Archive (Page 2) • Afternoon Slow • Buttondown

A main plank of the BBC lawyers

hello, I have a friend who dives into a spreadsheet when they’re stressed or overwhelmed. When they need a few minutes of controlled space in their own head....

Funk, disco, boogie, jazz

What to say? You don’t need another newsletter. I don’t need to be writing one. Yet here we are. I’ve been immensely cheered this month by the people-...

Every day is like Wednesday

Hello, I’m not a big going out person. I like a coffee out. And a breakfast. But mostly, most of the time, I’m in. So lockdown has surprised me. Not with any...

the chickens followed, they are not mine

We've just come back from a holiday in America, using up the last of the air miles from all those years of flying for work. It was fantastic, but it felt...

Let's say we do this the first Sunday of the month

February 2, 2020

Five things: I recently read The Maintenance of Headway. It’s lovely and odd. You’re constantly wondering if it’s supposed to be this flat and banal, but...

Something reminded me I have a newsletter

January 5, 2020

Feel free to unsubscribe. Obvs. It’s been more than a year since I sent one of these. I imagine you’ve moved on. (BTW, I have migrated from tinyletter to...

It's been a while. Sorry about that. I imagine you've coped. And sorry to my friend and colleague Helen who tells me that she gets a little burst of...

Brilliant reading

I've mentioned here before that what I'm trying to do for Wired is write about the internet like it's not new. To review it like it's culture. I'm still...

Angus asked me to contribute to curate.tv, which was fun. It's a nice thing; "Desert Island Discs for internet video". Putting it together reminded me of...

Polite Newsletter

I've long been fascinated by the Polite Notice signs you see, written in a semi-official font, trying to trick the quick glancer into thinking it is, in...

Entirely like a blog post

February 18, 2018

You've probably been worried all to hell, unhinged with panic and doubt. For this newsletter is a week late and your world has been turned upside down....

Algorave as Soulcraft

January 28, 2018

Way back in 2009, on holiday in New England, I bought and read The Nature of Technology by W. Brain Arthur and Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B....

January 14, 2018

Thousands of years ago I did Speechification with Steve Bowbrick and Roo Reynolds. It was a podcast of interesting speech radio. Other people's radio. We...

A small piece of web

December 3, 2017

While we're all starting to deal with the fact that much of the web has gone bad I like to try and keep noticing the good bits. Here's one: thatfootballgame....

November 19, 2017

I'm sitting outside Bar Italia in Soho's fashionable Soho. According to Swarm this is the 600th time I've been here. It's more though, obviously. I first...

Tabs and Margins

November 5, 2017

Since it’s NaNoWriMo I too am not writing a novel. Instead I’ve been devoting a bit of time each day to getting down some more thoughts about PowerPoint, to...

Difficult like Sunday afternoon

October 22, 2017

I'm sitting in front of the TV watching Graham Souness and Thierry Henry analyse the Arsenal v Everton match. It's a Sunday afternoon, we've just watched the...

October 8, 2017

Cafe blogging was the best blogging. That's what I enjoyed. No opinions just condiments. Just pictures of fried food and silly jokes. It mystified...

September 24, 2017

TfL's decision to try and rein in Uber reminded me of a thing I wrote for Wired a couple of years ago. I was one of a bunch of writers asked to contribute to...

September 10, 2017

A few weeks ago I was interviewed for a BBC radio programme about PowerPoint. I was slightly reluctant to do it. I worried it would be another programme in...

August 13, 2017

Joanne McNeil's lovely review nudged me into reading New York 2140 and I'm really glad. There are themes that many here would enjoy; dark pools, cities, air...

Not Getting Things Done

It has been two weeks since I last disturbed your inbox with my ramblings. A fortnight. I once wrote a piece for Wired about weeks and fortnights and the...

In Praise of Praise

Already it's been two weeks since the last newsletter and I've been busy at work and short of inspiration. I've not blogged at all since last we spoke, I've...

We're as disappointed as you are

It's important you understand that subscribing to this newsletter is going to offer no more value to you than subscribing to my blog. It's just going to be...

Maybe Sean has the right idea

There's a magnificent twitter account called Sean's Work Computer. It's a record, in screenshots, of the trials of dealing with a bad corporate IT...