Archive • The World Is Yours* • Buttondown

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...

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...

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

February 24, 2021

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

February 17, 2021

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,...

February 10, 2021

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

February 3, 2021

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

January 27, 2021

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...

January 21, 2021

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...

January 13, 2021

"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...

January 6, 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...

December 23, 2020

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-...

December 9, 2020

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...

December 2, 2020

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...

November 25, 2020

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

November 18, 2020

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

November 12, 2020

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...

November 5, 2020

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...

games, trains and automobiles

October 30, 2020

A lot of people liked last week's newsletter on HS2, which was nice. One consistent response, though, was to cite figures from the DfT which suggest that it...

October 22, 2020

5G is back in the news, now that the new iPhones are hitting shelves. They're not the first devices to have the tech – not by a long shot – but Apple being...

October 16, 2020

This week, I became a patron of the arts. Matt Round, who feels like one of the last people left doing fun stuff on the internet for its own sake, runs...

October 7, 2020

Like going bankrupt, there are two ways to lose an election: gradually and then suddenly. For Donald Trump, the suddenly part won't happen until November,...

September 23, 2020

Six months after the pandemic started, I have finally acquired a bike, just in time for the weather to break and autumn to set in. (Autumn, for American...

September 17, 2020

In 2018, Rafaela Vasquez was working as a "safety driver" for Uber in Arizona. Employed to sit in a "self-driving car", and seize control if something went...

September 10, 2020

This week, Microsoft made one of the most daring bets in technology, and I can't wait to see how it pays off. The company announced – in a bit of a rush, due...

how reels undercuts facebook's standoff with australia

September 2, 2020

Facebook vs Australia Facebook is in a standoff with the Australian state. I know, what's new, they've been in some sort of row for years now, ever since...

[bad scots joke]

August 26, 2020

By now, you have probably seen the increasingly viral reddit thread about the American teen who has written almost half of the entire Scots Wikipedia despite...

free the app store

August 19, 2020

I think this was the week I finally stopped defending Apple. I grew up with a Mac in the house, in the darkest days of Apple's history, though at the time,...

August 12, 2020

I was struck by this call, in a New York Times opinion piece by Brian X. Chen, to "have some patience and empathy for the indie developers" as a form of...

this email discusses pregnancy loss

We were supposed to have a baby on Monday. We didn't, and won't. We found out we were expecting last year. Late November, I think. My partner had terrible...

500 words about jam because I can't think about anything else right now

I made jam yesterday. The whole process was sort of magical, in a very childlike way. We went blackberry picking on Sunday, and managed to gather 800g of...

I received some pushback on last week's email, about GPT-3, from people who think that what we're seeing isn't anywhere near as impressive as it looks. The...

Last year, a machine learning research company called OpenAI published the results of work, a text-based AI dubbed, uninspiringly, GPT-2. I covered it for...

Do you ever stop and think about the fact that there's four or five companies who could just completely fuck up your life with a ban? There's a lot of focus...

buy my book and read my newsletter

Some personal news: my book is out! In case you don't remember, or are new here, I've written a fifth of a book of essays about ways the coronavirus response...

Covering Apple's media events is increasingly strange. The company's role in global affairs is vastly different to where it was in 2013, when I first started...

the ai will break you

I've spent the last few days obsessed with this story of a man live-streaming his own psychotic break, as he leads the police on a 110mph chase with his five...

We're all talking about statues now. I live in Bromley-by-Bow, a quiet neighbourhood in East London. My immediate local area doesn't have a huge amount of...

Well. Here's some things that are good that I haven't talked about here before. Stardew Valley I have a penchant for the sort of game which can be summed up...

personanxiety and the schedule

I alternate between two modes of living, right now, that I like to think of as About a Schedule and Personanxiety. They both have their roots in this...

four short story openings inspired by the now

1 One of the more impressive features of modern videoconferencing software, when you think about it, is the echo cancellation. The microphone you're talking...

install the app

Contact tracing This month has been one of the first times I've had to really question what my job is. It's easy to reach out for high-handed aphorisms like...

After two months in lockdown, I'm now underweight. I'd say "I don't know how this happened" but I think I can guess: the loss of gyms caused me to switch to...

I'm writing a fifth of a book and you can pre-order it now. It's called A Little Light. It's a collection of essays, from me and four other journalists, on...

denounce the roman empire?

There's a lot of activities that will forever be linked with this period in my head, I think. Whether or not I carry on running post-lockdown, it'll be hard...

I know we all joke about not knowing what day of the week it is any more but this newsletter is a day late because I sincerely thought today was Wednesday....

someone is wrong on the internet

It's been a while, but this week I allowed arguing with strangers on the internet to get the better of me. I spent a couple of hours on Saturday, and more on...

please don't tell my work I wrote this

I currently have seven different communications channels with my colleagues. That's counting all of Google's nightmarish mishmash of chat platforms as one...