoy, do send it my way.

London Centric spent this week in south-west London talking to local teenagers, shop staff and restaurant owners. What we found was a perfect storm of retailers fed up with police inaction on so-called ‘low-level’ crimes such as shoplifting, bored teenagers blurring the lines between filming crimes and participating in them, and viral videos spreading awareness of what people can get away with in the face of security guards trained not to confront teenagers.

I’m thoroughly bored with the people pushing their “London has fallen” agenda, but this is really interesting from London Centric: What actually happened in Clapham last week? [£ – sorry]

A rightly angry and brutal essay from Hannah Shea on what happens online when you tell your story of being sexually assaulted.

Tom Vanderbilt is wistfully – and slightly oddly – nostalgic about old-school street scams, which he says he much prefers to the faceless phone-snatchers of today.

The Face is closing which sucks.

Highlights from a selection from more than 70 galleries at Aipad: The Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York from 22-26 April.

I’m very much taken with this Nine Inch Noize project, and really enjoyed the Tron: Ares remixathon as well, so two NIN releases in the space of a couple of months that have very much done the business for me.

“In death he has maintained arguably the biggest – and certainly the most vocal – fanbase of any deceased celebrity” is quite the understatement. I can imagine it took a significant amount of time to get this piece through the lawyers as well: Can a new biopic change your mind about Michael Jackson?. I’m going to venture to say, not for me Clive, no.

Good lord, the Aadam Jacobs Collection is just thousands and thousands of free live bootlegs the dude has recorded over the years.

*whispers* I don’t ever recall playing Chuckie Egg, one of the ZX Spectrum’s defining games. 40 years on Keith Stuart waxes lyrical about a game which exists thanks to a 15-year-old tea boy who worked a Saturday shift in a computer shop in Greater Manchester. Maybe I should finally give it a whirl on my ZX replicant.

Uefa may finally be thinking about fixing European men’s qualifying to stop top-ranked sides being forced to routinely thump the likes of San Marino and Andorra in uncompetitive matches nobody wants to watch.

Jonny Weeks on the boyhood autographs that remind him of Coventry City’s Premier League heydays.

If you missed it, this week I wrote about my local pub which is changing hands for yet another refit: Adieu to the Bell (for now… again)

Friday Reading is a (usually) weekly series of recommended reads from Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things found on the internet. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive it by email.