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Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Recently Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to Casey Newton of The Platformer, for both his newsletter and The Vergecast podcast. It was a wide ranging interview covering many of the hot-button topics of the day – not least Covid misinformation on Facebook’s platforms and what they were doing about it. But the interview kicked off…
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Billy Summers by Stephen King
I’m not sure what kind of deal Stephen King has with his publishers (Simon & Schuster in the US, Hodder & Stoughton in the UK), but I do know that every so often, he publishes a book with Hard Cast Crime, the noir paperback imprint that comes with original illustrations on the cover, as though…
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Recently Read Crime Fiction
[Note: There has been, and will be, a flurry of book reviews on this blog at the moment. In part because I’ve suddenly been reading a bit more, but also in part because I’ve read a few books this year, but just not gotten around to writing about them.] The Less Dead is Denise Mina’s…
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Losing 56 kg / 9 stone / 124 lbs Over a Year
At the end of 2020, I wrote a blog post entitled “Making the Most of 2020” in which I detailed my diet and fitness regime. This post goes into significantly more detail, revisiting some of what I wrote before, and expanding on it. I should also make clear that I am not a medical practitioner…
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The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion
I’m not 100% sure when I became fascinated with the office sub-leasing business WeWork, but it was certainly ahead of its mid-2019 filing for an IPO, and which point things really did seem to fall spectacularly apart. Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell are a pair of Wall St Journal reporters who covered WeWork on the…
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Finding a New Movie Studio
This morning came news that the UK, and London in particular is going to be home of a new film studio. Specifically, Blackstone Real Estate and Hudson Pacific Properties have found a spot 17 miles north of London in Broxbourne to site their new studio facilities that they claim will see £700m invested, and bring…
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The Olympics on TV in the UK
The 2012 London Olympics were perhaps the high point for UK viewers who wanted to watch the Olympic Games. For a home event, the BBC pulled out all the stops with coverage across BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Three (then still on broadcast). There was a vast array of other broadcasts too, with up…
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CNN+
It’s interesting to see that CNN is launching a new subscription streaming service which it is imaginatively titling CNN+, because all streaming services from “legacy” providers have indicate that they’re streaming by adding that “+”. The service will launch in 2022 and will co-exist with CNN’s existing brands including CNN and CNN International. But there…
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An Ugly Truth by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
For a long time now, Facebook has had a serious problem with some of its users – myself included – a lack of trust. It’s hard to put a finger on why that is exactly, and why they should be viewed as any worse than, say, Google. Perhaps it’s the way they introduce new features…
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Wimbledon 2021
It’s been an awfully long time since I last attended an actual in-person sporting event, so it was great to be able to get a ticket to Wimbledon this year. Prior to the pandemic Wimbledon had finally gone digital in their ticket allocation. Previously, to enter the public ballot, you had to send away for…
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Top 10 Podcast Trends in 10 Minutes
I spoke today at Podcast Day 24, a big online podcast event that spread across Australasia, Europe and North America, and as the name suggests, ran for 24 hours! My piece was on Podcast Trends, and is a bit of an update of something that I delivered back in 2019 when the last physical event…
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Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
If there is one non-fiction title I’ve been looking forward to reading for a while, it is this definitive story of the Sackler family and OxyContin, the drug that swept America, almost single-handidly creating the opioid crisis and creating addicts across America. From a British perspective, while every crime show of the last dozen years…
Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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Yellowface/All The Lovers In The Night
Yellowface by R F Kuang I first came across R F Kuang with last year’s very enjoyable Babel, an alternate history of the British Empire told in a world where magic exists and is controlled by an elite group of individuals. Yellowface is very different, but no less enjoyable. It’s a book about books, and…
Hadrian’s Wall
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