The Monday Media Diet with Nick Doherty

Nick Doherty (ND) is an old pal. We met when I moved to London around 2000 and he was running press for the now-iconic club fabric (See related WITI here). He’s since decamped to Australia and works in tech but still keeps up the rabid music and cultural consumption. -Colin (CJN)

Describe your media diet.

I’m the guy with the tottering book tower next to the bed. I buy faster than I read and marvel at people who sprint through pages. Non-fiction hooks me most.

I subscribe to The Times (largely for its slick iPad app), the Financial Times, and The New York Times. I skim The Guardian daily, too. For music I love The New Cue, the newsletter launched by the editors of Q (RIP); they capture artists in the moment—something I tried to mirror in the breakfast snap my daughter took this morning.

I’m a magazine addict. Every few months I raid magCulture and buy titles I’ve never seen before. Recent hits: Paperboy, Racquet, Ralph, and The Paper—a genius Welsh zine that devotes pages to discovering who in Wales has the biggest head.

For work I graze design blogs, revisit craft books, and skim Fast Company, Inc., and The Verge (though “good news” is scarce). Podcasts? Hours each week, mostly the Goalhanger productions of The Rest Is Politics and its US off-shoot here.

I’m a last-man-standing on X. I stay for the UK comics: Limmy, Rob Morgan, Ruth “Husko” Huskisson, and Josh Pugh.

What’s the last great book you read?

I’m finishing Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe—an astounding outsider’s take on the Troubles, paced like a thriller. For something less famous, try Andrew Hankinson’s You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat]. Written in second person, it drops you inside Moat’s head. Iain Banks used the same device in Complicity, my favourite of his novels.

What are you reading now?

Holiday stack, Bali edition: Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (perfect poolside peril), Will Hodgkinson’s A Year with Lawrence (has a Searching for Sugarman vibe), and Norman Mailer’s The Fight—I own 50-plus boxing books, and the best writers make a single bout feel epic.

What’s your print-reading strategy?

I’m typing this from the kids’ club while my two annihilate Brazilians at air hockey. My whole strategy—reading, writing, creating—is grabbing micro-moments like this. As the kids grow, the moments stretch. Otherwise, I’m an old-school cover-to-cover guy (a lights-off, missionary answer, but true).

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Carole Cadwalladr. She broke the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal and was pilloried for it. Now she’s launched the Substack Broligarchy and just gave a second TED talk. Her new BBC Sounds podcast Stalked unpacks online harassment through her niece’s experience. Fearless journalism 101.

Best under-the-radar app on your phone?

Bevel turns Apple Watch data into actionable daily insights with elegant design. I also rely on Circa to wrangle time zones.

Plane or train?

From Australia, everything starts with a flight—and domestic flying here feels like the ’80s with better tech: show up 30 minutes before departure and still loiter at the gate. In the UK I’ll take trains to dodge London traffic, but beware the return: 200 Arsenal fans, two hours stalled outside Milton Keynes—been there.

One place everyone should visit?

Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). A cliff-carved cathedral of sex-and-death art. Time it with the Dark Mofo festival for maximum weird.

Tell us about a rabbit hole you fell into.

After hearing designer Richard Turley speak (he masterminded those wild Businessweek covers) I bought all his old mags and chased down out-of-print anthologies of Tibor Kalman’s work. My perennial hole, though, is ’90s/’00s British pop culture—Lily Allen, Pete Doherty, Mike Skinner biographies; standing front-row for Noel and Liam in a Penfield Pac Anorak. Nostalgia literally means “acute homesickness,” and when Jarvis soars through Pulp’s new track Spike Island, I’m here and there at once. (Morrissey, by the way, once cancelled a gig because the venue used nostalgia as a keyword—peak Moz.) (ND)