Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

NLR is pretty good but pretty rarified as well - i know there isn't anything like this, but the ideal thing would a left-wing edition of the Economist

let's start it, I'm going for a nap and I expect a blueprint by 6pm or whenever I wake

Has Ms B tried the Englang edish of Le Monde Diplo?

i suspected all along that history mayne REALLY fancies david thomson

loool

Bizarre Love Quadrangle with Zizek and Eagleton iirc.

ha Stevie she already reads that in French!

most o_O about the staggers is the continuing career of john "Barack Obama is a glossy Uncle Tom" pilger

I thought Robinson had sold it?

you're right, i totally missed that. dunno why it's still so shit then.

I should reread Pilger's Distant Voices and Heroes to work out whether he was this weird when I was massively into him as a teenager or whether he's got worse over the years. I haven't been able to read his NS stuff a while now.

the new statesman has dropped out of the ABCs

What does this mean?

All future editions will be in cyrillic

ABCs are essentially the league table of circulation figures.

i suppose it's never been exactly mass-market

but when the writers have as little inherent authority as james mcintyre or laurie penny, it's hard to justify the way they get their views inflated into significance by other outlets, basically by trading on the name. bbc news progs frequently use them, because the political editor of the new statesman is traditionally someone to reckon with.

though of course the institute of ideas lot are an even more o_O-worthy group in that context.

It's also a symptom of the exhaustion of the centre-left in this country. The previous generation failed, quick invest your hopes heavily in youth.

Is that Claire Fox's lot? She's a piece of work. The institute of challops.

they're a hoot. don't save that drowning man, it would be patronising implying he can't swim

Lezard's NS column is a good counterpoint to the SlackDad column he used to do for the Guardian, which was all "Oh, I'm so relaxed about childcare, I just open a bottle of wine and let them get on with it. My wife otoh is a wondeful mother ... "

Fast forwad a few years, she's chucked him out & he's living in a bedsit.

lol. it's kind of an object lesson in the limits of self-knowledge. but it's also basically a less sympathetic ed reardon.

11.28am: David Cameron has said the pro-democracy leader's release was "a travesty" and long overdue.

I wish we had a pro-democracy leader

i'm asking mainly because the lovely Emma B is looking for a weekly politics/world affairs magazine that isn't basically right-wing

I used to write abstracts of NS articles and found that it comments on the news rather than giving you the news a lot of the time. Unlike the Economist, which might be right-wing but at least gives you a clearer idea of what the article you're reading is actually about. The NS is always saying things like "recent goings-on in Westminster mean..." but doesn't tell you what the recent goings-on might be, so you have to read something else anyway to find out about them.

I like The World Today, the monthly magazine from Chatham House. I get a nice roundup of world news and a bit of international relations theory thrown in.

John Lanchester has a great line about the Economist in Whoops!, along the lines of how the first 80% of any piece is brilliant, intelligent and meticulously researched but the last 20% is always: "on balance, unregulated free markets are the answer. The end."

they are particularly fond of the sentence "Perhaps."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/nov/14/sarah-palin-alaska-reality-tv

is the guardian the world's easiest paper to troll? who gives a shit about this except them?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/08/chris-huhne-stays-cancun-talks

"Clegg decided that the long-term interests of the planet should take priority over the government's potential difficulties in tomorrow's vote, said the source."

in case you hadn't noticed, that's the PLANET Clegg took into account: waddaguy.

ha, thought of the guardian when i read this

While we’ve been chasing the “conversation” thing, people have drifted away from news because they’re seeing the conversation as fun and entertaining but not very worthwhile compared to really, really good journalism and really, really good reporting. I think that the emphasis that so many organizations have had over the past few years of concentrating on opinion-sharing has been a massive waste of time and resources – and actually almost a cultural crime, because that time and resources could have been put forth to something that was, you know, much more intellectually rigorous, and would have kept the brand… known for its news, rather than known for… being a collection of mad people.

blog.fawny.org/2010/12/14/hammersley-dld10/

That's very OTM.

God help me though, I instinctively scrolled down to read the fucking comments.

A top casting director once rushed up to me after Hero had sung in a cathedral in the south of France insisting that she hadn't seen that quality since casting a young Kate Winslet.

I tried to read that the other day for the lols, but couldn't get past the first sentence where she reveals she named her daughter Hero. What an awful person.

You should have kept reading, her younger brother is called Tybalt!

Christ. I know it's Shakespeare and that, but it's like she thought she was giving birth to a couple of minor characters for a future Battlestar Galactica spinoff.

That's one article where the comments section is useful. I wouldn't have known who this woman was if the commenters hadn't said.

yeah the four-year-old article she wrote for the Mail that gets linked therein is a str8 banger too

From that article:
Lover One: Steve Peake, 48, the Sexy Snapper, who rekindled my sex life. November 2003.

Steve had pitched up in my garden previously to take snaps of my family for Hello!

And she's worried about her kids being on xfactor?

I quite like the name Tybalt.

Her B&B looks splendid as well.
http://www.stcurigschurch.com/

Sounds like a power tool or some kind of alloy.

I was a marquess's daughter with a privileged upbringing, an acting career and a flat in Notting Hill. Simon was an armed robber serving nine years who'd grown up on a council estate.

But in the confines of the prison walls, our very different upbringings didn't matter. As part of the acting workshop I ran in the prison, he played a handsome Macbeth to my Lady Macbeth.

Despite family and friends decrying the match, after a 15-month romance, we married. We went on to have a daughter, Hero, seven, and a son, Tybalt, six, and bought a disused church in Snowdonia. It could have been idyllic. The problems came when I discovered Simon's drug habit, then his affair.

This is incredible stuff. I just want to savour it before I read any further.

clearly the woman's a dobber, but the CiF feeding frenzy is kinda full of unedifying attitudes and assumptions too

I'm not going to actually read a CiF thread to find out.

archive of Times column: http://www.stcurigschurch.com/sunday%20times.htm

Her ancestor gave us the Queensberry Rules, and bankrupted Oscar Wilde.

I was a marquess's daughter with a privileged upbringing, an acting career and a flat in Notting Hill. Simon was an armed robber serving nine years who'd grown up on a council estate.

But in the confines of the prison walls, our very different upbringings didn't matter. As part of the acting workshop I ran in the prison, he played a handsome Macbeth to my Lady Macbeth.

Despite family and friends decrying the match, after a 15-month romance, we married. We went on to have a daughter, Hero, seven, and a son, Tybalt, six, and bought a disused church in Snowdonia. It could have been idyllic. The problems came when I discovered Simon's drug habit, then his affair.

This is incredible stuff. I just want to savour it before I read any further.

― Matt DC, Monday, December 20, 2010 12:13 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

lololololol

That's not a Cif thread, btw. Just sayin' like. Comment is free is the home of opinion pieces. It's not "any Guardian story with user comments enabled".

Comment is free is the home of opinion pieces fucking maniacs.

fixed

PLEASE CAN PEOPLE STOP CROSSING THROUGH THINGS AND WRITING "fixed" IT IS THE MOST ANNOYING PRISSY THING EVER, EVEN MORE ANNOYING AND PRISSY THAN ME.

PLEASE CAN PEOPLE STOP CROSSING THROUGH THINGS AND WRITING "fixed" IT IS THE MOST ANNOYING PRISSY AMAZING SEXY AND WITTY THING EVER, EVEN MORE ANNOYING AND PRISSY THAN ME.

fixed

almost, adhering to guardian proofing standards

and then someone...

YUP, guessed so (xpost)

big link from FRONT PAGE online to this
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/24/view-from-broad-lauren-laverne