Author | Lightnews

Rory McCarthy

@roryisconfused.bsky.social

1.7K followers 850 following 1.5K posts

Hey, it’s Rory. I like fiction and I like films and I like people. “Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world”. U can buy me (an unemployed dude) a coffee while I hunt for jobs here https://ko-fi.com/roryisconfused

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Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Nov 7

Walking in the middle of Hampstead Heath, an American guy came up to me and said “hey, how do I get out of here?”, I said “well, that depends where you need to go”, and he looked at me like I was some fucking Alice in Wonderland character

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Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · 1d

I imagine him shuffling through an alleyway with a duffel bag….the soundtrack stops for us to hear his interior monologue — a La Rochefoucauld quote on the incomprehensibility of death — before he puts on sunglasses…he is far, far uglier than his girlfriend…

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Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · 2d

Ah…someone has committed the only truly chic crime…even as we speak, a suave art thief makes their way through Paris to the sound of quick, tense jazz…

News update stating that the Louvre has been robbed

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Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · 5d

I love the bit on synesthesia in the new Patricia Lockwood

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Matt Zoller Seitz @mattzollerseitz.bsky.social · 25d

I was saddened to learn of the sudden passing of Kaleb Horton. (See thread below.) One of the best American writers of his generation. Most recently at Rolling Stone, but at every outlet where his byline appeared, he had that very rare gift for literary eloquence that read like ordinary speech.

Brandon Kennedy @bicycleidiot.bsky.social · 25d

RIP Kaleb Horton
kalebhorton.ghost.io/2025-so-far/

I also have advice. Everybody loves reading advice on the computer, so I'll share it: the best thing you can do right now is log off as hard as you can. Go outside, talk to people in real life where it's actually kind of rude to talk about the news, try to actually see the friends you usually just text message. Go for a long drive and turn the phone off while you do it. Get back into your hobbies or pick one and learn it for a while. Watch one of those studio movies that reviews called "wildly miscalculated" and you haven't seen since high school. Play an album you like but find embarrassing. Go to free community events even if they sound stupid. If you take the freeway, try the surface streets. Go to a bad diner and just order some bad coffee because even bad coffee is good coffee.
You can't help anybody when you're exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of "I would love to be dead right now" on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that's wonderful because we're not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.

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Siddhant Adlakha @siddhantadlakha.bsky.social · 25d

Really sorry to hear about the sudden passing of Kaleb Horton, a fantastic writer. Only seems fitting to share what he wrote for David Lynch kalebhorton.ghost.io/death-is-jus...

Death Is Just A Change

David Lynch has gone on to whatever the next place is. I’m very sad about it; it came at a hard time for the city of Los Angeles, a place he dearly loved, and it’s hard not to think his change of cons...

kalebhorton.ghost.io

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Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 18

You would cry too if it happened to you

Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 18

It’s Your Party and I’ll cry if I want to

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Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 18

…is how America elected a man who just seems so easily bored by things. That’s us, that’s the age, that’s what got chosen as the west’s representative: a man who simply can not abide a moment of boredom.

Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 18

This and that gets said about “what would David Foster Wallace say about our current era?”, the whole idea of the numbing addiction of ‘The Entertainment’ at the core of Infinite Jest being realised in the smart phone and all, but I reckon what he’d hone in on…

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Alexander Chee @alexanderchee.bsky.social · Sep 18

All this for a historically unpopular president.

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Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 18

It’s all a bit fucking dismal, isn’t it, to be reduced this way. As if Starmer might stage-whisper to us “look guys, I know you don’t like him, but the only chance we have of not totally collapsing as a nation involves treating him like he’s our god.”

Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 18

Saw a Labour councillor boasting about the tariffs Starmer had negotiated with Trump, and have just seen this too. It becomes the only thing Keir’s fans can brag about: thus far, he’s managed to suck up pretty well to a fascist, he’s managed to make him bully us less than he bullies other countries.

