Recently updated blogs

I got into a polite exchange of views a couple of days back over an otherwise unexceptional story about, of all things, expensive mince pies. Or, more specifically, over the language used by the good citizens of Orford, in Suffolk, where the Pump Street Bakery makes delicacies that are supposedly the priciest mince pies going. When one of the locals described them as “bespoke”, I was confused, because there had …

I’ve started a Bluesky list featuring some of the brilliant writers, designers, coders, editors, and others who’ve contributed to A List Apart “for people who make websites” from the magazine’s first dawning back in the 19(mumbles). Bluesky fans, grab the list here: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:pgjpl4opnmqxxpb74n4vuabv/lists/3lbozpqe2kq2t Why only *some* of the contributors? Simple. Several are, sadly, deceased. Many others are likely alive and well but not yet on Bluesky. We can’t unmake death, …

The Papermakers Arms, Hawley, Kent An inter-wars cottage-style pub in a village south of Dartford near the A2/M25 interchange. It closed in 2022, and a planning application has been submitted for a luxury car showroom on the site, which makes a change from yet more flats.

A ghost goes for a walk in the woods.

I was interviewed about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, for NPR’s To the Best of Our Knowledge. The episode is “The Sum of Our Data,” and it includes interviews with The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life author Lowry Pressly and The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care author Carl Öhman. You can …

For the rest of the year, EVERY order shipped from my online bookstore comes with 4 FREE stickers.

How do you possibly even contemplate posing such a question (with such an overtly obvious answer) to such heavily traumatized... children?!?

For me, it’s important to have things to aim for, even if they’re arbitrary. I’m still on target for running 1,000km in 2024, partly because the Strava feature that tracks it shows me when I’m behind my goal. This morning, I really didn’t want to run, but being 10.3km down meant that I went out anyway. Current status: 0.2km in front of goal. This means I’ve now only got just …

My collaborator on Katabasis (Beth McCarthy) and I spoke at Devcon, one of the largest Ethereum conferences in the world that happened this past week in Bangkok! In our talk we spoke about the power of memes and the influence of capital on them and vice versa. Beth provides some good frameworks for understanding these narrative dynamics from the likes of Foucault, Walter Banjamin, Althusser, and Wittgenstein. My time in …

Today, we present a guest post written by Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. An earlier version appeared at Project Syndicate and the Guardian. Nov. 24, 2024 –When the US election was called for Donald Trump the night of November 5, the stock market rose but the bond market fell. The yield on 10-year …

Amazing how close these Sweetsong demos made by Mike Chapman are to the finished record. (you'll want to skip ahead past the early abject bubblegum pap to the "Wigwam Bam / Little Willie" onwards stompy stuff.)Particularly on the level of the vocal inflections, the campy ad libs, the whole pitch of hysteria - almost all of it was worked out in advance. Eventually the dummies assimilated the implanted style - …

When this post is published, I should have been traveling with friends in Japan for just under a week. Hanging out with friends is always awesome, but the whole traveling and waiting around at airports and packing all your things and lugging bags around and managing inventory is not. It is also exhausting. I don't have my weekly step total yet (as I am writing this before my week ends), …

When we were up in Northumberland a few weeks ago I walked Lucie through the parish church graveyard first thing in the morning. As always a long established village has a lot of old graves and this one with the lichen growing on it caught my eye. Now one of the interesting things about these quiet places is the local history that is there, you can read the carving on …

by Rutger Claassen and Ingrid Robeyns Let’s establish an upper limit on the personal wealth any individual can possess. This is the core principle behind ‘limitarianism’. Limitarianism represents one of the more radical proposals in the debate on wealth inequality. Over the past few years, one of us has developed the philosophy of limitarianism (first in the academic realm, and then more recently also in the public sphere, as regular …

This has been an unusual travel year for me. I’ve had two adventures that were – wildly against type – organized within weeks of going. My Alaska cruise was booked only 10 days before I left while I had a comparatively leisurely three weeks to organize my fabulous visit to Chicago. But what I did have planned from very early in the year was a restorative two week trip to …