Daily catch-up: Boycotts, writing and the future of capitalism

Goretzki and Rowling on calls to boycott Israel; Montgomerie on capitalism; Parris on writing too much

Another fine cartoon by Jake Goretzki. Also well worth reading is JK Rowling's response to people who quote her Harry Potter books at her on the subject.

• Tim Montgomerie on what's wrong with capitalism. He makes some good points, about high pay and payday loans in particular, but unfortunately falls prey to Milibandian fudge about "rebalancing" the economy (always a reliable indicator of sky pie) and forcing business to "end its focus on short-term profit maximisation".

• An unusual point of view from Martin O'Keeffe, a supporter of the European Union, who intends to vote Leave in the referendum to save Europe from us selfish British.

• Matthew Parris on writing, in the Times magazine, Byline (pay wall):

I enjoy writing my columns and I don’t enjoy writing books. It just becomes a chore which I’ve taken money for, and now I have to make myself do it. Something goes wrong in my brain when I try to write anything longer than 1,500 words. To extend the horizon before me further than 1,500 words is a terrific mental effort. There’s a little ping in the brain when I reach about 1,200 words.

Twitter was an accident waiting to happen. I never wanted to tweet, but the strong urging was that all columnists should, which was absolutely right. Under some pressure I did get an account, but I started wanting to tweet bad things. I wanted to tweet things that, even as I thought of them, I knew would cause trouble. Then my partner began to worry I was going to tweet something really stupid, so I bailed out. I use Twitter all the time in that I read other people’s tweets. I’m just mute myself.

I’m a naturally indolent person and I love deadlines. I do tend to dawdle. I start fairly early but I spend a lot of time over the first few paragraphs which you always junk in the end anyway. The intensity builds up as the deadline approaches.

Television is a very slow way of absorbing news. I listen to the radio, I listen to the Today programme, I listen on and off to Five Live, I read newspapers and political blogs. I sometimes watch Andrew Neil, who’s a good interviewer, and in those ways I absorb what’s happening and also what’s being said about what’s happening.

• Moose Allain: "‏Neutral is the ne plus ultra of anagrams."

• And finally, thanks to Swedish Canary for this:

"I ordered a chicken and an egg on Amazon... I’ll let you know."