Collection of short posts and short stories.
Walter Ong believed that societies without writing are ‘agonistically programmed’, that is they have an inherent bias towards confrontation. This makes sense. Reading an essay written by your hated enemy is – however irritating their writing style and however intolerably…
What a soundbite. Of course, it’s out of context. But out of context or not, it’s clearer and clearer that Sam Altman is out of touch with what mainstream consumers want. I’ll repeat this again and again: We didn’t ask…
I’ve made no secret that, workwise, 2024 was crap. Freshly redundant with limited funds, I entered the market. A job hunt should take three to four months. Mine? It took twelve. This felt personal. One rejection stings. Two rejections hurt.…
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 described and introduced Ramageddon in February 2026—the rising price of RAM due to the data centre boom fuelled by the AI bubble. By June 2026, Apple, Nintendo, and Xbox had announced significant price rises due to “memory chip shortages”.…