Why you’re going to carry on getting receipts, Jack

Do you know why food companies give out receipts? M’colleague Jack Rivlin is furious that he keeps getting given them in train stations and supermarkets. “When I buy a snack, I don’t need a receipt! Stop forcing these useless scraps of paper at me,” he grumbles: “Honestly, you can’t pay for anything without someone forcing…

If you don’t put a case on your iPhone, you’re an idiot

Sorry, this is a bit niche, but I just wanted to quickly respond to something I read on Mashable. It is this: Buying a beautiful iPhone and putting a case on it is like buying a piece of art, putting it on your wall, and then putting a sheet over it so it doesn’t get…

Weathering St Jude’s storm: tips for working from home

I actually made it into work this morning, despite St Jude’s Biblical storm wreaking havoc on the nation’s wheelie bins and patio furniture. In fact, I have a history of this: years ago, in the Great Snow Day of 2009, I was one of about four people who made it into thelondonpaper’s Wapping offices, trudging…

‘Oh no, all the mainstream political parties are basically the same.’ Well: good

In the hours since I wrote about Russell Brand and his call for unspecified revolution, I’ve been having a few conversations with people who think that, confused and incoherent as it was, he was putting voice to a real problem: there is not enough variety in politics. The three “mainstream” parties, goes the accepted wisdom,…

Russell Brand, unnecessary revolutionary

Did you see Russell Brand on Newsnight last night? Watch the video above if you didn’t. He is, if nothing else, compelling viewing. And I agree with him about Jeremy Paxman’s beard. He worries me, though. Partly he worries me because he’s got a large part of the political and media class captivated by his…

‘Gif’, with a hard G, is perfectly correct, and it doesn’t matter what people said in 1987

Stupid because-I-say-so prescriptivism in The Atlantic and The New York Times over the word “Gif”. “The war is won, even if the battle ensues. GIF is pronounced with a soft G, and if you think otherwise, you are wrong,” sniffs The Atlantic, its nose hoisted well into the air. The NYT agrees: “A GIF, pronounced…

The Facebook beheading row is a symptom of our weird attitudes towards sex and violence

I remember, when I was quite young – maybe 10 or 11 – seeing, on a TV in a French hotel, a nipple. A female nipple. On an advert for something entirely un-nipple-related – hair product, possibly, or a department store – at about 2pm. It may have been later that same holiday that I…

It’s about to get exciting in the search for life as we know it

By the time you read this, the number of planets found outside our solar system may have hit the 1,000 mark: a historic landmark in astronomy. Or it might not. It depends on who you ask: the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia claims, at the time of writing, 999; Nasa admits to just above 900. However you count them,…

Of course you should wear a jumper indoors. It’s winter and we’re at 51°N

Hey everyone! We live in a northern European country. Our capital city is on the same latitude – further north, actually – than Kiev and Prague. Our mainland’s northernmost parts are up there with Newfoundland and the Norwegian fjords. You might not have noticed this. But now that you have, can we all agree that…

Who is the England player? Trial by Twitter in an age of hysteria

Who is the England player? It is, apparently, all anyone wants to know. After the whole silly business with Roy Hodgson yesterday (he told a joke about “space monkeys” which was taken to be racist), Twitter and the wider web have started hunting around for the leak: the player who told a journalist at the…

The uproar over Roy Hodgson’s ‘space monkey’ comment distracts us from real, complex race issues

Poor old Roy Hodgson, the England manager, has been forced to apologise for calling Andros Townsend, a mixed-race player, a “space monkey”. As Martin Kettle in The Guardian and Iain Martin on this site have both written, Hodgson is a dignified and learned chap, and there is absolutely no suggestion that he meant “monkey” in…

George Osborne thinks 160m Chinese watch Downton. Shouldn’t the Chancellor have a good head for figures?

This morning, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and someone who, presumably, is meant to be pretty good with numbers, was on the Today programme. He was talking about the importance of links with the Chinese, and how our import and export links are blooming. To give us an example of this, he said:…