Category: City Life
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The Dark Side of the Summer of Love
Researching for my talk at TEDx this year, I came across scanned pages of this superb article in Playboy magazine. Who knew what crazy stuff was out there on the Interwebs?! Seriously, it’s a very fine piece that gets under the skin of what was really going on at the time, through the story of a…
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A chilly morning for Plato…
Been beautiful in London this week… these both taken on my walk to work through the remnants of the Crystal Palace… though let’s not pretend that the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets aren’t a function of air pollution 🙁
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Getting High…in 1753 | The Gin Craze
‘In all history there’s never been a culture in the world that didn’t have some drug of some kind to lift people out of themselves.’ Poverty, war, terrifying religion and women experiencing liberation… Could so equally have written Getting High about the Gin craze era of the mid 1700s 🙂 In Our Time, brilliant, as…
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Walt, The Wire and The Waltons – Thoughts on Breaking Bad and The Wire
As Breaking Bad draws to a finale (last episode airing on Sunday / Monday) I wanted to post some quick thoughts – clear warning, this may therefore contain spoilers. It’s become a bit of a truism to say that it’s the best thing on TV, but it really has been an immensely enjoyable series. I…
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‘There Can Be No Retreat’: On Simplicity, and the Fixed Vector of the Examined Life
A good friend Jonny spent a week or so in silence in the hills of Wales recently, and has been blogging really beautifully about the experience. The term I don’t like that’s often used for these periods is ‘retreat’ – it’s too military for me, and carries with it a sense of moving backwards. Though…
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Chinese Highways | Enclosure of the Commons | Minimal Wages
It seems that the current coalition government are determined to raise the revenue that’s required to keep our roads up to scratch by arranging an elaborate private finance initiative, which will probably result in the Chinese government owning contracts for road management. How can this possibly make sense? There must, one presumes, be an economic…