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...
What fresh torture is this? “Just resending this email to get it to the top of your inbox!” Let me stop you right there. There is no top of my inbox. My inbox is empty. At least it was before you decided to do the digital equivalent of emptying the contents of my...
Like the uninspired sermon-writer who finds a way to link everything to Jesus, some commentators find a way to link everything to climate change. In December, an editorial in The Lancet medical journal on Covid-19 and climate change announced that “the causes of both...
“What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism is inspiring — although as anyone suffering from long Covid can tell you, it is not always true. Sometimes what does not kill you just makes you weaker. Does Nietzsche’s maxim apply...
Why parents, politicians and doctors would be wiser to sometimes do nothing. Lady Sale (played by Helena Bonham Carter) was part of a bloody and ignominious British retreat from Afghanistan in 1842. The arrogant colonial invaders had thought intervening in Afghan...
Wrinkles and grey hairs notwithstanding, I must be younger than I had assumed. Sixty per cent of the adult population of the UK have been vaccinated with at least one dose, but your columnist is not old enough to be one of them. Who knew? This means I still have...