A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness — Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! As a bunch of gun-toting religious maniacs tear apart the Middle East, I’ve been thinking about this verse. It’s from Edward FitzGerald’s 19th-century translation of…
Month: June 2014
The Oxford English Dictionary is one of humanity’s greatest achievements
Duh-duh, duh-duh, diddly duh, dum. That, in case you haven’t been a student in recent years and so haven’t watched much daytime telly for a while, is the sound the Countdown clock makes as it ticks off its last seconds. As we speak, the clock is diddly-dumming for Countdown’s print edition of the Oxford Dictionary…
The Bristol Crocodile, the Inverness Tapir, and other terrifying beasts of Britain
Is this a crocodile in the River Avon? After the horrors of the Essex lion and the Dorchester monkey, Britain is once again quaking with fear at the sighting of yet another dangerous and exotic animal on the loose in its cities. A crocodile – or possibly an alligator, more suited to our chilly climes,…
The MI6 plot to undermine the independence campaign: being quite rude to JK Rowling
A black-clad figure rappels unnoticed down the outside of an old stone building in the heart of Edinburgh. It’s late in the short Scottish summer night, and the sky is almost dark; the castle sits blackly against the horizon, huge and foreboding. The figure reaches a window, gently prises it open; sneaks inside. His job,…
Making smoking illegal would be the worst idea ever
As we’ve seen in the war on drugs, the best way to stop people taking things that are bad for them is definitely to make that thing illegal. After all, no one smokes marijuana any more. And you just can’t get cocaine or MDMA or heroin for love nor money these days. And certainly an…
A nostalgic paean to the A-10 Warthog: ugly, brutal, and reprieved
I have a funny relationship with the world’s military, and specifically with military aircraft. On the one hand, there’s something uncomfortable about the fetishisation of machines of death. It’s one thing acknowledging that we need to be able to defend ourselves, but the tools we use to do it, you feel, should be just that,…
Jeremy Hunt: ‘12,000 unnecessary NHS deaths a year’. Is that a lot?
Apparently, at a Press Gallery lunch earlier today, Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, said that there were 12,000 “unnecessary deaths” in the NHS every year. My only source for this is our correspondent Christopher Hope, who was at the lunch, and tweeted it – I haven’t yet seen any news stories based on it. So…
Why it pays to be narcissistic
Tony Blair has been accused of it; Charles Saatchi has admitted it. But is it really a problem that some people fall in love with themselves, asks Tom Chivers Narcissus was a beautiful youth. So beautiful that a nymph, a spirit-creature, fell in love with him; when he rejected her, Nemesis, the goddess of retribution,…
The apps that will save your life – or not
[ooyala id=”d1MDk1bjprxpwYNQdbMU4nGD97ASNlyD” ] Health and fitness is the new growth area for reward-driven apps, but do they actually work? One of the favourite words of the smartphone era is “gamification”. Computer games entice players with a series of small rewards, little pats on the head, whenever some arbitrary goal is reached; and this creates a…
Whether or not Laverne Cox is a woman is not a question of biology; it’s a question of language
[Correction added 3/5/2016: in fact some people DO dispute that sex is a biological reality, contra what I say in this piece.] There’s a piece in the National Review by a guy called Kevin D Williamson. It is one of those pieces that is written solely to provoke outrage from milquetoast liberals like me, and…
Tom Chivers 