

Latest blog posts

  • New film: "The Zero Theorem"

    Strangely charming

    by F.S.

    FORGET Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life". The cinematic search for mankind's true purpose reaches new heights of strangeness in "The Zero Theorem", the latest oddity from Terry Gilliam, a maverick director and former member of the Monty Python group. Focusing on a deranged data processor in a dystopian future searching for his raison d'être, it's an uneven film, but one with a ragged charm awaiting those patient enough to stomach its chaotic half-plots.

    Christoph Waltz, the gifted Austrian actor who has won two Oscars for supporting roles with the help of Quentin Tarantino, takes the lead here.

  • Writing worth reading

    Dark matter

    by T.C.

    When state-of-the-art is second best (PBS) The high-tech prostheses that make the headlines are often not what amputees actually say they need.

    Crawling through the brain without getting lost (Carl Zimmer) On how the emerald jewel wasp performs brain surgery on its cockroach victims, turning them into passive zombies that the wasp's young can devour from within. Parasitology is not for the faint of stomach.

    The lopsided universe (Ars Technica). Matthew Francis on the strange fact that the sky doesn't quite look the same in every direction, and what that might imply.

    The slow death of Silicon Roundabout (Guardian). Much credulous guff is written about Britain's faddiest tech hub.

  • Bits and mortar

    Babbage visits Ada's

    by G.F. | SEATTLE

    WHO would open a bookstore selling actual, physical books in 2010? Who would then, a few years later, take over and convert a much larger bookstore into which to expand after spending a pile to refurbish it? An electric engineer is the culprit, who found after years of training for her career that days filled with working on circuit designs didn't mesh with what she wanted out of life.

    Danielle Hulton is the owner of Ada's Technical Books and Café, a beautifully kitted-out shop now nestled in a converted Victorian-style house in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighbourhood.

  • Deportations

    A kinder expulsion

    by J.P.P. | WASHINGTON, DC

    AFTER John Boehner sent a memo to the House GOP at the end of January that held out the promise of a country in which undocumented migrants could live “legally and without fear”, it seemed like an overhaul of immigration laws might just be on the way. The optimism lasted just under a week. Since then, campaigners who favour a law that is kinder to migrants have switched their attention to putting pressure on the president. America deported 370,000 people last year, an operation carried out by the Department for Homeland Security. This is a federal agency, such campaigners reason, so the president ought to be able to stop it with a swish of his mighty pen.

  • Blasphemy laws

    Wrong on so many levels

    by B.C.

    A CONCISE but densely-packed briefing paper on the penalties faced by "blasphemers" in various countries has just been published by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, an agency which is mandated by Congress to monitor liberty of conscience around the world and identify violators. The paper points out that governments which punish sacrilege are giving representatives of the state, from bureaucrats to judges to village elders, a kind of arbitrary power. This can very easily be used for nefarious purposes.

  • Keynes and Hayek

    Prophets for today

    by C.R. | LONDON

    ON MARCH 10th 1944, seventy years ago earlier this week, a relatively-obscure Austrian émigré published a book that would become one of the great classics of 20th-century economic literature. The new economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes were much in fashion in that period; this new book judged them rather harshly.

    The dissenter from the growing consensus around Keynes was Friedrich von Hayek, an economist from Vienna. The book was the "Road to Serfdom", in which Hayek argued that the extension of central planning is the start of the growth of constraints on individual liberty, which inevitably leads to the emergence of tyrannical regimes, both communist and fascist in nature.

  • Media in America and Russia

    We have ways of making you talk

    by M.S.

    A FEW years back, at an international media conference, a Russian reporter for the Kremlin-backed television station RT (formerly Russia Today) asked me whether I thought CNN was an American propaganda channel. Given the way CNN and other American networks had practically fallen over each other in their eagerness to cheer on the invasion of Iraq, the question had some merit. Also, the reporter was gorgeous, and her challenging expression suggested that if I answered "no", she would roll her eyes and end the conversation.

  • Gay rights in Lebanon

    Laws of nature

    by F.V.T. | BEIRUT

    LEGALLY speaking, the Middle East has never been a great place to be gay. In theory, if seldom in practice, Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen punish the "crime" of sodomy by death. Gay sex elsewhere in the region can get you a whipping or a hefty prison sentence—up to 17 years' hard labour in the case of Egypt. That list officially still includes Lebanon, but slowly activists, and now judges, have been chipping away at the legal foundation of such sentences.

    Article 534 of Lebanese penal law states that sexual acts which “contradict the laws of nature” are punishable by up to a year in prison.

  • Airlines and hotels

    Room at the top

    by B.R.


  • Marriage tax breaks

    Ed Balls gets it right, for once

    by D.K

    HERE’S an idea. Children are, the data overwhelmingly proves, better off in households who own ponies than in those who don’t. They do better at school, grow up to earn higher incomes, live longer lives and generally suffer less*. When they grow up, they are more likely to own ponies themselves, and so perpetuate the virtuous cycle. Obviously then the state ought to subsidise ponies, to extend the benefits of the institution of pony-owning to as wide a section of society as possible.

    A joke. Most people would not accept that ponies have such wonderful effects on children (though your correspondent can name at least one who fervently believes it).



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