Will Self's Blog, page 14
June 26, 2016
June 24, 2016
June 18, 2016
Self’s Search for Meaning
In a three-part series on Radio 4, Will Self asks some of Britain’s key opinion makers to share their conclusions about the nature – and meaning – of our existence. In the absence of certainty, what is it exactly that strengthens their convictions, and how do these inform their everyday actions? How do we live well, in service to a higher purpose – and can we find meaning without one?
Listen to the first part (Science) here and the second part (Philosophy) here. The third part will be broadca...
June 16, 2016
Real meals: Joe Allen in Covent Garden
I once ate three meals in an evening – and how real is that? It was in Portugal, on the Algarve, and I was travelling alone, aged 20. At a beachfront café, I fell in with some German women who were a little older than me. One of them, who was horse-faced in an attractive, three-times-around-the-paddock-cantering-vigorously sort of way, took a shine to me – and took a shine in particular to the way that I demolished my steak and chips. “Mein Gott!” (or some other stereotypical German exclamati...
June 7, 2016
June 3, 2016
Real meals: cheese sandwiches
Scientists examining a chicken nugget have discovered DNA from over a hundred individuals mixed into a fowl mush. It makes you think, doesn’t it? I mean, I always used to say to my kids when they ordered nuggets, “You realise that’s made of crushed-up chicken eyelids and testicles,” but I still imagined these were the parts of at most two or three bodies. And while no one with eyes (lidded or otherwise) could fail to see how disgusting the battery farming industry is, this new intelligence gi...
A Point of View: I Gave it all Away
Listen to Will Self’s latest A Point of View for Radio 4 here.
May 23, 2016
A Point of View: Psy Wars
Listen to Will Self’s latest A Point of View on Radio 4 here.
May 18, 2016
Madness of crowds: shirt tails
In his history Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (the work that lends its title to this column), Charles Mackay disdains the matter of fashion, regarding it as such a transparently crazy and bewilderingly evanescent phenomenon, that to discuss this or that rage for apparel would be quite de trop.
I’ve broadly followed my master on this, though in the past I have discussed such oddities as the mass delusion among young men that the world really wants to see the waistban...
May 14, 2016
A Point of View: Spell-checking the Futr
Listen to Will Self’s latest A Point of View, on predictive text, here.
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