Ben Jackson

@benjackson.com

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I build stories. Chief revise editor @thetimes.com

A fortune cookie wrapper and the fortune that says: Look! Good fortune is around you.
A Times advert at London Bridge station
“Certain kinds of writing — bureaucratic, social-scientific, even journalistic — often seem to have been written by a robot, reaching for prepared phrases, recoiling from idiosyncrasy. Yet the sense of a human heart beating through plain words can penetrate a reader’s indifference as nothing else can.” John Whale, Put it in Writing (1984)
A bottle of saké and two glasses
The Times and The Sunday Times Style Guide on a bookshelf
Free to read. Head to thetimes.com this Wednesday and Thursday to enjoy free access
The US election untangled. Read free. November 6 and 7. The Times and The Sunday Times.
Manhattan Bridge with the Empire State Building in the distance
The words “no Oasis” written on the inside of a DJ booth
Andrea Bowers 1965 Born and works US The Worker’s Maypole, An Offering for May Day 1894 (Illustration by Walter Crane) 2015 Ink on cardboard
Read The Times and The Sunday Times for free. This weekend only.
Portrait of Elizabeth I in her coronation robes
An empty cinema screen at Angel, London, on July 24, 2023
What will your great great grandchildren be looking at in a hundred years from now to mark three centuries of The Times? Will there even be a Times then? The need will still be there for the same objective reporting of contemporary events coupled with interpretation and comment. But will it appear daily in the form of black text and pictures printed on paper? Probably not. It may, for instance, appear on a hand-held screen with direct access to a news databank transmitting constantly updated text and pictures of selected subjects of interest to the individual reader. The equivalent of this commemorative book may be a disk, a series of holograms harking back to the quaint old days of paper and ink or even, as an exercise in nostalgia, a genuine book. We at Ben Johnson, the printers of this book, do not claim to have the answer yet to the 2085 edition but we are working on it.
100 days #IStandWithEvan
Culture works and grows through the constant warp and weft of creators, producers, consumers, intellectuals and instinctive lovers. You can’t dictate or legislate for it, you can just make a place that encourages it and you can truncate it. You can make it harder and more grudging, you can put up barriers and you can build walls, but why on earth would you? This collective culture, this golden civilisation grown on this continent over thousands of years, has made everything we have and everything we are, why would you not want to be part of it?
Stacks of DVDs on a shelf
Siamese cat on bed with fangs and slight tongue on display
A narrow, four-storey building on the Strand in central London
A Waystar Royco baseball cap and a grey T-shirt with the words: “Connor Roy was interested in politics from a young age.”
View of the River Thames with St Paul’s Cathedral
Vintage Tube train at Aldwych station
Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.”
1877 patent drawing of “Toy Buzz” whirligig