Here’s a holiday quiz question for you: what do puzzles, poker, and misinformation have in common? The answer is at the bottom of this column. Let’s try an easier question first. In Santa’s workshop, if it takes five elves five minutes to wrap five presents, how long...
Tom Kelley is a sensitive soul. Shortly after sending the manuscript of his first book, The Art of Innovation, to his publisher, he visited Kepler’s, his local bookshop in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley. “I literally started to cry,” he confessed to a group of authors...
A few weeks ago, Toby Young, the editor of the Lockdown Sceptics website, tweeted: “New study suggests more than five million Britons have had the coronavirus. Given that ~50,000 people have died from it, that means an IFR [infection fatality rate] of <0.1%.” There...
Perhaps there is no wrong way to exchange Christmas gifts, but in a hurried rendezvous just off junction six of the M40 must come close. My sister was furious; we had planned to go for a walk in the woods together the day before Christmas Eve, one of the safest...
There are those who will have you believe that Santa Claus wears red and white in honour of the colours of the Coca-Cola brand. This is nonsense. The great man was seen clad in red and white some years before Haddon Sundblom’s iconic 1930s advertisements. What’s more,...
One consequence of working from home is that mistakes are made. People miss messages; spinning plates fall to the ground; the falcon cannot hear the falconer; a New Yorker journalist broadcasts his genitals to everyone else on a Zoom call. Much has rightly been...
People used to send more seasonal greetings cards in times gone by, but in December 1974, Phil and Joyce Kunz received a particularly bountiful crop. Some were simple offerings of “Happy Christmas” but others contained long letters. There was also a complaint from the...
The race to find an effective vaccine appears to be on the home straight. The same cannot be said of the race to roll it out everywhere. Preparing to present a BBC radio series titled How to Vaccinate the World, I’ve been looking at the route ahead. It is less of a...
Self-help is a much-mocked section of the bookstore, and in truth there is much to mock. However I have a soft spot for certain self-help books that I have found useful over the years. These ones get my vote. The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. A nostalgic pick,...