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Articles by Will Self
Samizdata quote of the day – Graham Linehan puts the boot in
Will Self manages the same trick, in his own register. He recently published a piece he had the nerve to call J’Accuse, in which he put the invented term “gender criticality” in scare quotes, for fear that the rest of his prose might touch against it, and treated a position that would have been unremarkable a decade ago as self-evidently disreputable now. Self doesn’t do Jon’s soft, sorrowful faux-concern.
Jason Arday: J'Accuse the British Media
Prime Minister, You have been in office for less than a month. It would therefore be absurd to hold you responsible for the events that preceded the death of Professor Jason Arday. But you have already said something about his death that makes what happens next your responsibility. You called it a tragedy 'on so many levels'.
America is Too Stoned | Will Self
Jeremiad Reflections on an uncool half-century of cannabis use. A national contact-high is being created by the consumption of 0.4g of the sticky-icky per person, per day.
The Quantity Theory of Morality
Brave New World By Grove 368pp £18.99 Subscribe or Sign In to read the full article For People Who Devour Books Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website. Visit our Bookshop Browse our selection of reviewed and recommended books
How to talk to an Uber driver
The first Uber driver I summoned had a sharp trowel-shaped beard — and was angry. But then I had committed the cardinal error of tapping on the rear window of his vehicle.
LSE Literary Weekend - I Shall Die by Inches: Contemporary Approaches to Death and Dying
Sunday 1 March 2009 | 1 hour 23 minutes 15 seconds "All but death" wrote Emily Dickinson "can be adjusted", and yet, the cold fact that bodies must eventually die only serves to hide the reality of death as a contested cultural domain, where competing notions of public and private, tradition and innovation, individual and collective, are played out, and discourses within literature, art, jurisprudence, medicine, religion, and politics all stake their claim to knowledge of the great unknown.
GPS - County Highway
The great French philosopher of the quotidian, Michel de Certeau, argued that “space is practiced place.” What he meant by this is that while places are given spatio-temporal locations, commonly assented to, space is the particular way we choose — both as individuals and groups — to inhabit or otherwise traverse them. Private ownership and other property titles and exclusions on land use necessarily impede some people’s ability to “practice place,” while enhancing others.
The View-Master - County Highway
Essay The more ubiquitous our image-making machinery gets, the rarer independent perception and personality become. ‘One of the most sublime — if highly introverted — experiences you can have is examining a View Master transparency exposed on a sunny day, on a cloudy one.’ I struggle to convince myself that t’s all just entertainment.
The Sons of Liberty | Jim Shepard
Report In the woods with Sasquatch and the Red-Haired Dancer Who is engineering the weather? Sundown, you better take care, if I find you been creeping ’round my back-stairs Bett Williams My friend Ashlea Stinnett invited me to a Bigfoot campout in Washington State. I brought the Red-Haired Dancer with me, fully aware of our interloper status.
Up, Up, and Away | Walter Kirn
Concert Forget ‘Sinners.’ 88-year-old bluesman Buddy Guy is the epitome of rude health, ripping cosmic solos and jerking his neck around like a serpent. ‘We’re talking about chicken here.’ Derek Trucks and his wife Susan ain’t bad, either. Armin Rosen Buddy Guy, born in a small town on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi river on July 30th, 1936, is America’s last surviving human embodiment of the blues.
The Highest-Paid NCAA Basketball Coaches, 2025 Edition
The men's NCAA Tournament Final Four is set. If you don't enjoy upsets, this has been the tournament for you. All four No. 1 seeds reached the Final Four, just the second time that's ever happened. Only one double-digit seed made it to the Sweet Sixteen, and it was Arkansas, led by John Calipari. Not exactly a Cinderella underdog story. As the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight unfolded, we saw a couple of close calls.
Will Self: Careless Whiskers
The Long and the Short of Growing a BeardHerbert Dorfman Having let things go over the winter to the extent that I completely forgot what the best a man can get is, I asked the youngest, who’s been left behind to look after the greybeard by his siblings, what I should do, tonsorially speaking.
