Technology
Where’s the internet revolution they promised us?
At the risk of sounding like Jean Baudrillard, I would like to suggest that the internet revolution has not yet…
It’s not all Twitter mobs – the internet can be a force for good
Few readerships of any intelligent national magazine will be more alive to the perils and downsides of 21st–century cyber-life than…
I can’t live without Jane Fonda
Everything since the ZX Spectrum has pretty much left me cold. Ghetto blasters, Sony Walkmans, CDs, Apple Macs, iPods, PlayStations……
How the Rat sniffed out £15,000 down the back of my virtual sofa
It must be about 25 years since the Rat first made an appearance in The Spectator. He started out as…
The inventions (and Welsh rarebit mix) that will change your life
At last. And just what you’ve been waiting for. The official Wiki Man guide to the best gadgets and gizmos…
iAddicts
For many years The Spectator employed a television reviewer who did not own a colour television. Now they have decided…
Decision breakers
‘The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision,’ said Maimonides. How right he was. Today,…
Want greater diversity? Try being less fair
In its hasty dismissal of James Damore, Google showed a worrying disregard for one of the most important freedoms within…
A tale of two Valleys
Silicon Valley looks like a cross between Milton Keynes and the set of the Stepford Wives. Row after row of…
Big Auntie
It’s sneaky, the way in which the BBC, so much regarded as part of the family as to be nicknamed…
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…
The internet’s war on free speech
The web was meant to empower us all. Right now, it’s empowering censors
In praise of doctors’ handwriting
My baby and I excel at blood tests. He (tiny, jaundiced) stretches out naked under the hospital’s hot cot-lamps like…
Tea and honesty
We recently moved -offices from Canary Wharf to Blackfriars bridge. When you move after a long time in one place,…
Fast and furious
Modern life is too fast. Everyone is always in a hurry; people skim-read and don’t take the time to eat…
I have seen the future, and it’s a racist, filthy-mouthed teenage robot
‘I’m a nice person,’ said the robot. ‘I just hate everybody.’ Maybe you know the feeling. The robot in question…
Diary
Killing time in a Heathrow first-class lounge, I notice how many men adopt an unmistakable ‘first-class lounge’ persona. They stand…
Going global
We can all identify decades in which the world moved forward. Wars are not entirely negative experiences: the social and…
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…
We’re swamped with nonsense gizmos and it’s all Steve Jobs’s fault
I keep being told that the big hot technological gizmo of the moment is a box that sits in the…
No hiding place
Technology has made murderers much easier to catch
Letters
What might have been Sir: Harry Mount points out that Boris Johnson is two years older than David Cameron (Diary,…
Ruling the digital waves
Everyone, we hear these days, must learn to code. Being able to program computers is the only way to be…
Tax me more, but don’t touch my dishwasher
There was a big fuss a year or so ago about a book by a French chap called Piketty about…
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…
