Tag: USA

  • Apex capitalism

    The Apple Vision Pro represents the end of something. Or possibly the beginning. It’s an apex product from an apex economy. — (updated on 10 June with some new market…

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  • Skycaps on a break

    From the archives. At JFK, 24 April 2005. They’re telling me about the previous Friday night’s $205M Michigan lottery win.

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  • Trump’s epic disdain

    Trump the innovator is back on the campaign trail, diagnosing and mocking his audiences. And they love it. — I can’t stop watching this video. It’s a random tiny clip…

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  • 1998, the last time New York City had the correct amount of visual chaos

    It was the end of history but it was before 9/11, before the dot.com crash, a whole decade before the Great Recession — Zuckerberg was still at school. I was…

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  • Who is Trump?

    A little Benito Mussolini, some John Gotti and some George Wallace. Plenty of Charles Lindbergh too, of course. But mainly he’s Rufus T. Firefly.

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  • The second-best book about twentieth century music

    Everybody knows the best book about Twentieth Century music is Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise but there’s another brilliant book set in the same period – Wilfrid Sheed’s The…

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  • Viacom’s giant ‘fuck you’

    I’ve run a number of pretty big web sites in my time, often maintaining large customer databases and, of course, log files. We kept those log files indefinitely but rarely…

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  • Didion’s lament

    Joan Didion has been the unassailed Queen of the New York liberal elite for decades – essayist, novelist, political commentator. Her latest NYRB piece is hard-hitting but reads like a…

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  • The downtown music scene after 9/11

    I sometimes listen to Radio 3’s Mixing It. Freaky stuff from every corner of music and only occasionally a bit po-faced. This week I stumbled across a web page about…

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