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...
Is Vladimir Putin mad? Russia’s president has launched a costly and unprovoked war, shocked his own citizens, galvanised Nato, triggered damaging but predictable economic reprisals and threatened a nuclear war that could end civilisation. One has to doubt his grasp on...
How are those New Year’s resolutions going? If you’re persisting, good for you. Many people do not. I began musing on this problem in December when the writer David Epstein’s Range Widely newsletter asserted that “New Year’s Resolutions Actually Work Astoundingly...
We all know that there’s a gap between the money men earn and the money women earn, but I hadn’t grasped quite how enormous that gap still is. Even in egalitarian Finland, men earn a third more than women. In the UK and the US, men earn two-thirds more. In the...
What colour is a rainbow? On average, white. And what is the current level of UK inflation? On average, 5.4 per cent. Both answers are true. Both are missing something important. The consumer price index, or CPI, aims to measure the average price paid by UK consumers....
Are you being bullied by your inbox? That was the question posed recently on the productivity podcast Change Your Game with GTD [Getting Things Done]. It hit a nerve, as on that particular day my email inbox had me in a corner, turning out my pockets for lunch...
Is this the point at which we should shrug our shoulders and give up? Omicron has prompted three kinds of reaction: optimism, pessimism and fatalism. The optimists argue that the variant is “nature’s vaccine”, a mild and transmissible virus that will quickly infect...