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Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 18

He in particular had a big go at the Coen Brothers for Barton Fink, which he saw as cynical and nihilistic, as I suppose 90s art in entire must have seemed to someone at that age

Reposted by Rory McCarthy

Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · Sep 18

developed an earth-shattering crush on Conan earlier this year so watched a bunch of his early late night shows, like a creep, and was really taken aback by how properly funny and *really* odd most of it was, the cultural mainstream has become so much more sanitised over the past decade or two

Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · Sep 18

I’m sure a lot of us watched Conan growing up and that show was surreal and weird and writer driven and on network tv, and now it’s just Jimmy Fallon asking Ariana Grande if she could sing Get Lucky like Christina Aguilera, like what the fuck are we doing here

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Heather Flowers @hthrflwrs.bsky.social · Sep 16

thinking once again about one of the all-time great newspaper mixups, when Dennis the Menace and The Far Side got their captions swapped

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David Klemperer @dmk1793.bsky.social · Sep 18

"But for many, and not only the young, politics is chiefly mediated through an anarchic and externally opaque torrent of short video, in which fraud is rife, critical thinking rare, and trust accrued through charisma and parasocial identification."

London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · Sep 17

‘Keir Starmer is in trouble.’

New on the blog: James Butler (@piercepenniless.bsky.social) on Labour’s problems.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

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London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · Sep 18

‘Robinson’s street movement is more likely to find electoral expression in Reform than any of the minuscule fascist parties. Labour’s approach to this electoral threat has so far been incoherent.’

James Butler on Labour’s problems, from the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

James Butler | Labour’s Problems

Keir Starmer is in trouble. ‘Phase two’ of his government launched on 1 September and was immediately derailed by...

www.lrb.co.uk

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Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 18

Still really, really fucking rankles me whenever people talk down Ta-Nehisi Coates. Marilynne Robinson or Rowan Williams can use an elevated register and even archaic diction and people accept it; a black guy does it — and he’s so good at it — and suddenly people think he’s getting above his station

Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Feb 3

Ian Leslie and Hadley Freeman unhappy with how Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about black people and black issues, it seems

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Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 18

It’s been dizzying going on that crawl from when Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time when I was a kid, the shock that these sort of abhorrent hateful views would get a mainstream airing, to all of this becoming the mainstream, the seeming inevitability that it’s all going to rise and take over

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Giles Wilkes @gilesyb.bsky.social · Sep 18

"the hard data suggests that the largest of the UK’s very real problems are no more being caused by mass immigration than they are by a group of charity fundraisers rowing past Great Yarmouth"

on.ft.com/3IsyVVu

@timharford.ft.com with his facts and reasonableness

The UK’s problems aren’t caused by immigration

It’s not hard to see how so many came to worry about the issue. But the data isn’t there

on.ft.com

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Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 18

Well yes it makes sense that he’s love all the gaudy golden pomp stuff, that’s Trump all over. He’d probably buy it all if he could.

Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · Sep 17

King Donald the Terrible in his horse drawn golden carriage at Windsor Castle: “He said he was really, really looking forward to this.”

Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 18

Left “cancel culture” did not cause the current fascist attack on free speech, it is not them picking up the same tools, that’s an absolutely fucking nonsensical narrative and shouldn’t be entertained at all

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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · Sep 18

think if you're broadly a centrist and were suuuuuper concerned about attacks on free speech from the left and so you decided to give the right a hearing then you need to realise you were taken for QUITE the ride (and don't really have anyone to blame but yourself)

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Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 17

“Racism is not a legitimate position” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, putting it as clearly and simply as it needs to be put.

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · Sep 17

the hard line of 'racism is not part of any conversation' is the very minimum to maintain to have a civilized order, and the reactionary centrists are among the biggest quislings around when it comes to that.

Rory McCarthy @roryisconfused.bsky.social · Sep 17

!!!

Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan @london.gov.uk · Sep 17

What’s happening in Gaza is a genocide.