Philip Matthews

Forever haunted by this image/moment

@secondzeit go on, chip in..............

From the “you cannot be serious” file, an email from the Free Speech Union

Song of the day youtube.com/watch?v=DfvASy…

I'm currently rocking a T-shirt in front of my laptop

Columnist M. Gessen has been awarded the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in opinion writing, for "an illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile."

I'm a businessman people go to to make deals. Seymour's the one who had to go ballroom dancing to get noticed.

The Scamdalorian

Really enjoyed this cheap, local, stoner cannibal comedy with an excellent free jazz soundtrack. The Weed Eaters asks: why bury a body when you can just eat it, maybe with some tomato sauce? has been shared with you from RNZ rnz.co.nz/life/screens/m…

@plainjane130632 Good point. He was genuinely an antisemite.

@secondzeit Definitely an idiot. This is what we used to label as antisemitic because it is . Now the word is thrown around like candy at a lolly scramble

He was an idiot

@CanIbemorewoke Except it was a Christian church in the movie

@secondzeit Fitting that its a mosque then

This is pretty much how Paul Schrader's Exorcist prequel starts

@aucklandaussie They will invariably have read less NZ writing than the judges have.

@secondzeit See no problem there, as long as they know contemporary NZ writing without being caught up in local literary politics.

An extraordinary - and blatant - foreign influence campaign to interfere with New Zealand politics using social media as a vector - this account with over 122,000 followers (describing himself as being based in England), began a sustained attack less than an hour after I published a post calling out the nonsense being stirred up about our FTA with India.

Amazing story from the @washpost about the Ukraine war, a reminder of the excellence of Washington Post international coverage before it was gutted: washingtonpost.com/world/2026/05/… It's the kind of story that is so good that any reporter reads it and thinks: I wish I'd written that.

@fundypost Thanks. Vague memories of the whole thing.

@secondzeit Alan Taylor did come to Auckland in 2018: he presented his book about Muriel Spark at the Writers Festival. I recall chatting to him afterwards about contemporary Scottish writers, and the Wigton Book Festival.

If only Richard Dawkins had seen this.