There’s a weird gag in ‘Bridget Jones 2’: two people sitting next each other on a plane to Thailand both get out ‘The Beach’ as holiday reading. Now, the book, published in 2000, is set in about 1997, so the joke makes s[…]

Sloppy Science: the athletics edition
The September 30 issue of Nature featured a brief communication with a study comparing men’s and women’s sprinting. The authors concluded that by the 2156 Olympics, the winner of the women’s 100[…]

Camille Claudel
I seem to be engaged in a series of appreciations of undervalued artists from a century or so back here (see Bartholdi and af Klint pieces below). I’ll stop after this one, but I do want to mention someone who I think was a grea[…]

ex memoria
They weren’t all elderly and they weren’t all white, but the number of shoppers wearing poppies in Tesco in omnicultural Hackney, as the Armistice Service Parade wheeled out of St-John-at-Hackney into the Narrow Way, definitel[…]