Elon Musk has given us someone to blame for the fact Twitter seems so terrible nowadays, but it’s far from being the only internet platform that seems terrible. Facebook is a mess. Young people tell me that Instagram has ruined itself in the quest to be like TikTok...
I’ve spent years trying to help people make sense of the world around them and particularly to make sense of the numbers that describe that world. But for the past few months, I’ve been wrestling with a new challenge: can I do the same thing for nine- to 13-year-olds?...
Forty years ago, a kid from down the street told me about this cool new game, Tunnels & Trolls. Something about his explanation kept eluding my grasp. Was it a computer game, like Pac-Man or Chuckie Egg? A board game, like Risk or Monopoly? No. There was no...
Much has changed since 1986, when the Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt published an essay in an obscure journal, Raritan, titled “On Bullshit”. Yet the essay, later republished as a slim bestseller, remains unnervingly relevant. Frankfurt’s brilliant insight was...
I recently argued that the UK’s economic performance has been disastrous for 15 years. The consequences are plain to see: people are struggling to make ends meet; taxes are high, yet public services are overloaded; fights over a shrinking economic pie are leading to...
Can Lego save the world? That’s one idea that stuck with me reading How Big Things Get Done, a new book by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Flyvbjerg is perhaps the world’s leading authority on the failure of megaprojects — or how big things get done, but woefully late...
At a time of shortages, we are certainly not short of gloomy economic forecasts. The Resolution Foundation think-tank notes that average real earnings have fallen by 7 per cent since a year ago and predicts that earnings will take four or five years to recover to the...
In my defence, I didn’t get into financial trouble immediately after finishing my master’s degree in economics. It took months. I had a decently paid graduate job and was living within my means, so how did it happen? Simple: I had “cleverly” put all my savings in a...
Another year, another inbox stuffed with junk. So let’s get 2023 off on the right foot, with my opinionated guide to bad email etiquette. Whether you’re a cubicle dweller or a corporate communications supremo, here are the seven types of email you should never send....