Looking Sideways: 10 Things
A new career in a new town, the true scale of Musk's fortune, and an unlikely heatwave banger.
1. We moved to Bracklesham Bay! It's been a long time coming (and explains why I’ve taken a two-month sabbatical from wider Looking Sideways activities) But we are looking forward to getting to know our new home after so long in Brighton.
On that note - big up listener and subscriber Sam Evans for the message - normal service will be resumed soon!
10 Things will always be free, but it takes a lot of effort, love and curiosity to pull this thing together each week.
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2. There’s still time to enter the Dacia Bucket List Fund, the brilliant new competition I’m running through my agency ACM. In case you missed it last week, it’s simple.
Apply, tell us about your dream trip and if we like your idea we’ll lend you a car AND award you up to £5000 to make that pipe dream a reality.
Maybe there’s a family trip you’ve wanted to do for years. An adventure that’s been nagging away. A corner of Europe you’ve always had a hankering to enjoy. Whatever it is, we want to hear about it. Apply here.
More simple ways to support Looking Sideways - use any of these codes and I’ll get a small commission 🫡
FINISIDEWAYS10 for 10% off anything from Finisterre
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LOOKINGSIDEWAYS for a whopping 20% off anything from Goodrays.
3. On topic - I’m heading to Milan with Dacia next week for the launch of their new Striker motor.
I’ve never been to the city before - what should I do? Where should I go? Where should I eat? What’s the one thing I absolutely have to do? And how do I cope when the forecast is 35 degrees in the shade?
Italianate gang - let me know in the comments.
4. Humans famously have real difficulty conceptualising the exact magnitude of concepts such as a billion or a trillion. Which is why this new What's Elon Worth? wealth tracker is a) a handy way of getting your head around the obscenity of it all and b) a remarkable indictment of late stage capitalism in action.
5. A useful companion to the above: just why are these rich-as-Croesus oligarchs buying up legacy media companies and running them into the ground at a loss? Why did Musk buy Twitter? Why did Bezos buy the Washington Post? Why did Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz pour money into right-wing media?
Berkeley political scientist Matthew Grumbach’s recent paper (above) provides one answer. Extreme wealth concentration isn't just an economic problem - it's a political one. Media ownership is political power. And once concentrated wealth has captured democratic politics, as these clowns have, you can no longer use democratic politics to fix it. Bleak stuff indeed.
6. With Andy Burnham confirmed as the sole candidate to replace Keir Starmer as Labour leader - and, in all likelihood, prime minister - now is a good moment to read the Manchester Mill's forensic, sceptical look at what "Burnhamism" actually amounts to after six years in power. Verdict: not as much as the hype suggests. Essential reading.
7. Pharrell's surf-themed menswear show for Louis Vuitton has been caned for the environmental impact. But what did surf industry leaders think about a fashion house co-opting surfing's iconography on such a scale?
8. Now reading: Hilary Mantel’s French Revolution epic A Place of Greater Safety, which follows Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins from ambitious young lawyers to architects of the Terror, and is a proper door-stopper.
It’s heresy to admit this, but I really didn’t get on with Wolf Hall. So I’m enjoying this riveting read immensely (and with something of a sigh of relief).
A quick reminder - buy any of my recommendations from my Looking Sideways book store (and plenty of you are doing so!) and you’ll be buying directly from independent UK book stores (which means your money won’t be helping to finance the next ghoulish Bezos-sponsored Met Gala, for one) as well as helping support Looking Sideways (I get a 10% commission) in a really simple and (I humbly propose) righteous way.
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9. This beautiful, harrowing account of the life and death of Annabel Rook - who was murdered by her partner last year - by her friend Catherine Milne is a really important read. Her disbelief and righteous fury fairly leaps off the page. I haven't stopped thinking about it all week.
10. The news that Johnny Marr is auctioning nearly 100 guitars at Christie’s this September - including the 1971 Martin D-28 he used to write Cemetry Gates - sent me straight to Spotify for another listen to my favourite Smiths song.
One of the many reasons I love The Smiths so much, and consider them to be Manchester’s greatest ever band, is because of how precisely they captured what it meant to grow up in the city of my youth in the 1980s.
And Cemetry Gates, evoking as it does a very particular South Manchester experience and location, at a very particular moment in time, in three beautiful, sunny minutes, is a brilliant example of their economical genius.
It also got me thinking: what’s your favourite unlikely summertime banger? The one that evokes something in you?
Cemetry Gates is mine. What’s yours? Let me know in the comments.