• Stop Passing Laws and Start Reading the Old Ones

    It is, at the time of writing, a criminal offence in England and Wales to handle a salmon in suspicious circumstances. Not to steal one, mind — theft was already covered, thank you very much, since roughly the Bronze Age. Section 32 of the Salmon Act 1986 exists because Parliamen

  • Nowhere to Salute: How Europe Learned to Evict Its Dead Dictators

    Shortly before dawn on 20 July 2011, a small crew of workmen in the Bavarian town of Wunsiedel dug up Rudolf Hess. Hitler’s deputy had been in the ground since 1987, when he hanged himself in Spandau prison at the age of 93, and the local Lutheran parish had finally had enough of

  • The City That Throws Away Its Heating

    Two-thirds of the energy produced by a typical nuclear power station goes straight into the nearest large body of water. Not through incompetence, not through some scandalous cover-up, but through the plain arithmetic of thermodynamics: a reactor turns roughly a third of its heat

  • 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.