Zoe Williams

Diary – 14 May 2015

From our UK edition

For the 2005 general election, I had a party featuring a gigantic cheesecake with differentiated segments by allegiance. It contained no purple, which you could call leftie bias, but it genuinely didn’t seem necessary. It certainly wasn’t because I couldn’t think of a purple fruit. The Lib Dems did badly out of that, but mainly because you should never put banana on a cheesecake; they did fine in 2010, when I represented them with lemon macaroons. No colourful theming for 2015; the stakes were too high, and I decided that it was a waste of soft fruit. Just booze and crisps and, by 10.15, depressed people; exactly like 1992, in fact, before we discovered finger food. At 1 a.m., I went into Adam Boulton’s programme on Sky News to talk results with Harry Cole.

Low-level challenge and response

From our UK edition

Steven Johnson has written a bold little book that very nearly undermines the only moral precept of my adult life: thou shalt not get into video games, since then thou really won’t, ever, get any work done. Thank heavens, his argument wasn’t quite that good; but it came extremely close. His key thesis is this: ‘popular culture has been growing increasingly complex over the past few decades, exercising our minds in powerful new ways.’ He economically dispatches the notion that culture has anything to tell us about moral right- eousness, which is a blessing, since I (racistly) never quite trust Americans to know the difference between proselytising and educating.