I loved discovering this when I wrote an essay for the National Concert Hall ahead of his residency there in 2019. Along with this great little supplementary anecdote from his time as a white goods repairman.

TIL that Philip Glass and Steve Reich had a furniture removals company called Chelsea Light Moving www.laphil.com/musicdb/piec...

First time seeing a Waymo in London

A really well packaged handbook on strategic foresight by the Singapore gov'ts Center for Strategic Futures, reflecting their latest thinking and findings from practice www.csf.gov.sg/thinking-abo...

We're recruiting two research assistants to help us deliver "The IRL Trial" - a world-first randomised trial of social media limitations among 12-15 year-olds, and the effect on mental health. You'd be part of the Born In Bradford family. For more info and to apply: www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jo...

Changing things up at @firetail.bsky.social www.firetail.co.uk/news/leaders...

Love the @banffcentre.bsky.social film festival and this film was amazing. Jasmin Paris is a legend: m.youtube.com/watch?v=PgTE...

Some thoughts on becoming a #bcorp www.linkedin.com/posts/andyma...

"But here’s the catch" in the middle of an article is just about the cleanest sign something has been written by AI.

For over 20 years, SETI@Home crowdsourced computer power to look for aliens. After a decade of analysis, the most promising signals are being studied by a huge Chinese telescope. I can't stress enough that the Three-Body Problem was not supposed to be an instruction manual. phys.org/news/2026-01...

Reality TV has trained us to blame people, not systems. Every problem is presented as a failure of character, and the only response we have is to vote them off the island.

Reality TV has trained us to blame people, not systems. Every problem is presented as a failure of character, and the only response we have is to vote them off the island.

The Candidate (1972) is a great film that ends with Robert Redford realising, a little too late, that winning the campaign mattered more than winning the office. www.youtube.com/watch?v=myEp...

"Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on" William Gibson,Pattern Recognition

Every Winter Olympian‘s bio during this opening ceremony is “The child of diplomats, he learned short track skating during his parents UN posting in Geneva. He switched to luge after excelling on the internal JP Morgan track during his internship.” #openingceremomy #winterolympics

Building out AI turns out to be so capital intensive that it needs to access debt finance. Diversified conglomerates are good vehicles for raising debt. That‘s the whole story. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...

Once you‘ve noticed this use of the word “wrong”, you see it everywhere: open.substack.com/pub/thedraft...

Early social media and blogging made room for the pleasure of observation as an end in itself. Today we have hot takes, hustle culture, performative outrage and AI slop.

The LinkedIn algorithm wants you to post three times a week, but the humans don’t

The term "big beast" is now far too casually applied in politics to both medium-sized and even smaller beasts. Stop the beast Inflation, or at least introduce a Beast* category.

Forecasting is hard...

"UK Wind Power has saved consumers £100bn by displacing gas and lowering rates" (from excellent www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations)

It's like throwing someone out of the Lib Dems for pointing at potholes

Incredible to learn you can be thrown out of the Conservative Party for "secret plotting"

“This is whalefall — a world living off the remains of what once was, as everything slows down, decomposes, and becomes something that merely sustains life, but doesn’t give birth to anything new.” This is becomnig a Chor Pharn Lee stan account thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/whalefall

“Without a forward arc, one cannot outsource meaning to progress. Responsibility becomes local and immediate. You are accountable not to a future payoff, but to the person in front of you, the standard you refuse to abandon even when it no longer benefits you“ open.substack.com/pub/thecutti...

Timely reading, recommended...

Screen time is starting to look like an inferior good. As income rises, people substitute away from scrolling.

"There was a brief silence while Louis XVIII, in handwriting that he made as tiny as possible, wrote a new note in the margin of his Horace; then, when the note was written, he looked up with the satisfied air of a man who thinks he has made a discovery when he has commented on someone else’s idea"

The Earth Rover Program is doing some fascinating science. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

MBS as Cesare Borgia is a great analogy (from Giuliano da Empoli)

Often there isn’t a “different paradigm”; it’s just someone very confident about their new way to be wrong.

When i was young, I thought "this time it's different" might meant that this time it's different. Now I'm old, I know it means "this is nearly the top".

It is fascinating that people screenshot and quote posts they find abhorrent, thinking they are doing anything other than amplifying those views.

<stops dead> <gawps> I mean it feels like a thing I should basically know on reflection but still....

When Tony Blair came to power in 1997, the UK economy was bigger than China and India combined.

Provocations for yield and rage for profit that generates real anger in its audience 👇

It is frankly too late in the day to be learning about something called ‘TNT Sports’ #ashes

Switching coal off was one of the most impressive cross-party policy achievements of the last decade. No drama, genuine leadership, and no-one talks about it. Change is possible when we work out what to do and get on with it.

One of the most interesting thought experiments I’ve read recently, arguing a positive future needs doers as well as narrators, and (that China especially) needs a "machinery of care" alongside the production of abundance. Curious what others make of it. thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-republ...

One of the most interesting thought experiments I’ve read recently, arguing a positive future needs doers as well as narrators, and (that China especially) needs a "machinery of care" alongside the production of abundance. Curious what others make of it. thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-republ...

It will probably be the warmest November on record, until next November.

You cannot lead if you make your opponent’s grievances your priority. You won’t satisfy them, you lose your own people, and you can’t fix it.

The Attention Economy is exhausting, and no-one enjoys it.

I think this question is deliberate

Excellent from Martha Lane Fox: "We cling to a model that makes public life feel like a punishing, precarious calling that only a few can endure." martha6j5h2.substack.com/p/this-is-pu...

The global whaling industry experienced a boom c. 1840-1950 as technology allowed whalers to hunt the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. Under standard models, we would have expected krill populations to have *exploded*. Instead, they DROPPED exponentially. Let's talk about the KRILL PARADOX.

Another species no longer on the global Endangered list: Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). A few decades after a Star Trek movie where the central conflict was the total extinction of the humpback, their numbers are rising fast enough to put them at "Least Concern" on the IUCN Red List.

I have written some stuff about BBC/Public Service broadcasting which I'll start putting out soon. I don't think there's enough public policy debate - when I was doing broadcasting/Charter Review in the regulator and Government there was an industry around it. Now everyone has moved on to "tech".