Paul Genders - Secret Histories
Secret Histories By Grove Press 304pp £18.99 Subscribe or Sign In to read the full article For People Who Devour Books
Ithaca, by Will Self
Somewhere, Freud remarks that he who is his mother’s favorite will carry that victory with him to the end of his days. I believe this may well be the case for me—but, as many other favored children can confirm, the victory is almost always a Pyrrhic one. How do I know this? Well, in part because I’ve spent the past two years both contemplating the possibility of my imminent demise and writing another novel about my mother. That’s right—another one.
Will Self’s impressive paean to his mother’s frustrating life in the US
Will Self’s recent, exceptional fictional trilogy, comprising Umbrella, Shark and Phone, displays a deep preoccupation with the ways that time, memory, family, psychosis and history interact. The novels are complex, multigenerational narratives, composed in a late modernist style as engaging as it is experimental. Formal playfulness, with the prose switching between its characters’ consciousnesses, sometimes even midsentence, is married to solidly satisfying plots.
Spectral Evidence - A testimony in fragments | Neighbourhood Paper
O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,That has such people in’t. — William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206 Take a walk through the land of shadowsTake a walk through the peaceful meadowsDon’t look so disappointedIt isn’t what you hoped for, is it? – Talking Heads, ‘Memories Can’t Wait’ You Xiaoli was standing, precariously balanced, on a stool.
Mina’s Matchbox
Yoko Ogawa, trans. from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. Pantheon, $28 (288p) ISBN 978-0-593-31608-5 In Ogawa’s captivating latest (after The Memory Police), a Japanese woman looks back 30 years to 1972, the year she stayed with her aunt’s family in the coastal town of Ashiya, and reflects on the secrets she uncovered there. Tomoko is 12 when she leaves her home in Tokyo while her widowed mother attends a course for dressmaking.
Camminare è politica
Questo articolo è stato pubblicato il 20 aprile 2012 nel numero 945 di Internazionale. La donna vaga per le strade della città.
The Despotic Origins of the World's First Men's Style Magazine
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The Despotic Origins of the World's First Men's Style Magazine
Your eyes un-gum at cock’s crow, and there’s a bleary view of dawn through the dormer window: you may be a knight of the realm, but you’re a pretty damn lowly one, so your room is in the attic of the Le Grand Commun, the building the King has allocated to those nobility who, at his command — and dependent upon his sinecure — are permanently resident at court. It may be early, but you go straight from languor to ardour. And for what?
November 11, 2023 - Air Mail
London Feels It Brits See You Next Tuesday SIGHT SEER Gods and Monsters PALACE INTRIGUE SAY ANYTHING BUT, WAIT, THERE’S MORE! Issue No. 226 The View from Here It was the worst of times, it was the best of times The London List Meet the 25 irrepressible young talents lighting up the scene School for Scoundrels Eton College has long played an outsize role in Great Britain’s public life.
The London Nobody Knows
13 hours ago ‘Did you forget your resignation letter?’: Suella Braverman confronted at Hertfordshire home The Independent - Holly Patrick • 13h Suella Braverman was confronted by a shout of “Did you forget your resignation letter?” as she left her home in Hertfordshire on Friday (10 November) amid calls for her to be sacked for her comments accusing police of bias.
Will Self on Discovering London by Foot
There are fewer than 20,000 licensed black-cab drivers remaining in London, yet despite the inception of G.P.S. navigation systems, all of them are still exhaustively schooled in the geography of a conurbation so massive, so old, and so storied that its epithets—the Great Wen, the Smoke—conjure up primordial images of a chaotic, infective environment.
The Psychobabble of Everyday Life
I asked a colleague how he was and, being a conscientious parent, he began talking about the welfare of one of his children rather than his own. His son is about to sit his GCSEs and revision isn’t going well – a bit like the Homer Simpson gag, every time the kid learns something new, what knowledge he already has seems to fall out of the back of his head.
Patient Notes | Will Self
I was pleased to review this sixty-one-year-old man in clinic today, referred for suspected Zombieism. His blood pressure was 0/0, his temperature room, his pulse nonexistent. On examination I found that if I lifted any of his limbs then let go, they couldn’t maintain rigidity and dropped immediately; palpation of the stomach released large amounts of trapped afflatus. I asked the patient to provide a urine sample, but he was unable; he also told me he hadn’t moved his bowels in weeks.
