Collection of short posts and short stories.
In 2011, 21, and full of the naïve ambition to be the most interesting person alive, I signed up for an email newsletter. It was to sendmeastory.com (eventually rolled up into longform.org, which shut down in 2022), which sent you…
…or how the reader hears your writing The period means stop for a moment the semicolon means pause and the comma means either pause very briefly or expect some change the dash is a pause that sets a phrase apart…
Happy 66th Birthday one of the sources of my heart Flawed though you may be (“Fantastically corrupt” didn’t offend you For you knew it was true). You’ve held yourself together These 66 years. Your independence was peaceful Your coups and…
There’s going to be a few little changes in how I write. But let me set the scene first. Social media, “content” as entertainment, is entering its end-game. A race to the bottom to compete with TikTok means everything is…
Maybe you missed it. Maybe you didn’t. But The Odyssey Was for Sailors, is the most ambitious piece of visual storytelling I’ve ever done. It brings together five to six years of Data Journalism, one to two years of learning…
There is a hard word to translate in The Odyssey. And it’s in the second line of the epic poem. It is the epithet—the adjective, or byname—for Odysseus. In the proem, or the invocation to the muse, Homer asks the…
I spent 14 hours creating a custom data visualisation (a recreation of a template that took 15 minutes to customise). Why? We’ll get to that later. But for now, it means you can get a behind-the-scenes peek of how your…
FIFA, you insanely corrupt institution. (Source: BBC)
“Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the…
In the vast swamp of ignorance that has been the debate about AI in the workplace, I’ve slowly been coming to the conclusion… There is a large number of people with full time knowledge work jobs that don’t understand the…