‘It should be remembered, that in few departments have important reforms been effected by those trained up in practical familiarity with their details. The men to detect blemishes and defects are among those who have not, by long familiarity, been made insensible to...
Other Writing
Articles from the New York Times, Forbes, Wired and beyond – any piece that isn’t one of my columns.
The joy of the humble brick
‘I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.’ That is supposed to have been the boast of Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor, just over two thousand years ago. If it was, he was exaggerating: ancient Rome is a city of brick, and no less glorious...
Book Review – Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut, by Marcus du Sautoy
In 1786, in a classroom in Braunschweig, near Hanover, a bored schoolmaster in need of a nap set his pupils the tedious task of adding up every number between 1 and 100. Before the master could even lean back in his chair, one boy strode forward and placed his slate...
The Tyranny of Spreadsheets
Early last October my phone rang. On the line was a researcher calling from Today, the BBC’s agenda-setting morning radio programme. She told me that something strange had happened, and she hoped I might be able to explain it. Nearly 16,000 positive Covid cases had...
What conspiracy theorists don’t believe is more important than what they do
The paperback of “How To Make The World Add Up” is now out – do please order! Some people believe the most extraordinary things. Earth is flat, and airplane GPS is rigged to fool pilots into thinking otherwise. COVID-19 vaccines are a pretext to inject...
A free chapter of The Data Detective audiobook
My book The Data Detective is out today in the US and Canada. (The same book is called How To Make The World Add Up elsewhere in the world.) To celebrate publication, Riverhead Books have teamed up with Pushkin Industries to release the final chapter of the audiobook...
My fantasy dinner party: Florence Nightingale and juggling unicyclists
I don’t believe in keeping my guests waiting to eat, so it all starts with a first course to more than take the edge off the appetite: chips from Frituur No 1 in the centre of Antwerp, fried twice in beef tallow, scalding hot but cooled with mayonnaise. The fries...
We will not understand Covid until we give up debating it
Confused by the contradictory claims about the dangers posed by coronavirus? Cut through the fog with this one weird trick: stop trying to win an argument. I realise that such advice does not sit easily with the way culture has been going in Britain in general of...
Can the pandemic help us fix our technology problem?
We have a technology problem. By that, I mean that we currently lack the technology to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. We don’t have a cheap, easy, self-administered test. We lack effective medicines. Above all, we...