- Blog
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Folk justice
Sophisticated it ain’t. Taking a man’s lottery winnings away from him fifteen years after he was convicted and sentenced may sound Mediaeval to you but I suspect there’s worse to come. Retrospective punishments might just catch on – and let’s not be timid. Why stop at the first generation? A miscreant’s offspring ought surely to…
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Admirable Things
The admirable Things Magazine has reached its tenth anniversary. I’m a recent convert (like thousands of people, I guess, by way of the equally good New Things linklog). You can buy a copy here and you can even use the PayPal credit you’ve been accumulating selling off all those… er… things in your attic. Things…
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Buy my stuff…
I bet you need a powerful, versatile flash gun for that old manual focus Nikon of yours, don’t you? Here’s a good one.
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Animal testing crackdown
The animal rights people aren’t terrorists, not even the ugly ones wearing balaclavas and harassing researchers and their families – that’s just big pharma spin. They are stupid, though. Their story-book anthropomorphism is simple-minded, reductive and partial. Animal testing may offend you (it offends me – I’m as sentimental as the next man) and there…
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Half a kilometre and climbing…
Short piece from MIT’s Technology Review about the latest world’s tallest building – in Taipei – soon to be overtaken by several others, including the Twin Towers’ replacement (NY Times). I like skyscrapers. They speak to the 14 year-old in me and, since you just have to reverse those numbers to arrive at my current…
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Small amusements
Pages like this will one day form a sort of buried stratum from which info-archaeologists will reconstruct the texture of our time – or something. Russell’s been photographing those little rocking, beeping, coin-operated amusements they put outside supermarkets (well, anywhere actually). My kids love them, naturally enough, and I can’t get away with sitting them…
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One great book, one bad one…
Here’s a beautiful book about The Marx Brothers and here’s a dreadful one about Groucho. The first, by movie comedy-specialist Simon Louvish, is warm, melancholy, loaded with incident, contemporary accounts, documentation, asides and – above all – funny material from the brothers’ long career on- and off-screen. The second, by Groucho expert Stefan Kanfer, is…
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Through the looking glass
When I was a kid I used to lie in bed at night with my crappy Sanyo radio and roam the shortwave bands. I loved those voices from distant places. My favourite was Radio Tirana. On the nightly English-language news a male/female duo with the plummiest RP delivery imaginable (accents presumably acquired at Oxbridge and…
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Two kinds of business insight
Here’s a really fascinating peek inside the Movable Type machine from Mena Trott. Like a lot of inventors, she’s giving up the CEO role in favour of a more experienced operator. People usually keep schtum about this kind of thing… While I’m posting business stuff, a terrific piece from Business Week about the decline of…