Welcome to Another Day In Paradise

I can’t tell you for certain that Thomas Magnum, the greatest floral-noir detective, ever looked at the Hawaiian sunrise and murmured, “Another day in paradise…”

I was young when the show aired and it’s possible that I’m paraphrasing, or mixing up Magnum with another 80s banger, Phil Collins, who definitely said it.

Still, that phrase and its ironic twinkle has stayed with me; a perfect, wry invitation to a world full of contradictions and fictions, and therefore, I think, a fitting name for a Substack in which I’ll be writing about the ironies, paradoxes and fantasies that current politics and popular culture keep throwing across our screens.

At this point it feels appropriate to borrow another catchphrase from Magnum PI, the one he would use whenever his inner monologue broke the fourth wall: “I know what you’re thinking.”

How is this different from the columns I write for TimesLive and Business Day?

Some of the answers to that question have to do with the ups and downs and even more downs of modern media. For example, I have no reason to doubt that I will keep writing those other two columns for the foreseeable future, and I’m sure that the health of my current employers is as robust as one can be in the media biz, but it can’t hurt to develop what the kids (and everyone else in the Class Formerly Known As Middle) call a side hustle.

I also want to get out of the habit of giving my writing to Facebook, not least because it’s one of the organisations currently working very hard to destroy writers, publishers, journalists, facts, expertise and probably democracy.

Mostly, however, I want to rediscover my readers.

It goes without saying that I’m grateful for paywalls. They’ve paid my rent for a decade and allowed the last newsrooms to hang on for longer than anyone expected. But what a writer wants more than anything is to be read. They want it more than they want money. That’s why they didn’t become plumbers like their mother begged them to be. And over the last many years I’ve found myself slowly vanishing behind various paywalls: I regularly meet people who ask me what I’ve been doing since I stopped writing about cricket for the Mail&Guardian in 2008.

This Substack will be free, at least for now, because I want you to read it. I want to know what you think, what you like, what you don’t, what you agree with and what’s pissed you off. To this end I’ll be keeping my comments open while moderating them for stuff that clearly goes too far.

So. If you’d like a weekly dose of politics, pop culture, perhaps a bit of sport and whatever else takes my fancy, delivered to your inbox every Wednesday morning, please click on this here Subscribe button and let’s do this thing.

Until next week.

Tom