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1 week ago | 
maryharrington.co.uk | Mary Harrington
At the risk of stating the obvious, what you see online is not always what you get IRL. But enough people have now noticed the internationalisation of “multicultural” street youth / gang culture that it’s worth a few words. A set of TikTok videos from Toronto has been doing the rounds, including this one:Tiktok failed to load.
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2 weeks ago | 
maryharrington.co.uk | Mary Harrington
This week I was lucky to catch the author Ewan Morrison on one of his rare forays out of the Scottish wilderness, for a conversation with the writer Nicholas Blincoe to mark the publication of Morrison’s ninth book: For Emma. Morrison and Blincoe explored “Accelerationist society”, Covidian paranoia, contemporary ambivalence about technological progress, and the increasingly transhumanist edge everything seems to have these days.
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2 weeks ago | 
maryharrington.co.uk | Mary Harrington
Originally delivered on 2 April at the Family Formation and the Future conference, at the Danube Institute, BudapestOur session theme is “Tech and Human Relationships”. I want to talk about truth, in relation to those two themes. You might think this is a digression; it’s not. For the relation between technology, human relationships, and truth is a critical current battleground.
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4 weeks ago | 
maryharrington.co.uk | Mary Harrington
Should I, a Briton, treat the US as a hostile nation now? That’s the view of some, not least since US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene slapped a British reporter sharply down for attempting to ask questions about that whole Houthi bombing group chat thing. “We don’t give a crap about your opinion and your reporting,” said Greene. “Why don’t you go back to your own country. We have a major migrant problem […] You should care about your own borders.
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1 month ago | 
maryharrington.co.uk | Mary Harrington
I enjoyed this recent, provocative challenge to “postliberalism” from the always acerbic Pimlico Journal, one of the few Substacks I support financially. The essay is paywalled, but especially if you’re in Britain and interested in the youthful Right the publication is worth your consideration:For those whose subscription budget is maxxed out, a brief summary.
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1 month ago | 
maryharrington.co.uk | Mary Harrington
Way back when my daughter was a toddler, one evening I ran her a lovely, warm, bubbly bath. I got her ready for it; then, with not a stitch on, she announced: “I don’t want a bath”. I said: “But it’s bathtime.”She said: “You can’t make me”. I said: “Well, actually, I can,” and I picked her up and put her in the bath.
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2 months ago | 
maryharrington.co.uk | Mary Harrington |Katherine Dee
If you post a lot, as I do, it’s hard to predict what will follow you around. Some years ago, I said on X that I thought the pseudonymous internet personality Bronze Age Pervert was a genius media artist. It’s true: BAP is among the earliest pioneers of online personae as cultural artefacts, a phenomenon now so pervasive that the internet historian has taken intermittently to publishing reviews of such entities (read her on Nancy Mace’s X account here).
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Jan 11, 2025 | 
maryharrington.co.uk | Mary Harrington
Recently, a talented young woman asked for advice on beginning a writing career. Implicitly, she meant: opinion journalism, maybe political. Did I have any tips for starting out? I told her the same thing I’ve told others who asked: I’m the worst possible source of such counsel, because I didn’t really set out to do this for a living. But supposing for a moment that I might have something helpful to offer aspiring writers in their twenties, it would go something like this.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
maryharrington.co.uk | Mary Harrington
It’s become common in recent years to talk about “wokeness” as a new Reformation: a wave of religious sensibility eager to sweep away the old order in pursuit of a new vision of the good. But the biggest realisation I’ve had this year is that this is exactly backwards. The cluster of moral assertions that travels under the heading of “wokeness” is not a new Reformation, but its opponent.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
maryharrington.co.uk | Mary Harrington
Context collapse discourse has been less fun since Elon bought Twitter, and the tribes began dispersing to different platforms. So I hope I’ll be forgiven a moment of nostalgia at the recent sex strike discourse, in which angry progressive women reacted to news of Donald Trump’s re-election by publicly sharing a “4B” pledge. 4B, from ‘bi’ in Korean, meaning ‘no’, refers to the four ‘nos’: no sex, no dating, no marriage, and no babies.