going pro
I've always liked the idea that the key revolution in popular music in recent years wasn't the shift from guitar bands to electronic music, nor the growing...
i'm on paternity leave
My daughter was born at 5:56pm on Friday. There won’t be a newsletter this week.
don't get firewood from the fruit-bearing trees
Charles C. Mann, in his book 1491, writes about the Americas before Columbus. It's a work of popular revisionist history – which is to say, it's more than...
spotify
One of the sillier ways to do journalism is when companies don't bother to check if you're a journalist before running experiments on you. It's not big, and...
the nft letter
NFTs, then. The collective tech press has been workshopping a way to describe this field to the uninitiated for a few years now. The best we've all come up...
news hokey-cokey
Facebook's week of dancing the hokey-cokey – it put the news tab in, it pulled the news tab out, it out the news tab in and it shook it all about – is over,...
this email is being tracked
Every industry has practices that burst into flames on contact with the public. Things which are accepted, and not even doubted, within the field, but which,...
bitcom
For someone who is not particularly interested in bitcoin I spend an awful lot of time talking about bitcoin. In part that's because I have serious Someone...
the gamestop email
Because these emails come out on Wednesdays – please do not check previous publication dates, they always come out on Wednesday and have never been late – I...
monsters, hunted
This week, I wanted to talk about the single worst game design choice I've seen in a very long time. (It's another gaming email, sorry mum. Scroll to the...
open source
Elastic is an open-source software company which makes a product, Elasticsearch, that companies use to make cloud widgets do stuff better. (It's not actually...
i jinxed it
"I'm optimistic about this year" was how I ended last week's email. lol Anyway everything went downhill almost as soon as I hit send and the United States...
2021
Happy New Year! We're at the one year anniversary of this newsletter. It has been… a year. For me in particularly, both the universal and the personal have...
music blogs
In 2006 – I think – I started a music blog. I was sixteen, a sixth former in south-west London, which was at the time the centre of a moderately-sized NME-...
google
Two stories have me thinking about Google, today. Timothy B. Lee wrote about Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Google, which has been operating a...
on netflix
Forgive me, but someone is wrong on the internet. Ben Thompson is one of the first movers of the current newsletter boom. Yes, it's hard to define when the...
spotlight
Snapchat operates in a weird area for me. Professionally, I am aware it's a huge social network. It's got more daily users than Twitter, a higher market cap,...
Fleets and laptops
I don’t understand Fleets. I don’t mean this to make me sound out-of-touch. I understand what they are perfectly, though if you’re not on top of the tech...
consensus reality
Today I published a piece I've been working on for a while, asking a question that's fascinated and terrified me: what has lockdown done to our sense of...
well,
Ooooooooooof. I have my eyes set on the horizon at this point. Living in the moment is good in normal times but the when the moment sucks and is on a vaguely...