We puny humans just can’t seem to deal with the idea of a disease for which there is no treatment. We’ll always find something to believe in, no matter how tenuous. Since the Sars-Cov-2 virus was discovered, people have been circulating “cures”, from avoiding iced...
What looks like fraud, feels like fraud but isn’t fraud? What about a company website that pops up when you search for the government agency that issues driving licences, and charges a handsome fee for forwarding your details to the real website? Personal finance...
Mr Spock, Star Trek’s pointy-eared, nimble-eyebrowed Vulcan, is a beloved figure, especially as portrayed by the late Leonard Nimoy. He is a cultural touchstone for superior rationality. There’s just one problem: Spock is actually terrible at logic. As Julia Galef...
In his acid parliamentary testimony recently, Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former chief adviser, blamed a lot of different people and things for the UK’s failure to fight Covid-19 — including “groupthink”. Groupthink is unlikely to fight back. It already has...
“As more of everyday life returns, we must not forget about the things that quietly, efficiently (perhaps almost without us noticing) offer some of the greatest benefits of all.” Those were the words recently of Lord Sebastian Coe, twice an Olympic gold medallist and...
Everyone knows that intellectual property is sacrosanct, a reward for good deeds and an essential way of supporting creative endeavours. That, at least, was the response to journalist Matthew Yglesias when he suggested in March that copyright protection should be...
Femi was 21 years old when he was pulled over for speeding in Colindale, London; the police charged him with a cannabis offence. It was one of several brushes with the law. But Femi changed. As Christian Jarrett writes in Be Who You Want, “Femi, or to use his full...
Back in 1992, my school friend Daniel Saxby and I stood in London in front of an audience of worthies and a panel of celebrity judges including health minister Virginia Bottomley and Tory grandee Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham. We battled an opposing team, debating the...
Watching the Ever Given wedge itself across the Suez Canal, it would have taken a heart of stone not to laugh. But it was yet another unpleasant reminder that the unseen gears in our global economy can all too easily grind or stick. From the shutdown of Texas’s...