The world’s a less brighter place this week.

A couple of weeks ago, you may have seen the news that Amanda Knox had taken a controversial one-woman show to the Edinburgh Fringe. Controversial, in that the show, Cartwheel, addressed her experiences from twenty years ago when she was charged, convicted and eventually acquitted of the murder of her roommate, the British student Meredith Kercher. Kercher's family felt particularly aggrieved, and it's hard to blame them.

Dolly Parton, legendary US country singer, dies aged 80.

ALT: Will Ferrell Tastes Bitter Coffee

There are two things that tend to jump out when reading memoir; the differences and the similarities.And when we explore the lives of people from different cultural and geographical backgrounds, the unfamiliar is also educational, it allows us to understand and empathise with communities that we otherwise only encounter as news stories. The similarities, meanwhile, are a reminder that there are truths that unite us all, make us human.

ALT: Brooklyn99 Noice - Jake Peralta

A general round-up of what I'm up to and future plans

What's absolutely astonishing about this book is the level of raw honesty. I've been a fan of Nixon since Fresh Meat, to my mind one of the finest sitcoms of the past twenty years. Following her on Instagram, she had already impressed me with the openness with which she talks about her OCD, ADHD and Autism. She Seems Fine To Me…

ALT: Mmm, I'll Allow It

A much underrated artform.

"Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam."

You'll have seen, no doubt, that Reform UK are up in arms of Zack Polanski's reposting of an image which featured a man wearing a t-shirt depicting a guillotine and the caption "We're only making plans for Nigel", a reference to an old XTC lyric obviously being used to refer to Farage. News that the Met aren't going to pursue the case has been met with the usual cries of "two-tier Britain", albeit cries that don't mention the corresponding incident that was handled differently, possibly because there wasn't one.

"There is just one thing which I know about myself for certain: I am not Tom Barlow. It was the first thing that occurred to me upon waking this morning but, unlike anyone else who is not named Tom Barlow, that is the only thing I know about myself. I’m not suffering from memory loss or from any other ailment that might be found in a psychiatrist’s case file.

Robert J. Sawyer's massive compendium of non-fiction writing about science fiction, the field he loves so much, is Shadowpaw Press's August release