John Birmingham

1 week ago | sixcolors.com | John Birmingham

About four weeks out from a manuscript deadline—already a month or two behind schedule—I broke my arm. Well, technically, someone else broke it. A Muay Thai fighter, during a sparring session in a martial arts class I definitely should not have been in. The next morning, I had to call my editor and fess up: instead of hammering away at the keyboard, I’d been getting my forearm snapped like a dry twig. Now I wasn’t going to be hammering away at anything except painkillers and regret.

1 week ago | aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham

No one would have believed, in the increasingly stupid years of the 21st century, that I would open my daily scroll of doom to learn that James Patterson—the literary equivalent of a haunted fax machine plugged directly into the overflow tank at a Red Bull factory—was ‘co-writing’ a thriller with MrBeast, a man-child YouTube trolligarch who gamifies human desperation for likes, filming acts of weaponised charity to unlock a giant personal loot box in the winner-takes-all game of late-stage...

2 weeks ago | aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham

Sometimes these things are easy to write. Sometimes they all but write themselves. If I wanted to do a bit on the Coalition breakup this week, I could probably ask Siri to write it for me. Even she couldn’t mess that up. But Annabel Crabb has already written that meisterwerk, and I had something else planned for this week anyway. Even so, I hardly know where to begin. Writing a private column like this, I get to choose every week what interests me.

3 weeks ago | aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham

(A little programming note. I’ve got two books coming out next week and I’m very excited. They’re part of a new and different project for me, something that started out as a giggle and got serious. I meant today’s column to be a simple think piece to give me a bit of extra time to do my pre-launch stuff, but a bit like the books, this also got a bit serious. Oh well. Apologies for next week, when you’re gonna be hearing all about this one weird thing I just did.

1 month ago | aliensideboob.substack.com | John Birmingham

All good things must come to an end, even the Festival of Shameful Joy. And so, I lie here on my orgy couch, wiping a thin sheen of sweat from my brow with one trembling hand, while gently drumming the fingertips of the other on my hugely distended belly, engorged as it is on a magical, never ending string of victory sausages stuffed with schadenfreude. And I think to myself, it won’t always be like this, you know. Some day they’ll be back.