Tag: Culture

  • AI vs Car Culture – Fasten your Seatbelts?

    Just a typical Friday night in San-Fran. A Waymo driverless taxi stops in the street. A guy jumps on the bonnet and smashes the windscreen. A crowd forms, and cover the car in spray paint, break its windows, and set it on fire. I’ve been thinking a lot about cars as I’ve written God-like my…

  • To the moon (and back)

    Today I went to Lightroom in London’s Kings Cross to see The Moonwalkers – an immersive video experience focused on the Apollo missions to the moon… and the Artemis II missions which intend to go back in 2026. It was a beautiful re-telling of a story I now know so well through the work I…

  • After Magic – Preview 2 – Tell All The Truth, But Tell It Slant

    Very excited that After Magic will be available in the next few days now. It’s a compact read at around 25,000 words, but covers a lot of ground within that. As I’ve increasingly found with the books I’ve written, the source material that’s given rise to After Magic isn’t really the kind of stuff you’d…

  • Football As Religion | Pele as God

    I’ve been asked to contribute to what might be best described as a theological dictionary of culture – coming out sometime at the end of the year I think – and one of the entries I’ve take on is football, through the lens of perhaps its greatest player, Pele. Nice to be able to pass of…

  • Soul Synaesthesia

    This month’s Believer documents a strange case from Hungary of audio-kinetic synaesthesia. The subject, whenever he hears certain words, ‘sees’ them as discrete and definite actions or gestures. Colour synaesthesia is more common: sounds or numbers are seen as distinct colours, and some estimates reckon that around 1 in 23 experience it. And I just…

  • Into Great Silence ¦ Sound Pollution

    by

    I enjoy most things about city life, but one of the perennial frustrations is noise. Light pollution, on the micro scale at least, is fairly easy to manage. We can shut our curtains or buy special blinds, and shut our eyes if need be. And, while some objects are foul to look at, we only…