Tag: economics

  • Hillman in Hendon and in Tehran

    Is the Israeli attack on Iran the first on a country that manufactures electric cars by one that doesn’t? — I met this gorgeous car and its proud owner in…

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  • Final act for the streamers

    Netflix introduced ads and now Amazon Prime too. It’s your fault. — It’s a three-act drama — In act one it’s about growth—extravagent, out-of-control, venture-funded growth—you remember that. Piling on…

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  • Dudes in the woods

    Robin Hood is a Mediaeval superhero. He doesn’t care much about emancipation, but he loves to skip through the trees. — Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.…

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  • A cheesy romance, a seaside class-war, a vehicle for the biggest female star of the time

    The actual top film of 1914 was an epic 23-part serial called The Million Dollar Mystery, which it turns out is lost (how do you lose 46 reels of smash…

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  • From the other end of the modern

    Italo Svevo and Adam Tooze (and Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng) — So, this post originally started with a bit about how I’d read about Svevo in Franco Moretti’s The…

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  • Podcasting—the platform battle

    UPDATE 2026. When I updated this post in 2022 I concluded I’d got it completely wrong about who would wind up dominating podcasting. Now I’m not so sure. UPDATE 2022.…

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  • Games that disappear

    You can’t play Godfinger any more. It’s gone. ngmoco, the developer, removed the game (plus a couple of others) from app stores during February – and it’ll stop working all…

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  • David Hepworth – a Q&A about curating music

    It has been my privilege, over the last few years, to write a few pieces for Britain’s best music (and arts and movies and stuff) magazine The Word – including,…

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  • A parable of sorts (about the music business, I feel obliged to point out)

    The year is 1823. Nathaniel Burrell, sheep farmer, has stumbled upon a method for duplicating sheep. To cut a long story short, after years of essentially random cross-breeding he now…

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  • Record label angst

    If the last three generations (five years = one generation) of music industry executives had been contestants on The Apprentice they’d all have been fired by now. So many self-destructive…

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