After two decades of digital titans hogging the limelight, the physical economy has spent the past two years reasserting itself. From the supply of toilet paper to the price of wheat, shortages of personal protective equipment in early 2020 and columns of Russian...
On the surface, April 2020 was apocalyptic. You could walk the sunny streets of Oxford and barely see a soul: shops closed, roads empty, just the occasional pedestrian nervously crossing to the other side of the street. Of course, it wasn’t just Oxford. The...
In 1989, several years before the world watched the chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue vanquish the world champion Garry Kasparov, a computer notched up a different milestone in artificial intelligence that was all but unnoticed. This was largely because the...
It seems unlikely that anyone will ever read my epic fantasy trilogy about the adventures of Angor Ironfist. There are four reasons for that. First, it is unreadable. Second, it is unfinished. Third, it was written on a now-obsolete BBC Microcomputer, in a...
My finger hovered over the mouse as I briefly considered retweeting the “Battle of Snake Island” footage. You may have seen it; you may have retweeted it yourself. It was, apparently, the last moments alive of 13 heroic Ukrainian soldiers, with a Russian ship...
A century ago, the father of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, was commissioned by a French industrialist to design some homes for factory workers near Bordeaux. The resulting development, Cité Frugès de Pessac, was much as one might expect: brightly hued blocks of...
Nearly two years ago, I made a costly mistake. I’d spent some time trying to fix up my bike at a local bike co-op, when one of the volunteers told me that the chain was worn, and I should come back soon to replace it. A week later, the first lockdown began and I put...
Andy Warhol put it best. “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too,” he declared in 1975. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke...
“I wanted to show that you could develop even a very beautiful place without defiling it,” said Sir Clough Williams-Ellis. “In fact, that if you did it with sufficient loving care, you might even enhance what God had given you.” It was 1969, and Williams-Ellis was...