Simon Lincoln Reader
Simon Lincoln Reader was born in Johannesburg. He spent a decade living in London, where he worked in financial services, eventually co-founding investment marketplace Lofotr Investors. He writes a Friday column for The Daily Friend, podcasts twice week and is a trustee of the Kay Mason Foundation, a charity awarding bursaries to young people in Cape Town.
Articles By This Author
Better to have a fictional vigilante than a real one
If lively or amusing instant karma is ever to have a case study, then its authors may wish to revisit the events in the Johannesburg
Luncheon-meat face is all we ever knew of Keir Starmer
The scene is a prison in the Caribbean in the early 1990s. A young, overeducated Marxisty-looking English guy wearing an ill-fitting olive suit is ushered by wardens to the maximum-security section where his newest client is lounging on a concrete slab in a string vest.
The Battle for Language
Admittedly I can’t remember the last time a woman was angry with me, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t smack her on the bottom and tell her to shut up and make me a martini. Doesn’t work, that kind of thing. I know a man whose wife was cross with him for a reason he felt unwarranted: “Just take those thoughts out that pretty little head and zip it,” he said: a move that cost him the next month on the sofa. During that time his wife started extracting liberties to the point where her next move could — could — have been acquiring a boyfriend of Caribbean extraction. He told me he apologized over 500 times.
Gutting firms of HR may save the future of work
Ordinarily not predisposed to heaping upon praise on tech bros, I can’t help but think one of them has just revealed how to save the future of work. At a recent Fortune event, Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow remarked that he’d just axed his entire human resources (HR) division.
The George Floyd madness destroyed the UK
Minorities in the UK are touchy when whispers of revolution drift into the nation’s dining rooms at night, but cheerfully, I’m here to inform them. With the exception of grooming gangs, they’re okay, because if revolution is occasioned, which many scholars suggest it will, there will be years of priorities, and the overwhelming majority of those scholars are white people who wear clothes from Next or TK Maxx.
Redi Tlhabi is a threat to our national intelligence
Long before Redi Tlhabi emptied her head to write a neurotic article entitled “Don’t hand South Africa’s democracy to Elon Musk for 30 pieces of silver”, curious things were happening in Washington DC, where Tlhabi and a man called Phillip van Niekerk – upon whose Substack her nonsense was platformed – reportedly reside.
Shelley Garland-ing the literary world
There’s a lot going on in the literary world – but you might not know it if you attended the most recent South African literary festival.
Cancel UK elections until further notice
The UK is about to have a new Prime Minister, or not, but if it is, the condition has already been set.
Imagine when we get pissed off: an intriguing mayoral campaign in Los Angeles
Like me, you’re probably not familiar with The Hills, the breakout reality TV show broadcast for six seasons from 2006 on MTV, documenting the lives of some young blonde Californian women. Six years into our marriage, my wife informed me that she had made an appearance on the show during one of its seasons, but even then I didn’t pay much attention.
Everybody is talking about death because nobody is talking about life
Like their progressive counterparts in Canada and Spain, the UK’s right-on politicians want to kill everyone – but would prefer they do it themselves.