• The Plagiarism Detector That Can Finally Read

    The world’s most widely used plagiarism detector cannot detect plagiarism. It never could. What Turnitin and its rivals actually do is match strings of characters — a task closer to spotting duplicate barcodes than to reading — and for twenty-odd years universities have treated t

  • The Earth Is Flat and So Is My Faith in Humanity

    In 2018, a flat-earther spent twenty thousand dollars on a laser ring gyroscope to prove, once and for all, that the planet doesn’t spin. The device promptly registered a drift of fifteen degrees per hour — which, for anyone keeping score, is precisely what you’d expect to see on

  • Science Talks on the Afterlife

    Death, these days, has a marketing department. There are bestselling memoirs of heaven, streaming documentaries about surviving it, TED talks with soft lighting, and a steady drip of neuroscience press releases about the dying brain lighting up like the Blackpool illuminations. E

  • Review

    Seán Maigh

  • Manchesterism

    There is a particular kind of silence that descends on a room when a politician says the word “productive” with a capital P. You can almost hear the spreadsheets sweating. Somewhere in the Square Mile a man in a quarter-zip puts down his flat white and frowns, because he has read

  • The Digital Afterlife.

    In January 2021, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Microsoft a patent for building a chatbot out of a specific person’s texts, emails and voice messages — including, the filing made clear, a person who happens to be dead. Microsoft’s own general manager of AI

  • Burnham vowed to end rough sleeping in Manchester too. He didn’t.

    Recycling, we’re endlessly told, is a virtue. Not in politics. In politics, a recycled pledge is the original failure wheeled back out in a fresh bin bag, and you’re a mug if you don’t check what’s inside before applauding.

  • Every Night at Nine, a Man in Ripon Still Blows a Horn at an Obelisk

    The most reliably punctual public service in England is not a train, a bin lorry or a GP’s switchboard. It is a man with a horn.

  • Mythos, Fabele, Opus

    Prometheus stole fire from the gods, handed it to humanity, and spent the rest of eternity chained to a rock while an eagle ate his liver — which regrew overnight, so the bird could start fresh each morning. In February 2023, Microsoft announced that the technology behind its new

  • Bribes Are Taxable

    Under British tax law, a bribe is income. Declare it, pay your marginal rate, and HMRC will bank the proceeds without so much as a raised eyebrow. The principle is Victorian: in 1886 the courts decided that a pair of bookmakers running an illegal betting operation still owed tax