Category Archives: Blather

I will some time, honest, write a proper review of Oliver Morton’s book Eating the Sun. For the moment I just want to say that it is the first pop science book I have read since The Extended Phenotype where … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The monologue here from the Guardian’s Weekend Magazine, seems to me quite flawless. It is a teenage girl being censorious about another’s thong. The latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey is out, and I really wish I had access to the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I went to the Indie 21st anniversary bash last night; it was held in the upstairs room of the Angel, a sleazepit almost unchanged in twenty years. Even the man behind the bar was the same Irishman. I had expected … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Revisiting the walk under the flightpath — for there is at this time of year a stretch of about half a mile of almost continuous blackberry bushes, and it’s a shame that they are not as good as the ones … Continue reading → Continue reading →

We set out yesterday to walk from Thaxted to Chickney Church without a map. I got most of the route right, which means there were only two wrong turns — and, in fact, both of them are marked as perfectly … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I have been quoted in Language Log. This is like being reviewed in Nature: it involves a demonstration that there are important lacunae in my knowledge of sex. More from the department of the bleeding obvious as it comes in. Continue reading →

I am a huge fan of Aki Kaurismäki so the latest film he’s made was a correspondingly large disappointment: Lights in the Dusk is the story of a remarkably stupid and stubborn man who goes to jail rather than betray … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Getcha getcha kulcha here … Torrent links to every one of Bergman’s films. Found through the blog of a leader writer on SvD: it’s hard to imagine any British paper’s leader writer doing that, or, indeed, any British cabinet minister … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I’ve been wanting to read Collapse for ages. It’s perhaps a quarter too long, where he tries to be encyclopaedic; but it has some really first-class, thought-provoking parts, at the end of which I am even more pessimistic than before. … Continue reading → Continue reading →