For The Guardian, I wrote about how the rural housing crisis has been exacerbated by the pandemic. This stretches all the way from Devon and Cornwall to the Hebrides. It’s so much worse than I thought it was, and I knew it was bad. Second homes have become a major problem—if you have a second home in an area where there’s a housing crisis you should be renting it (affordably) to the people who are currently being made homeless. Let’s hope something changes, fast. To read it, click here.
I wrote a piece for The Millions about how, in 1979, Italo Calvino predicted the AI author in one of his best-loved novels, and what the reality of that prediction now means for us writers, poets, journalists and translators, Can a machine ever compete in metaphysical matters? What happens to an author’s copyright when a machine learning algorithm “learns” from an author’s work? And what happens when something learns from only “good” works. Click here to read.
I spent an unfortunate amount of time on sex doll/bot forums, and somehow I didn’t lose my sense of humour entirely. Here’s the resulting piece I wrote for the New Statesman. CLICK HERE.
Well, you heard it here first, or maybe you read a science paper that told you first: tree hugging is good for you. Fact. In this article for Breathe I tell you why and I pick the best forests with some of the finest trees to hug.
I’m also happy to divulge that during a recent low point in my life, having written this article a couple of months previously, beneath the moon I hugged a tree in an olive grove. Yes, initially I felt stupid, and during, and afterwards. But it did make me feel better.
You can buy here x