Could Ketamine Be the Cure for Chronic Depression? MH Investigates
Sitting on top of the health pages on the BBC website reads the headline: Kent man with depression calls for ketamine prescriptions. Simon Bottle is a businessman campaigning for the NHS to prescribe ketamine tor patients who have not responded to other forms of antidepressants.
Wild Houses | Grove Atlantic
With his acclaimed and award-winning collections Young Skins and Homesickness Colin Barrett cemented his reputation as one of contemporary Irish literature’s most daring stylists. Praised by the Oprah Daily as “a doyen of the sentence,” and by the Los Angeles Times as a writer of “unique genius,” Barrett now expands his canvas with a debut novel that contains as much grit, plot, and linguistic energy as any of his celebrated short stories.
‘We Need to Take Back Responsibility for Our Health,' Says Will Self
“Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer.” Or so Arnie would have you believe. By contrast, today’s gym bros swear by GOMAD (gallon of milk a day) and feel pangs of guilt just looking at a pint. But is beer really on the banned list? The nutritional know-it-alls at Examine.com have the answer. To answer this question, let’s first consider the markers researchers can measure.
‘We Need to Take Back Responsibility for Our Health,' Says Will Self
Our health service is unwell. You’ve read the news stories – staff at breaking point, pitiless waiting times, patients languishing in corridors. The problems it faces are deep and knotty, though hope is not lost. Whether the solutions lie in smarter funding, technological innovation, or even our own actions, there are bright minds at work to find them. For this series, MH assembled a team of field-leading thinkers to share their strategies. Is it a case of whither the NHS, or wither the NHS?
The Mind-Bending Fiction of Mircea Cărtărescu
In his celebrated 1873 essay “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche argued that the problem with human understanding is that humanity can never truly understand itself. Even our very language is suspect to the highest degree, born as it is not out of some loftily universal capability, but rather deriving from the messy contingencies of our bodily reality. “What is a word?” Nietzsche hectors us.
OPINION - Will Self: There is a surprising joy hidden within London’s glorious, historic churches
Read full article Will Self (Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures) I have a confession to make: while not being a Catholic — or even a practicing Anglican — I’m a regular attendee at evensong church services. In this, I’m my late mother’s son: she was an agnostic like me, but always used to say she found great solace and aesthetic pleasure in attending church. For years — decades, even — I found this a pretty absurd notion.
“Books are prohibitively expensive in South Africa“
Why did you decide not to include the perspective of a key protagonist, Salome, the black servant who was promised a house at the start of the novel? My decision to leave out the inner lives of the black characters was taken because those inner lives are not really part of the white South African awareness. And that’s a fact that fuelled apartheid. I wanted that absence to speak. The silence of Salome and the other characters is eloquent, but in a very problematic way.
Will Self: There is a surprising joy hidden within London’s glorious, historic churches
Now all that has changed — and changed so comprehensively that I regret my former resistance, and regret as well all the beautiful, affecting evensongs I’ve missed out on. What brought about this change? Age is, of course, a factor. The older you get, the less embarrassment you feel about anything. Then there was the pandemic and lockdowns. I’ve always been an architecture buff and gained great enjoyment from visiting London’s superb churches.
Just When Did the Shine Leave My Shoes?
It was an old friend’s absolute end — but also the beginning of the end, if not of life itself then at least of a period in mine that was a kind of living death. There we all were: a gaggle of contemporary folk at a funeral, displaying the mandated heterodox fashion sense. Some were properly in mourning — others alluded to the fact with a dark jacket thrown over an inappropriately vernal shirt or blouse.
Letterman, by Will Self
In January, it was reported that an English hepatic surgeon who had inscribed his own initials at least twice on the livers of patients was finally—after nine years, a criminal proceeding, and two disciplinary tribunals—banned from practicing medicine for life.
