TikTok’s Dystopian Britain
Last week I was in North America, and on more than one occasion I spoke to somebody who seemed to pity that I had to live in Britain. They were concerned for me. They told me they’d heard that Britain was a lawless hellhole… with gang ridden streets, wide-spread corruption and an authoritarian regime. Sure, […]
We Are Not a Conspiracy School – BBC Radio 4
Deep in the English countryside, at the end of a winding country late… a sign: NO TRESPASS. STRICTLY BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. If you listen carefully, you can hear the sounds of children playing, carried along by the breeze. Just beyond the hostile sign, there is a place – built around barns, marquees and organic allotments […]
How our biology is being weaponised against us
I have done something gross. I needed to do it. I did it for you. I did it for science, in the name of human exploration. I did it because I was a bit curious. Last week, late one evening, after my partner Michaela had gone to bed… I tasted a drop of her breast […]
Are these terrible times?
The sky was a deep purple, with lashings of red, as emerged from the radio studio a week last Sunday morning. It was a lovely morning. 04:08. Four hours and eight minutes after I should have originally gone home. It’s unusual for me to catch an early sunrise, so I drank in the quiet of […]
How to negotiate with hackers
You know that awful, gut-wrenching feeling in the pit of your stomach when you when you realise something has gone terribly wrong? The bosses of M&S know that feeling well. A few weeks ago, a cyber-attack crippled their business. We don’t know much about what the hackers have demanded, but we do know they sent […]
Cameron Mofid: visiting every country in the world
How has your week been? Accomplished much? Or just enjoyed the sunshine, like me? 24 year old Cameron Mofid from San Diego had a special week, becoming one of the youngest people ever to visit all 195 countries. It’s been a heck of a journey, which included being detained on suspicion of espionage, narrowly avoiding […]
AI Generated ‘True’ Crime: harmful or harmless?
Have you heard of the shocking story of a father in Colorado who had an affair with his step-son, before the whole thing ended in a grizzly murder? A YouTube video about the case on a true crime channel has had millions of views, and people have been asking the local paper why they haven’t […]
Should pensioners move into smaller homes?
Ah, here I am again, pretending to be authoritative on the television. I was on Storm Huntley’s show on Channel 5 and we got to talking about pensioners who live in large houses, younger people struggling to get on the housing ladder, and if older people should downsize to make more homes available for families. […]
The Constitutional Sheriffs: America’s vigilante police
The ‘Constitutional Sheriffs’ are a strange group of vigilante police officers, who believe they have a supreme authority, and are the highest law in the land. They are a conspiracy-fuelled movement with links to violent militias, spreading radical ideas in their local communities. They answer only to the people, God… and Donald Trump. They are […]
Searching for Nicola – two years on.
This month marks the second anniversary of the disappearance of Nicola Bulley – the mum of two who went missing in Lancashire, sparking a media and online frenzy. Neighbours, day-trippers, police, independent investigators and an army of YouTubers, TikTokers and amateur detectives descended onto the scene. And… so did I. Not to try and crack […]