Here’s a holiday quiz question for you: what do puzzles, poker, and misinformation have in common? The answer is at the bottom of this column. Let’s try an easier question first. In Santa’s workshop, if it takes five elves five minutes to wrap five presents, how long...
Tom Kelley is a sensitive soul. Shortly after sending the manuscript of his first book, The Art of Innovation, to his publisher, he visited Kepler’s, his local bookshop in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley. “I literally started to cry,” he confessed to a group of authors...
I think we could all use some help in escaping to other worlds with our friends. I've taken the Christmas holiday as an opportunity to read some good gaming books, some of which were kindly placed in my stocking by Father Christmas... Without further ado, Return of...
I occasionally listen to the oddly-named but excellent "Art of Manliness" podcast, and a recent episode brought me up short. It was an interview with Gregg Krech, author of "Naikan: Gratitude, Grace and the Japanese art of self-reflection". Krech suggested a practice...
A few weeks ago, Toby Young, the editor of the Lockdown Sceptics website, tweeted: “New study suggests more than five million Britons have had the coronavirus. Given that ~50,000 people have died from it, that means an IFR [infection fatality rate] of <0.1%.” There...
Perhaps there is no wrong way to exchange Christmas gifts, but in a hurried rendezvous just off junction six of the M40 must come close. My sister was furious; we had planned to go for a walk in the woods together the day before Christmas Eve, one of the safest...
There are those who will have you believe that Santa Claus wears red and white in honour of the colours of the Coca-Cola brand. This is nonsense. The great man was seen clad in red and white some years before Haddon Sundblom’s iconic 1930s advertisements. What’s more,...
One consequence of working from home is that mistakes are made. People miss messages; spinning plates fall to the ground; the falcon cannot hear the falconer; a New Yorker journalist broadcasts his genitals to everyone else on a Zoom call. Much has rightly been...
People used to send more seasonal greetings cards in times gone by, but in December 1974, Phil and Joyce Kunz received a particularly bountiful crop. Some were simple offerings of “Happy Christmas” but others contained long letters. There was also a complaint from the...