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6. Smart Drugs
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4–6 minutes·
No comments on 6. Smart Drugs2019; Unified Korea Can we change who we are? For millennia, we’ve eagerly bought potions and medicines that promised to make us smarter and wiser, and for just as long, we’ve been bitterly disappointed. Yet we kept coming back; there was just something irresistible about improving ourselves without any effort. And then the promises came true.…
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3. The Guide
2015; Seattle, US What is the good life? Philosophers, wise men, preachers, televangelists, self-help gurus — all have tried to answer the question of how we should live and thrive as humans. Some have been driven by a sense of moral duty and religious zeal, others by a quest for power and money, but over the millennia, they…
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1. Ankle Surveillance Monitor
2014, San Jose, US “Six months doesn’t sound so bad. I mean, compared to the guys I’ve met who were in for five years or fifteen years, I had it good. But it’s still plenty long enough to lose your job. Lose your family. Even lose your friends, people you thought you could rely on. Seemed…
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The Many Meanings of The Islanders
After reading Christopher Priest’s The Islanders, I was immediately compelled to figure out exactly what was going on in the story (similar to what I tried with Iain Banks’ Transition). Of course, The Islanders is even more deliberately ambiguous and dreamlike than Transition, and so I’m acutely aware that trying to unknot the plot is…
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Thoughts on consistency in tablet news apps
A few months ago, I finally had what I’d been dreaming of for years – digital delivery of every single magazine and newspaper I read. No more stacks of New Yorkers and Economists lingering on tables waiting to be given away (or more likely, recycled); no more hunting for all the bits of subscription forms…
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Unbound: The Crowdfunding Cargo Cult
(This piece may be appearing in The Telegraph, but I felt it would be useful to have it up soon given the recent interest in Unbound from places like The Economist). The Southwest Pacific islands of Melanesia are some of the most remote places on the planet. Until the Second World War, its inhabitants had…
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A History of the Future in 100 Objects
Last year, I listened to a programme on Radio 4 called A History of the World in 100 Objects. It took 25 hours, or 1500 minutes. In the show, the BBC and the British Museum attempted to describe the entire span of human history through 100 objects – from a 2 million year-old Olduvai stone…
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On Justice (2010 Reviews, Part 1)
Since moving into a new flat two months ago, I resolved to demolish my pile of unread books that had been eyeing me reproachfully for far too long. Counting some extra books I tackled after the pile of doom, I read: Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? by Michael Sandel The Lifecycle of Software…
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More on the Death of Publishers
If book publishers want to see the next decade in any reasonable health, then it’s absolutely imperative that they rethink their pricing strategies and business models right now. Hopefully this example will illustrate why: I’m a big fan of Iain Banks’ novels; I always buy them in hardback as soon as they come out. It…
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The Binding of a Book
Like a gamer to Starcraft 2, I can’t help but be attracted to articles about the death of books, and even better, the death of long-form reading. There’s something about the desperate handwringing that pushes almost every intellectual button I have, from impassioned but futile appeals to the past, to lurid depictions of how new…
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