Red lights and red flags
Sometimes, when I am driving home from hosting my late night Times Radio show, I hit a red traffic light at a roundabout near MediaCity. I think you know where this is going. It’s 01:30. There is nobody around. The red light is for a slip road off the main dual carriageway. It isn’t a […]
The story I didn’t have time to tell you…
A few years ago I made a documentary about a man who claims to be God… and the people who follow him. But there was one story we didn’t quite get time to tell. If you are hearing about this for the first time, I know what you’re thinking: that sounds a bit like a […]
Newsletter: The Pale Blue Dot
It was a couple of hours before Donald Trump promised to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age that humanity did something extraordinary. Under an eruption of blinding white steam and churning orange fire, hundreds of tons of metal and four intrepid humans were thrust into space. The launch of Artemis II is the culmination […]
Newsletter Version: Meet the Attention Activists
Can I have your attention, please? Professor D. Graham Burnett would like it, too. Graham is an historian of tech and science… and through his research has become so passionate about reclaiming our attention from the grip of tech giants and addictive digital media that he has started a new movement. Alongside some colleagues, friends, […]
Why do we feel nostalgic? Newsletter version
Last night, after bathing Molly and putting her to bed, I got stuck into one of my favourite pastimes: taking the bins out. What was once a grubby chore has become a rare moment of solace. It’s just me and the night sky… and the bins. I pause for a moment after I’ve delivered the […]
Charlie Veitch and the New Media
“Grab your popcorn and enjoy your front row seat to the collapse of modern Britain” Last week, I wrote about how a dystopian view of modern Britain is thriving on TikTok. Some people are being served video-after-video on their heavily curated For You feed that depicts a world where everything is broken and everyone is […]
Newsletter Version: TikTok’s Dystopian Britain
Last week, on a trip to North America, I had some strange conversations. 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 were anxious about my safety. They told me they’d heard that Britain was a lawless hellhole… […]
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 […]
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 […]