- Blog
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And watch out for those pea-soupers…
Strange ‘insider tips’ from The Economist’s London City Guide that came through my letterbox the other day, apparently cut and pasted from a 1950s travel guide: Table manners are keenly observed as a sign of good breeding. Never talk with your mouth full; never reach across the table; do not wave cutlery around or yell…
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“a striking new bird for the future”
The last time Penguin gave its Puffin kids’ imprint a new logo was in the year I was born, 1963. In the same year Puffin published Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and The Opies’ Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes – a good year. The old logo is evocative – it rushes me back…
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Things are getting better
Will Hutton’s a pretty stern critic of the Blair project but you’d be hard put to read this article from The Observer as anything other than an endorsement of Labour’s record on public services. To quote the standfirst: “Things are getting better in health, education and the fight against crime – we’ve got the figures…
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Phones that go bling
Nokia are betting they can create a super-luxury mobile phone brand. It’s called Vertu. £15,000 buys you a pretty ordinary GSM phone (called an ‘instrument’) in a hand-tooled platinum, white gold or silver enclosure. They’re borrowing explicitly from the vocabulary of hand made mechanical watches and they come with a one-button concierge service for helpless…
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No no no no no
Er, excuse me for blurting out my first reaction but have you lost your mind? An Apple takeover of Vivendi Universal Music will inevitably be a disaster. Much as I love the cat-among-the-pigeons potential of a tech counter-strike deep in the heart of showbiz-land, we now have decades of evidence that mega-mergers like this one…
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SARS links, scary and otherwise
Azeem provides the scariest SARS link so far. The cold statistics show the ineluctable progress of a disease vector. Global SARS cases are doubling every 14 days: “There will be 100,000 cases on about June 20, 2003. A million cases will be reached on about August 6, 2003, and ten million on about September 21,…
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Said on the war
I supported this war. I did it in a queasy, compromising way ? like all the pro-war lefties I know. I have a phrase: “…conditional support”. I don’t feel any more comfortable now than I did before the invasion began but my support holds, although I’m keeping open the possibility that I’ve made an enormous…
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A distributed business
Up many flights of stairs to the not-very-glamorous offices of brainy trend-spotters Sense Worldwide. Jeremy Brown, Tom Savigar, Raj Panjwani and Inma Martinez run an unusual business, employing only 8 staff but with on-demand access to about 1,000 other people from a global email network of egg heads, designers, fashion victims, people watchers and journos…
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Pilger vs. Lloyd in The New Statesman
Absolutely compelling war writing in this week’s New Statesman. John Pilger’s article is bitter, Messianic, despairing stuff. For him, the actual conduct of the war confirms everything he said and thought in advance: “…a glimpse of fascism”. John Lloyd – one time editor of the magazine – is a pro-war Blairite. His angry article is…