The British Monarchy Should Die With Queen Elizabeth II
Don’t get caught up in sentimentality over Elizabeth’s death. This ridiculous institution needs to go. Americans who are tempted to use the death of Queen Elizabeth for an excuse to indulge in a vicarious modern monarchism—all Oprah/Meghan Markle style, no real substance—would do well to remember the harsh facts: the House of Windsor is as important in terms of the British constitution as the Targaryens are to the Iron Throne.
Artificial Intelligene can exacerbate inequalities
August 2022 Surveillance, policing, data collection: Artifical Intelligence is now part of our everyday lives. Are we being equally impacted by these new technologies? In certain areas, such as policing, migration control, and social risk assessment – AI can have discriminatory effects and exacerbate existing inequalities.
Under The Banner of Heaven
True crime in the American heartland. Under the Banner of Heaven is a riveting account of Mormon fundamentalism and renegade prophets. From the bestselling author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. Now a major TV miniseries starring Andrew Garfield. Brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty insist they were commanded to kill by God. Jon Krakauer‘s investigation into the murder of a mother and her child is a meticulously researched, bone-chilling narrative of polygamy, savage violence and unyielding faith.
My Nemesis | Grove Atlantic
Tessa is a successful writer who develops a friendship, first by correspondence and then in person, with Charlie, a ruggedly handsome philosopher and scholar based in Los Angeles. Sparks fly as they exchange ideas about Camus and masculine desire, and their intellectual connection promises more—but there are obstacles to this burgeoning relationship.
My debt to Boris Johnson
Back in 1997 when I was narked on by a fellow journalist (Simon Walters, currently of the Times, then of the Express) for taking class As on the Prime Minister’s press plane, I sought to restore my reputation by giving an interview to a maverick young libertarian on the Telegraph.
Director/PDMR Shareholding
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The Grossly Underrated Thrill of Ironing (Correctly)
Twenty years ago, I found myself in New Delhi, making a documentary for the BBC about British arms exports. Days were spent at an arms fair in a sweaty expo’ centre, or driving around town in those old yellow and black Ambassador taxis, en route to interview defence experts and army types.
Boris Iofan – cunning apparatchik of a loathsome regime | The Spectator Australia
The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has rendered what might otherwise have seemed a fairly niche study of a Soviet-era architect rather more resonant. Boris Iofan was born to a Russian-speaking Jewish family in Odessa in 1891. After initial studies in his home city and a brief period working with his older brother Dimitri in St Petersburg, he fled the war engulfing Tsarist Russia for Italy, where he trained at the Istituto Superiore di Belle Arti in Rome.
Will Self’s fantasy dinner party — a vegetarian feast served by Margaret Thatcher
Frankly, any dinner party is a fantasy to me nowadays.
Play It as He Lays
It’s a sort of mise en abyme, really, this curious fact about the Academy Awards telecast: it has won a huge number of Emmys—54, with 293 nominations overall—since the television awards themselves were inaugurated in 1949.
An Ode to Pevsner Architectural Guides
I cannot have been alone in this: as the pandemic took hold last year and the country went into lockdown, I found the city I live in, London, transformed and by no means entirely for the worse. With far less traffic in the streets, I began noticing the buildings a great deal more, seeing them with eyes no longer compelled to follow the trajectory of this van or that car, lest it fatally intersect with my own.
A Posthumous Shock
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December 2021 Issue | Harper's Magazine
[Findings] Neuropsychologists developed a shorter IQ test for children with shorter attention spans. Share [Findings] The depression-prone are less attracted to the political right. Share [Findings] The nocturnal heart rate of young men can be predicted by their female partners’ daytime feelings of intimacy or annoyance. Share [Findings] Men who pose for photos with cats are seen as less datable.
A Posthumous Shock
Reassure me it’s like this for you too: you experience the unexpected—a psychic shock, a physical blow, a realization so disagreeable it sets you reeling—yet even as this event takes place in all its random spontaneity, it’s shadowed by the thought: I should’ve anticipated it.
The Great Renunciation
According to a survey of 6,000 people by the recruitment firm Randstad UK, almost a quarter of workers are actively planning to change employers in the next few months as part of a “great resignation”. The move is thought to be a result of the high number of vacancies available at the minute combined with burnout caused by the pandemic. But will the great resignation or the great renunciation really come to pass?
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