Recently updated blogs

I have a talk coming up with the Sohemian Society on Thursday December 5, where I will be in conversation with writer and musician Max Décharné about Denmark Street: London’s Street Of Sound. The event will be held upstairs at the Wheatsheaf pub on Rathbone Place in Fitzrovia – tickets can be purchased here. The Sohemian Society was founded in 2003 to celebrate Soho Bohemia and is organised by the …

On weekday mornings, early enough that the sun is still creeping up past the horizon, we bundle up in our jackets, grab the backpack, and walk to the bus stop. The bus stop is a six minute walk from the house, down the hill at the end of our street; with a four-year-old, those six minutes often stretch to ten. If we play “the paint is lava,” carefully jumping over …

Good leaders are students of human behaviour and psychology. In this short video, I share the insight on how our cognitive processing works and how learning this can help us become Mindful leaders. One of the most important aspect of leadership is our ability to choose how we respond to any given situation. Understanding how our cognition functions and where exactly in the process of cognition can we exercise choice …

Spent a few days over in Lithuania at the end of October, visiting our lad in Vilnius. The city is spilt by two rivers, the Vilnia and the much larger Neris, which are home to a wide variety of fish species, including salmon, trout, grayling, asp and nase, so couldn't help peering over the many bridges on our various walks. Only a short distance out of the city the surrounding …

Whelp. Tuesday did not at all go how I had hoped. A friend of mine lives next to a high school history teacher who posted the text below on one of the big social media sites yesterday. I found it helpful. This one is hard if you wanted Harris to win. Because Trump won fair and square. The Republicans will control the Senate, and most likely the House as well. …

Well, here we are. As someone who unfortunately lives in a MAGA pocket of Los Angeles County, I’m numb but not surprised. I’ve seen so much of this in my local ecosystem over the past decade, but I think that seeing it at full country scale last night really cemented for me some current truths about a majority of 2024 America: Deep down, we’re never handing over power to a …

Figure 1: Poster for the 2021 American comedy thriller film Me You Madness When an artwork or cultural object is deeply layered with an array of meanings we call it a rich text. This is not that. This is what happens when financialization and oligarchy and extreme wealth unfold in the new gilded age of a crumbling, decadent empire. Specifically, this is what happens when you are the son of …

America Hates You, America

Life in America has long felt like a game played between adults and children; a game where one side knows the rules and is dedicated to keeping them, and the other is merely making up ad-hoc rules from moment to moment, for no reason but to help them win.

I learned on Monday that my friend Duke Parrish died from catching up on his wife's My­Insta­Tik­Face­Linked­Me­Pin­Book­Space­Tok­In­Gram­We­Trest feed. He died on October 31st. Hallowe'en. He was five days younger than I. It wasn't a sudden accident or the result of a horrible crime. No. He had a genetic disorder diagnosed way too late and it caught up to him. I am still processing this. Outside of family, he was the …

for we must know in advance, if we are prepared for that conflict, that the combat may have truces but never a peace. If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface …

The next democracy we build will have to be better than this one.

This is a fantastic idea: integrating tactile maps on pedestrian crossing buttons to help sight-impaired people get a lay of the land. These exact signal boxes are used here, but I don't think I've ever seen the map module on them. That's a shame. [View video on Youtube] [View video on Invidious (tracking-free)]

What is the opposite of Cory Doctorow’s neologism “enshittification“, the seemingly purposeful making worse of a product or situation? It’s Cory Doctorow’s embettering of his recent cancer diagnosis. Cory assures his readers that it’s very, very likely to turn out to be completely treatable in minimally invasive ways. In fact, he has already gone through […]