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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23918 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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The Simon and Schuster page contains a "Raves and Reviews" section for all the blurbs it's got (pre-sale). Best of all is:

‘Jason Arday is a remarkable and brilliant man’

– James O’Brien, Sunday Times bestselling author of How To Be Right

(Emphasis mine.)

Um.

I'd like to see the full review because blurb writers do cherry-pick and alter sentences. It might well be that James O'Brien said "Jason Arday is a remarkable and brilliant man - if you believe his self-report, but if you do believe it, here's a bridge I'd like to sell you" 🤣

Probably it was just "got sent a review copy, never heard of the guy, skimmed through it, wrote a few lines of praise and sent that back".

I looked up the author and book, and here's a corker of a Guardian review from seven years ago. Apparently Mr. O'Brien is a sucker for "them conservatives is all bigots" so the Arday story would have been catnip to him: son of immigrants bravely overcoming adversity and racism all the way to the top!

Here’s a question. How often have you come away from listening to a radio phone-in feeling educationally enriched or intellectually stimulated? Here’s another: did you notice how loaded that question was?

The loaded question is the preferred mode of expression of the radio talk show. It’s a variation on the prosecutorial “When did you stop beating your wife?” of legal legend. And James O’Brien, the LBC presenter, is something of a master of the form. He’s forever asking questions aimed at uncovering a caller’s underlying prejudice, the better to put them right.

Because that’s what O’Brien does. He puts callers right. Or, as LBC likes to put it, he “schools” people, which is not quite the same thing as educational enrichment or intellectual stimulation. Talk radio isn’t a medium best suited for either. But books are, and O’Brien has written a book called How to be Right... In a World Gone Wrong.

This book comes with a pained-looking O’Brien on the cover, with headphones and mic, presumably listening to another foaming caller, above a quote from the New Statesman declaring O’Brien “the conscience of liberal Britain”. It seems designed to suggest that O’Brien is a principled figure fighting a tireless battle against a tide of misinformed opinion.

Is O’Brien right? Well, I imagine I share at least 80% of his self-avowed liberal beliefs, but I’m not sure that he’s the person I’d trust to make the case for them. His speciality is putting members of the public on the spot for their ill-thought-out views.

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