The Strippers, Trump, and JD Vance

On No Kings Day I've been reminded of a famous meme...

Oct 19 • 

Alex Went

1

1

Of narrative and rhetoric

The devaluation of political discourse

Oct 13 • 

Alex Went

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2

September 2025

"Find the beef, the beer, the bread. Then look behind"

RIP poet and playwright Tony Harrison

Sep 27 • 

Alex Went

Ancient and Modern

A digression on political transliteration

Sep 25 • 

Alex Went

1

August 2025

'Hot off the heels', and other idiomatic shifts

Students of linguistics are familiar with the ‘Great Vowel Shift’, the name we give to the alteration of vowel sounds over long periods of time.

Aug 18 • 

Alex Went

1

July 2025

We will all go together

Tom Lehrer, satirist extraordinaire, has died at the age of 97

Jul 28 • 

Alex Went

A Heroic Achievement

One of my first tests of the power of ChatGPT, back in late 2022, was to ask it to write a poem in the style of Alexander Pope.

Jul 17 • 

Alex Went

1

Checking AI: the empirical proof?

These are still early days for post-Turing-test interactions, but actually computers have been simulating human writing for many decades.

Jul 16 • 

Alex Went

March 2021

Zen and the art of content optimization

I’ve been reading a book about graphic design whose author takes inspiration from his experience of Japanese culture.

Mar 12, 2021 • 

Alex Went

August 2019

Fake Poohs

Or how People of Very Little Brain fail to do their research.

Aug 27, 2019 • 

Alex Went

1

March 2019

The Unbearable Business of Lying

More failures of attribution from the internet

Mar 15, 2019 • 

Alex Went

January 2019

Please, don’t critique me!

The word ‘critic’ originally denoted someone whose job was to judge between a good or bad action, a defendant’s guilt or innocence, or the positive or…

Jan 4, 2019 • 

Alex Went