Month: February 2007

  • Radio twittering

    Be my Twitter friend if you want to know what I’m listening to on the radio. I know I’m always going on about BBC Radio 4 here: ‘jewel in the…

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  • Playing in the road

    Yesterday the suburban street outside our house was closed all day. It’s a busy road so the contrast with an ordinary day was pronounced – the silence lovely. We all…

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  • What I have learnt about Iran lately

    Iran is not monolothic. The country is (weakly) democratic, has a (partially) independent press and a (moderately) autonomous judiciary. Dissent and criticism exist. Iran is not entirely Shia. Nor even…

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  • Better than reading the menu

    You mean your club doesn’t have a dirty great, broadsheet- sized, full-colour intellectual quarterly? Really? Mine does. Clever Giuseppe Mascoli, who’s been sprucing up Blacks in Dean Street a bit…

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  • Think before you sign that petition

    I like road pricing but it’s a big, important policy and – inevitably – it’s a proper curate’s egg. To start with we need to understand what’s good and what’s…

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  • Message to whingeing motorists: shut up!

    Did you notice the unsavoury emergence of so-called ‘motoring advocates’ into the pop media after last week’s letter bombs? Their disreputable message: “what did you expect? You pushed us around…

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  • Adaptation in action

    You’re looking at the kind of spontaneous local adaptation that new technology often undergoes after it’s arrived in its intended home. It’s the coin tray of one of those self-service…

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  • Blue thought

    Nothing like 97,000 pictures of the sky from every corner of the earth to remind you that our planet is just a big lump of hot rock wrapped in the…

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