Bookmarks (16)

There are many ways to give a terrible speech. The chief executive who pulls out a sheaf of densely written text and robotically reads it aloud. The management consultant whose every word competes with a jargon-filled tangle of meaningless diagrams and bullet points. The best man who manages to embarrass the bride and outrage her […]

When Ernest Borgnine auditioned for the title role of Marty, he knew this could be his big break. Typecast as a bit-part thug, Borgnine was nearly 40, losing his hair and putting on weight. Marty offered him the chance to play a movie lead: lovelorn butcher Marty Piletti. As he read his audition lines, protesting […]

We have a tendency to sleepwalk into adopting new technologies, and my new fitness-tracking watch is no exception. Ever the late adopter, I bought an entry-level model with a single aim: helping me pace myself on my Saturday morning Parkrun. But oh, the bells and the whistles! A heart-rate monitor. A step counter. Sleep monitoring. […]

A first impression suggests that there is nothing to be gained from reading Alex Bellos’s new book of puzzles, Think Twice (Puzzle me Twice in the US), except an hour or so of pleasant diversion. But as the book makes clear, first impressions can be misleading.  Bellos is offering a very particular kind of puzzle: […]

Mozart and Haydn were composing string quartets a quarter of a millennium ago, when the industrial revolution was in its infancy. Since then, the scale of the world economy has increased at least a hundredfold and material living standards in western Europe have grown 20 times over, perhaps more. Our ability to travel, build, calculate, […]

From time to time, my editor will suggest that I write a column about how to be more productive. It’s a sure way to trigger imposter syndrome because, whether or not I appear productive from the outside, I certainly don’t feel productive on the inside. In fairness to myself, and to anyone who worries that they […]

Earlier in the summer, the Democratic party and its supporters faced a difficult decision: should they gently but firmly sideline President Joe Biden from the 2024 ticket? There were plenty of reasons to agonise over the decision: loyalty to Biden; the daunting practicalities of the switch; fear of the chaos that might ensue; nervousness that […]

After a spasm of concern about the role of misinformation in fuelling racist riots in England, don’t expect things to calm down: the US election is approaching, and with it a crescendo of anxiety about online lies. The received wisdom now seems to be that misinformation — or perhaps Russian disinformation — is everywhere, that […]

Next Wednesday, 7pm at the Great Hall, Wills Memorial Building. We’ll be recording an episode live on stage; it will be fun! Tickets available here – come along!

My wife doesn’t even bother to roll her eyes any more when I fail to complete the simplest of household tasks. “Did you get distracted?” she will ask, although she knows the answer. Thankfully, now I have cover, because if there is one person in the household more likely to stop halfway through putting on […]

Travel broadens the mind, especially if the destination is the cradle of the Renaissance. However, the Florentine masterpiece on display that caught the attention of Harford Jr was not Ghiberti’s bronze baptistery doors, nor Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”, but some extraordinarily expensive accessories in the window of the Louis Vuitton store. Who would pay €2,000 […]

For those of us who love sport, the Euros followed by the Olympics have given us a vintage summer. For those of us who love geeking out over data, even more so — because sport, like life itself, is ever more quantified, a world in which metrics are thoroughly analysed in the hope of finding […]

It’s only natural that a Labour government would want to concern itself with inequality, not least because that’s what many voters want. According to the Resolution Foundation, the share of the public citing poverty and inequality as one of the most important issues facing the UK rose from 7 per cent in 2010 to 19 […]

There are few more depressing scenes than the one painted by the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll in her book Addiction by Design. She describes slot-machine players in Las Vegas so absorbed in their gambling that, when one of them collapses after suffering a cardiac arrest at the slots, others neither notice nor make space for […]

Can large language models solve logic puzzles? There’s one way to find out, which is to ask. That’s what Fernando Perez-Cruz and Hyun Song Shin recently did. (Perez-Cruz is an engineer; Shin is the head of research at the Bank for International Settlements as well as the man who, in the early 1990s, taught me […]

Receiving a demand for a parking fine is always annoying. Even more so when you know you paid for a ticket. But there it was, the letter from Euro Car Parks demanded payment, and they had photographs to prove it. It took 10 minutes for me to send evidence showing that at the time and […]