At the risk of sounding like a newlywed presenting my spouse with a list of pointers for improvement, these once-miraculous Covid vaccines could do better. It wasn’t long ago that I celebrated the anniversary of being fully vaccinated, but that first flush of immunity...
I’ve been thinking recently about three debates. In the first, which took place in January 2016, two Harvard students, Fanele Mashwama and Bo Seo, proposed that “the world’s poor would be justified in pursuing complete Marxist revolution”. In the second, in October of...
In the mid-1990s, the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission, an insurer of state employees, released healthcare data that described millions of interactions between patients and the healthcare system to researchers. Such records could easily reveal highly sensitive...
Switching to a new phone is easy enough these days. The wheezing older model formed a huddle with the shiny oversized new thing, and within a few minutes had effected a near-complete digital handover. One exception was the notification settings. As they reset to the...
Sitting exams is unpleasant at the best of times, but my daughter believes she has extra cause to complain. Two of her A-level papers are scheduled for the same time, so she must take a break between them with only an invigilator for company. “I can’t even have my...
What does it mean to “learn how to think”? Is it a matter of learning some intellectual skills such as fluent reading, logic and clear expression? Does it require familiarity with some canonical texts or historical facts? Perhaps it’s all about correcting certain...
If at first you don’t succeed, goes the old saying, try, try again. Good advice, up to a point. But let me offer a modification: even when you do succeed, try, try again. Tempting as it is to declare victory and move on, in many endeavours there is much to be said for...
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” wrote Adam Smith, famously, in The Wealth of Nations, “but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their...
Andy Warhol once gave a silkscreen portrait of Marilyn Monroe to a sceptical friend. Keep it safe in a closet, said Warhol: “One day it will be worth a million dollars.” Perhaps he undersold himself, given the price recently reached by another of Warhol’s Marilyn...