by Steven Poole From Edge Magazine: It looks like a children’s diversion, this isometric, brightly coloured world of aubergines, tomatoes and hoes (exclusively in the agricultural-tool sense, sadly), with friendly lost pigs wandering up to the side of my land, and a user interface that harks back to that glorious 1980s dawn when ‘icons!’ were…
Read MoreBy Maria Popova From the Change Observer: Malcolm Gladwell’s take on social media is like a nun’s likely review of the Kama Sutra — self-righteous and misguided by virtue of voluntary self-exclusion from the subject. But while the nun’s stance reflects adherence to a moral code, Gladwell’s merely discloses a stubborn opinion based on little…
Read Moreby Markha Valenta The success of Islamophobia in western Europe is both striking and disconcerting. How, after fifty years of the institutionalised nurture of human rights and anti-racism could an ideology of vicious discrimination gain such ground? Time and again, the Islamophobes seize the initiative and run with it: more often than not in the…
Read MoreThe coming boom We can already see the outline of the next crisis. The Federal Reserve is, just like in 2002 and 2003, preaching the need for low interest rates in order to recapitalise banks and encourage risk-taking. The deep dangerous flaws in Europe mean the ECB is also going to err on the side…
Read MoreIt was a Saturday, eight days before Christmas, the 17th. It seemed just an ordinary day. I got up, went for my usual swim, and decided to go to the cinema, but as soon as the previews started, I became aware of something bizarre happening — a sort of incandescent fluttering to my left, which I took to be a visual migraine.
Read Moreby Daniel Metcalfe Daniel Metcalfe’s book ‘Out of Steppe’ describes his journey through Central Asia. In this excerpt he describes the Karakalpak landscape around the Aral Sea. The Soviet tourist destination, previously the centre of a successful fishing industry, is now depopulated, polluted by the chemicals used to prop up the failing cotton industry and…
Read Moreby Greg J. Smith A section is an assemblage of dark spots on a plane. It maps the residual of surgery on an object by a plane of incision.” – Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi. The above quotation describes the architectural section as a precise operation, a surgical…
Read MoreListen to The Mercury Theatre radio production of the book Contents CHAPTER I. THE TWO POETS OF SAFFRON PARK CHAPTER II. THE SECRET OF GABRIEL SYME CHAPTER III. THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY CHAPTER IV. THE TALE OF A DETECTIVE CHAPTER V. THE FEAST OF FEAR CHAPTER VI. THE EXPOSURE CHAPTER VII. THE UNACCOUNTABLE…
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