When Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to receive the Nobel memorial prize in economics, in 2009, she quipped: “I won’t be the last.” Although she has since been proved right, it was nonetheless astonishingly late in the day for such a landmark. Adding to the...
Travel these days requires an awful lot of paperwork. On a recent trip to Italy, I needed to produce proof of vaccination, proof of three different negative lateral flow tests, proof of the booking of a PCR test, a passenger locator form for the EU and a passenger...
I confess, as a boy, to wearing a Leonardo da Vinci T-shirt. Da Vinci was my idea of cool, and the attraction lay not in the Mona Lisa’s smile or his sketches of natural phenomena. It was the helicopter. Nothing could be more awesome than a 15th-century thinker...
In July 1995, a hot, humid, slow-moving mass of air rolled over Chicago and stayed there for a week. Roads and railway tracks buckled. Lifting bridges were hosed down to prevent thermal expansion from locking them in place. Shops sold out of air conditioners. Demand...
As the northern hemisphere limps to whatever summer tourism it can muster, I am starting to dream of the epic holiday I will enjoy when I am finally able. What will yours be? And will you truly live your holiday — and indeed your life — to the max? Will you see dawn...
It’s striking how much Covid confusion still reigns. Some of the informational miasma is deliberate — there’s profit for some in the bewilderment of others — but much of it stems from the fact that epidemics defy our intuition. So, here are five counterintuitive Covid...
With more than half the UK population fully vaccinated and the UK government just a little too eager to declare victory, spare a thought for Cameroon. With a population about half the size of England, Cameroon has — according to Our World in Data — administered just...
The recent unsettling footage of England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty being grabbed and harassed in a central London park brought to mind many things. There were the similar scenes of BBC journalist Nicholas Watt being pursued, surrounded and abused at a...
Weniger, aber besser. These three words — less, but better — summarise the philosophy of the great German designer Dieter Rams. His striking designs, from Braun electronics to Vitsoe furniture, have been influential to the point of ubiquity. Apple’s original iPod...