Psychology
How your brain buys a sofa
Almost every popular commercial product owes its success to two different qualities. First, it does the job it is ostensibly…
Barometer
Secrets of the stars The astrologer Jonathan Cainer died after beginning his last horoscope for his own star sign: ‘We’re…
Tea and honesty
We recently moved -offices from Canary Wharf to Blackfriars bridge. When you move after a long time in one place,…
When novels kill
If we claim books can heal, we must accept they can also harm
Stress point
It’s not work that’s killing us. It’s the irritation and confusion of modern office life
My tip for the next cool shop: Argos
When I was at school in the 1970s, some of the richer kids would come back from their summer holidays…
Directions your phone can’t give you
In many ways a satnav is a miraculous device. A network of US military satellites more than 10,000 miles above…
The ultimate nightmare
On an April morning in 1999, two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, walked into Columbine High School in Colorado…
Mistakes to remember
False memory disasters, from Keith Moon’s wedding-night abseil to Sophia Loren’s peanut addiction
The 5 per cent of people who get to decide everything
What happens when 95 per cent of people like something, but 5 per cent of people prefer something else? You might think…
Left without pleasures
No golf, no bridge, a tortured relationship with champagne… lefties deserve your sympathy, not your scorn
The power of painless payment
I am one of those annoying, mildly claustrophobic people who sit at the end of a row in cinemas. There…
Carrots — and no stick
Never mind teaching children to cook: they need to be taught to eat. Obvious? Totally, but this is the choosing…
Compliance order
Never a man tortured by self-doubt, Derren Brown introduced his latest special Pushed to the Edge (Channel 4, Tuesday) as…
What does it really mean to have a tyrannical father?
What was it like, asks Jay Nordlinger, to have Mao as your father, or Pol Pot, or Papa Doc? The…
The contagious madness of the new PC
Obsessive searching for hurt and offence will create it where once it never existed
Polymath or psychopath?
They don’t make Englishmen like the aptly named John Freeman any more. When he died last Christmas just shy of…
Pop psychology
The secrets of bubble-wrap and other delicious little sensations
No man is an island
Bit of Kant, bit of Kierkegaard, bit of motorcycle maintenance. That’s one take on The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew…
Why estate agents aren’t dying out
I don’t like to make business predictions, but — barring some apocalypse — I suspect there will be plenty of…
The British public is about to make a big mistake
On the weekend of 25 April 2015 I started to believe that the party I supported might not win an…
Plan Bee
What the hive knows about democracy that humans have yet to learn
Easy virtue
Why do the right thing when you can simply say the right thing?
Why we lie to ourselves about opinion polls
A strange ritual takes place on Twitter most evenings at around 10.30 p.m. Hundreds of political anoraks start tweeting the…
Looking for answers you can’t see
Driving from Dover on the M20 a year ago I missed the turning for the M25. A month later I…
