June 14, 2025

The Magpie #022: Everything is constantly happening

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Magpie, a wire service for the weird compiled from the open tabs of writer Alex de Campi. Here’s what’s going on:

I started writing this on Thursday. Just that afternoon there has been a fatal airliner crash in India, Israel launching a “pre-emptive” strike at Iran, a US senator getting shoved to the ground and cuffed by cops, and people in Ballymena (Northern Ireland) marking the doors of Roma residents so they can smash up their homes like they did to “papishers” on the Shankill Road in the 1960s.

I ain’t linking to any of that shit.

Look it has been a FUCKER of a week. I’ve spent most of it helping my fellow Unbound authors organize, get their rights back, etc. And as we speak to each other we are learning more and more shocking things about that company (stay tuned, there are some doozies of broadsheet newspaper investigations coming out). I’ve also genuinely made great new friends and learned about dozens of wonderful books I can’t buy because the authors won’t get a cent.

Will we ever get the money we’re owed? It’s slim. Our only hope is that the Administrators recommend to the Insolvency Service to investigate director conduct / go after the directors personally. We think we’ve handed over enough evidence of misfeasance (at least! christ) that they’ll do that—and we had a minor victory on Friday, when the Administrators contacted us to agree to a second creditor meeting to discuss our concerns about director conduct. So, score one for collective action.

On top of that I had a Dark Judges script due for 2000AD and it was very very hard to find time/energy to write but I am a goddamn professional and I did it on time and the script is great, actually.

And let’s not forget looking for a new literary agent and a publisher for The Scottish Boy, now that I’ve got the rights to it back.

Oh look it’s the world’s tiniest violin, and today it plays for me.

Anyway, thank you to EVERYONE who bought books, sorry it took me a week to send them, everything was a lot for a while. You all should have received them by now; if they don’t arrive by end of today (Saturday) then email me and I’ll dig up your tracking number.

(If you still want to buy books you can do that! Here’s what’s available, and I also now have my comps of Reversal from Dark Horse, which are $20. Earth’s ley lines reverse, magic becomes a thing again—and a 12 year old girl and her family may be the only ones who can stop the monsters emerging to attack their city from the enchanted forest that has sprung up at its outskirts.

What else is going on: two articles, one a cringey puff piece about ChatGPT enabled glasses and the other an unfolding horror about ChatGPT’s gaslighting skills, form a weird modern counterpoint.

On that note, there’s a new contender in the “favorite peer-reviewed paper title” contest.

More on ChatGPT. This, kids, is how you write a lede: “Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres’s sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool.” More.

Now that’s how to procrastinate: “I thought it was quite normal to take a break from writing at two in the morning, saunter down to the piers, and have sex with 20 men in a truck.” Queer novelist and memoirist Edmund White, RIP.

The way Jeet Heer absolutely bodies Art Spiegelman in this Jack Kirby roundtable.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a Lego Pemberley.

Okay, I am linking to one political thing, which is the giant clownshow that is the Department of Defense right now.

All You Need Is Death sounds amazing.

Shocked, shocked that Meta willfully avoided privacy laws and engaged in illegal user data tracking.

What’s shocking isn’t this Japanese ex boyband star turned TV host’s sex scandal, but that Fuji TV’s enablement of it is being talked about rather than it all being quietly buried/left to rumors and whispers.

There has been so much good writing recently (all by women, no surprise) around Ozempic, fatphobia, and capitalism, but this is a standout.

Italian mayor welcomes immigrants, thereby rejuvenating his dying town… and gets arrested for it. It’s the usual Italian political circus, sure, but the stories of the town are genuinely wonderful.

(Speaking of which, Paolo Sorrentino’s film Loro, about two idiot entrepreneurs trying to catch the kleptocratic oligarch-president Berlusconi’s eye, is candy-colored Kafka for this very moment.)

How I learned to be an intimacy co-ordinator.

Don’t threaten me with a good time, &c: Quantum computing may destroy the Bitcoin market.

My personal catnip is academic papers discussing gender and sexuality in Sir Gawain & The Green Knight.

Tony Gilroy (Andor showrunner) on what makes art left-wing: yay! In conversation with Ross Douthat: sigh.

I love Jaya Saxena’s work for Eater and her piece on “queer food” is another great read from her.

Fun short bio of Victorian radical Louise Mitchel? Yes please.

In recipe news, cooked this simple lemon cream chicken last week, served on basmati rice with the rapini arranged around it. (Because I’m lazy and hate washing up, I sautéed the rapini briefly just before serving in the same cast-iron skillet used for the chicken). The teenager INHALED the food and demanded it be put into our recipe rotation. Do actually measure the vermouth; I didn’t and the sauce was a little looser than I’d hoped.

Some music: People seem up in arms about Sabrina Carpenter’s current Diet Helmut Newton aesthetic and what it means for Feminism, whether her subversion of submissive/porn tropes is obvious enough or whether it will just make men more Like That, but may I counter with the stone cold fact that the “Manchild” video fucking whips:

Also here is a delightful J-pop/electronica song that samples from The Marriage of Figaro:

That’s it for now. Stay well, be kind to each other, and I’ll see you next newsletter xx

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