- Blog
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War analysed
Always excellent David Walker opens the new series of BBC Radio 4’s Analysis with a subtle look at our definition of the national interest in the context of the planned attack on Iraq. He talks to: Lord Owen, Lord Skidelsky, Professor Philip Bobbitt, Professor David Coleman and Professor Paul Hirst. You can listen to the…
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Toyota triumphs
I learn from the FT’s latest survey on the motor industry (which requires a subscription) that, in the midst of the longest recession of the modern era in its home territory, the mighty Toyota is in the ascendant. This year the business will make profits twice as large as any car manufacturer has ever made…
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Barry Cox on broadcast
The third and fourth of Barry Cox’s lectures on the future of broadcasting, as reprinted by The Guardian. The third concerns the failure of competition in digital TV in the UK and the fourth the implications of next generation media technologies. These lectures are the most interesting intervention on the future of UK media I’ve…
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The BBC and voting
We should probably keep an eye on this. Matt Jones, dreamer of this parish and information architect at the BBC, is working on an ambitious project intended to get us ‘reengaged’ with voting and with democracy in the widest sense. Here, Sian Kevill, Matt’s ‘sponsor’, who works in the office of the e-envoy, writes about…
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The end of language?
Azeem wonders if children submitting essays in txt msg language is a bad thing or just language evolving. I’m usually one of those ‘language is a living thing’ guys in these matters, laughing at the grammar pedants and vocabulary fascists (I like David Crystal on language change). There has to be some kind of limit,…
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Cable traumaMy latest Bowbrick at Large in The Guardian is about gloom and desperation in the TV business and the continued failure of the cable industry to wire up Broadband Britain. I really didn’t like it much when I sent it off. Weak, really. Anyway, it seems to have struck some kind of consumer chord –…
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Can you commoditise a commodity?
G Beato in The Guardian laments file sharing’s commoditisation of music. The piece is heartfelt but unhistoric. Music is ancient – older than language – but has changed more in the 75 years since recordings became available than in most of its history. More still in the fifty years since the 45 became pop’s day-to-day…
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Belgium in the West
There’s an excellent profile of Kofi Annan by Philip Gourevitch in the March 3rd issue of The New Yorker but it’s not at the web site, which is annoying. In looking for it, though, I learn from Simon Schama’s article about the history of European anti-Americanism that Baudelaire called America “the Belgium of the West”,…
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McDecline
When McDonalds lost the disastrous McLibel case I used to say that it wouldn’t be the greens or the anti-globalisers that’d bring down the fast food giant but much more prosaic and unpredictable business problems – lifestyle changes, weird new competition (Frappuccino anyone?) and an exhausted brand. Hey! I was right. “In the past, owner-operators…