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Banish the Burning Glass
06 September 2013
The concave glass walls of Rafael Vinoly’s 20 Fenchurch Street in the City of London focus sunlight so effectively that they melted parts of a parked car, a Jaguar XJ to be exact. Vinoly’s earlier building, the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas, singed the hair of at least one visitor by the same mechanism. The fact that nobody in the City of London noticed this in the planning process is a very funny comment on the continued competence of our … More
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Gravity: Post-Humanity in Tight Shorts
03 September 2013
Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity – a ‘fall’ blockbuster as they say – is a post-human film. Its two stars – George Clooney and Sandra Bullock – could have been played by robots. Clooney plays a standard non-threatening alpha male with a gruff manner and one minor character quirk – an urge to tell stories. Bullock plays her usual sweaty, scared but, when the chips are down, brave and competent woman in a life-threatening crisis. Algorithms for either performance would taken an … More
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American Tales
31 August 2013
Staying at Mountain Village in the Colorado Rockies, I need to catch what the locals call the gondola but we would call a cable car to get down to Telluride. I start at about 9000 feet above sea level. The car first rises up to 10,500 feet and then falls 2000 feet to drop me downtown where the Film Festival is in progress.
For 13 minutes I skim through the ghostly aspens. I have not yet been alone. People jump into … More
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One Cannot Live Quite Without Pity
27 August 2013
In the early years of Thatcher I remember a conversation with a triumphant right-winger (a self-described bastard) in which he snorted with disdain about ‘people who care.’ I knew what he meant and I still do. On the one hand there is the whole caring industry, always seeking out new ways in which we must care; on the other hand there is the bloated welfare state with all its injustices and ineffectiveness.
Personally, being hyper-empathetic (or so I am told (critically)), … More
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Arianna, Anonymity and Freedom
22 August 2013
Arianna Huffington has decided to end commenter anonymity at the Huffington Post. Our conversation, she tells me, was ‘very important in my decision’. In my article wrote, ‘Somebody has to teach the internet companies some basic logic – anonymity and free speech are incompatible – and Arianna is in a position to do it.’ As many people don’t seem to understand this point, I had better explain.
Anonymity has been claimed by internet utopians as an aspect of free … More
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The ‘Mule’ and Madame X
21 August 2013
I can’t stop thinking about the hair of Michaella McCollum, one of the British drug ‘mules’ arrested in Peru. It is extravagant, absurd, a swollen cushion drawing unflattering attention to her long face and neck. As is that weren’t enough, she is wearing a tee shirt bearing the legend ‘La Vie est Belle’. She is doing everything she can to appear to be ‘living the dream’of youth. Fame is one necessary component of that dream, of course, and … More
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Thomas Nagel: A Man with a Fine Chest
20 August 2013
It is immensely satisfying to see Thomas Nagel writing in the New York Times today simply to restate the arguments of his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. (There’s something roguishly clumsy about that sub-title.) It is satisfying because the book was widely (and predictably) trashed by materialist neo-Darwinians, some even suggesting that Nagel, a great philosopher, had cracked or gone completely insane. And yet here he is, not … More
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Satyajit Ray’s Hey Presto!
19 August 2013
Nige, that most gifted reader, has been reading Willa Cather.
‘It’s like a kind of close-up magic,’ he writes, ‘where you can see exactly what’s going on – nothing special, no tricks, see – and then suddenly… Hey presto!’
I know exactly what he means, having embarrassed my wife by bursting into uncontrollable sobs after seeing Satyajit Ray’s film The Big City.
As with Nige’s experience of Cather, you can’t see what Ray’s is doing until suddenly you realise he … More
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Steven Pinker: Science and the Humanities
09 August 2013
I have now read this by Steven Pinker several times and I have managed to work out what I think about it. My thoughts come under three headings:
1)My agreement with one of its most important points – that some of the enemies of ‘scientism’ make serious mistakes, mistakes I have made in the past.
2)My suspicion about some of the claims Pinker makes. This is a relatively trivial point.
3)My conclusion that the article is, as a whole, trivial, subject … More
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Privacy: The Spavined Nag that Bolted
24 July 2013
About a week ago I bought a device called a Securifi Almond from Amazon. I can highly recommend it but for one thing. A couple of days later I was phoned from America by Zafar Sayeed from Securifi Technical Support. Zafar was informative, charming and interesting; we must have talked for ten minutes. It was only when I got off the phone that I asked myself, ‘How the hell did he get my number?’ So I emailed Zafar and received … More
- The Prig Imperiale
- The Evil That Men Do
- Hirst’s Verity
- The Maiden Tribute of Jimmy Savile
- For Evel the Idiot
- High Art and Justice
- Uncertainty Does Not Sell
- Hobsbawm and Guilt
- What ‘Plebs’ Really Means
- Politics
- Florian Zeller: Sais Pas
- Clement and the Curse of the Freuds
- Gabriele Finaldi: The Catford Catholic Connoisseur
- Susan Faludi and her Sex-Change Dad
- Live Long and Prosper? Maybe Not
- Eddie Izzard: Comedy King of the Remainers
- Demolishing the Intelligence Superstition
- Tate Modern: Brick Conquers Glass
- Genetics: Better With? Better Without?
- Lesley Manville Is Mum
