“Hullo! I’m Hero, the naughty hedgehog mascot of the 2017 World Athletics Championships. You thought I was mute, didn’t you, just because I was holding up all those Bangface-style signs? In fact I was merely SILENCED by the authorit[…]

Tom, enjoying Havana
Its Sheeranmania bookends might fool you into thinking that 2017 was just as bad a year for Number Ones as 2016. It wasn’t. For a start, very little could be. But while last year saw the charts reeling under the impact of strea[…]

Hi, I’m Captain Ivan Drago, the Muscles from Moscow and still Undisputed World Heavy Champion if you were the kind of person who wandered out of Rocky IV halfway through and never saw a Rocky movie, or a Creed movie ever again. And I can tell y[…]

Last year I posted the new records I listened to every day on Facebook, deliberately writing nothing about them. This year I’m still listening to a new (to me) record every day, but I’m trying to be more thorough about what I think of them, and I[…]

“Hello children. I’m the Demon Headmaster, beloved patriarchal figure of note who wants nothing more than to educate keen students in the most efficient, hypnotic manner possible. If getting results requires a subtle Orwellian undercurren[…]

I’m not doing a comics poll this year – the slack is being admirably taken up with Pete’s new TV poll – but I still read a LOT of comics last year. Here, in no special order, were some of the best ones, new to me if not always[…]

Culture circulates online within algorithm-driven networks: Google, Twitter, Facebook, Spotify, etc. These are also automatic measurement systems. Two particularly valuable things they measure are attribution – the path you took to reach someth[…]