• 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

  • Rosebank’s £30bn Butterfingers

    The North Sea has swallowed a great deal in its time: Doggerland, the herring fleet, roughly one national energy strategy per parliament. Its latest acquisition is rather pricier per kilo. Somewhere in the waters west of Shetland, a piece of kit destined for Rosebank — the larges

  • The House That the Court Declared Haunted

    “As a matter of law, the house is haunted.”

  • The Petrol Queue Fine

    At what point, legally speaking, does a moving car become a parked one? It sounds like the sort of question a philosophy undergraduate might chew over at two in the morning. But it now has a practical answer, courtesy of Britain’s private parking industry: a car is parked the mom

  • The Sport Where a Ten-Year-Old Holds the World Record and a Federation Enforces 18 Rules

    The best-run governing body in world sport is not FIFA, the IOC or the ECB. It is the International Federation of Charming Worms and Allied Pastimes, it operates from a village in Cheshire, and it has never once been raided at dawn by the Swiss police.