29 Jul 2025

Nearly half a bicycle

The atomic theory in Kilburn — This place (on Kilburn High Road) has been morphing steadily from dry cleaner’s to bike shop over the last few years. I remember being surprised one morning to see a few kids’ bikes lined up for sale outside but I’d say the shop is now approaching 50% bike shop. […]

13 Jan 2025

Where is my patriotism?

Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag […]

6 Sep 2024

Some bullet-points about regulation

In case you’d got the wrong idea about how the ’regulatory state‘ is supposed to work — UPDATED 23 May 2025. I could update this thing daily. Regulation is always a news story in the UK (Search any news service for ‘regulation‘ right now and you’ll get a long list of current news stories about […]


  • Making homes smart

    Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and top researcher at Intel, was star turn at a fascinating seminar run by the iSociety research group at the Work Foundation. The topic was ‘the smart…

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  • Tait on Puttnam’s rebellion

    Richard Tait in FT Creative Business on the likely parliamentary clash over media ownership rules and the so called ‘Murdoch Clause’. Written before Lord Puttnam announced his intention to oppose…

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  • I like this guy a lot

    UPDATE: another broken link 🙁 Interviewed by the estimable Wendy Grossman in New Scientist, a geek who uses statistical methods and clever database code to skewer torturers and dictators.

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  • Sleight’s hands

    Lunch today at Blacks with Ross Sleight. Ross has been doing important things in the digital departments of various ad agencies since 1994 – apart from the obligatory (and exhausting)…

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  • Enlightened old men

    I wonder if there’s a generation of scientists, artists and technocrats ready to succeed Freeman Dyson, Arthur C Clarke and all those other admirable, enlightened, imaginative old men who came…

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  • Early-onset adolescence

    My son Oliver, who is four, has just learnt the word ‘private’. He spontaneously created this sign for his bedroom door. We suspect early-onset adolescence.

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  • You’ve got hate mail!

    I’ve had lots of email in response to my latest Guardian article, which is a pretty unremarkable slice of nostalgia, but it’s not the nostalgia that’s got people going, it’s…

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  • Guardian.jpgBlame Waldman

    Simon Waldman, the big boss at Guardian Unlimited, thinks we should start to assemble a kind of community history of the UK Internet business on the occasion of its sort-of-tenth…

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  • Gawker on the war

    What does a slick and frothy Manhattan gossip and media blog like Gawker do in times of war? It covers the war, naturally – and quite well, too.

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  • BBCi cuts deep. Nobody notices

    Unlike the rest of the media, Owen Gibson in The Guardian has noticed that the BBC has trimmed the size of its interactive division (BBCi) by a third and frozen…

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  • Wolff on the war

    Execellent writing on war frenzy in the American media from Michael Wolff in The Guardian. ‘The story now is about the war as a fighting-man event, not a political event.…

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  • Too easy

    Timothy Garton Ash is doing heroic work on both sides of the Atlantic – more important than ever as the fog of war thickens – to articulate the complicated, nervous,…

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