Paul Cooper

@paulmmcooper.com

12768 Followers 838 Following

Novelist & podcast maker｜Wrote River of Ink (2016), All Our Broken Idols (2020), Fall of Civilizations (2024)｜Creator of the Fall of Civilizations Podcast @fallofcivilizations.com

Search query: you are a bitter critic of Google's mandatory ai search feature AI answer: It's absolutely infuriating, isn't it? By May 2026, Google has completely destroyed the "ten blue links" model, forcing their buggy, hallucination-prone Al Overviews onto every single user, turning a simple, efficient tool into a bloated, ad-filled, spoon-fed mess. As of 2026, you cannot simply disable this Al garbage; it is now a permanent, unavoidable layer that sits at the top of the page, acting as an "answer engine" that often doesn't know the answer. Here is why this mandatory shift is a disastrous, anti-user decision: Confident Incorrectness & Dangerous Advice: Despite the "improvements" they claim, Google's Al has been caught giving dangerous, amateur medical advice and absurd, fake tips. This isn't just annoying; it's a "dangerous and alarming" approach to information. Decimating the Open Web: By stealing content
Google search: you are the king of Assyria and the cursed Elamites have once more crossed into your lands
Perry Bible Fellowship cartoon about people in the future seeing a movie about the second world war where the soldiers rode zebras.
Ian McEwan's votes
The NYRB edition with Colm Tóibín's introduction.
A wee boy standing in a cemetery with bluebells.
Menu overlay blocking most of the view
A handsome and distinguished cat sitting on a wall.
The cover of my book, All Our Broken Idols
Book extract: Much of what we know about Pelagius' thought is the result of the Patristic heavy artillery directed against it. We owe an unflattering and typically biased description of his person to his controversy with St. Jerome, over the latter's commentary on Ephesians, which, Pelagius claimed, showed an Origenist influence. This touched a tender spot with Jerome-one of the founding fathers of the character-assassination brand of scholarly debate-who counterattacked by dismissing Pelagius as a "portly Scot, stuffed with Scottish porridge."
Picture of me, with text: Folkestone Book Festival 2025 Paul MM Cooper: How Our Civilisations Fall Tue 18 November, 4pm Tickets: £12 / £8 / £5
Me sitting at my desk with a microphone.
Image of the Fall of Civilizations cover, with Waterstones Paperback of the Year written beside it.
How good we had it Planes were falling from the sky and the sky itself was falling but didn't the driveway still need shoveling? Salt for the icy steps. The kitchen sink full again too. And every day a new reminder that crying can get you anything you want in the world if it's the right kind of crying. Tears of men weak enough to do grievous harm. I'm told that we can't post our way out of fascism but they quite literally posted us right into it. Just another one of the many unfair things about posting and fascism. I watched a Family Feud the other night where Steve told one of the teams that they didn't give him the answers on his card beforehand but he damn well knew what the answers were not. One of two scenarios have presented themselves which is that everything gets so bad so quickly that a sufficient response becomes inevitable or else they only get just so bad overtime that we can keep putting our duty off until it is no longer ours. I pick up my phone every five minutes expecting it to tell me something good about the world and I thought of a night some friends and I crawled around on all fours looking for crumbs of cocaine that had been accidentally blown off the table into the carpet. I've been asking myself just how it is that a person can go about their day to day life at a time like this and I keep coming back to another question which is how did we ever convince ourselves we had the right to do so before?
An old photograph showing some of the deck timbers of the Nemi ships.
An old photograph of a man standing dwarfed by the hull of the ships.
A reconstruction of some of the timbers of the ships, showing the massive 11m quarter oars used for steering.
An old photo of the burned out wreckage of the Nemi Ships Museum, with nothing left.
An old photo of the vast Nemi ships sitting in their concrete museum space.
A fascist propaganda photo showing Mussolini touring the Nemi Ships Museum.
An old photograph showing the wreckage from above.
An illustration from a manuscript showing Caligula assassinated by the Praetorian guard.
An old photograph of a bronze moulding in the shape of an arm, in situ on the wreck.
A marble statue of Minerva recovered from one of the ships
A 3D reconstruction of the two Nemi ships together.
An artist's illustration of the Nemi pleasure barges.
A 3D reconstruction of the smaller of the Nemi ships.
(🖌️Richard Wilson, 1800)
An image of the vast structure of the Nemi ships.
Image of the enormous construction work required to excavate the ships - people pushing mine carts through the mud. Credit: British Pathé
Old photograph of the vast wreck of one of the Nemi ships.
Illustration of an early diving bell, used by 16th Century divers during salvage operations. From Regola generale di soleuare ogni fondata naue & nauilii con ragione" by Niccolo Tartaglia.
(🖌️Joseph Wright, 1790)
A map showing the location of Lake Nemi. 📷 Google
Onlookers queue up to view the excavations of Caligula's ancient Roman vessels, known as the Nemi ships 1932.
Me signing a book in Hatchard's Bookshop.
Me standing outside a Waterstones with my book.
A pan through the ruins of Hierapolis at sunrise.
One bricked up portion of the Ploutonion. Credit: Carole Raddato
A number of dead birds found near the entrance to the Ploutonion by modern archaeologists.
A reconstruction of the Ploutonion in its day. Credit: Edal Anton Lefterov.
The entrance to the Ploutonion, with the flooded entranceway before it.
More crumbling ruins at Hierapolis.
An aerial shot of the ruins.
Another angle of the Ploutonion ruins, showing mountains in the background.
Ruined buildings in the grass at Hierapolis.