… in 1984, more than 4,000 people died after a cloud of gas escaped from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India.
Twitter: the nub of it
At breakfast the other morning with a group of colleagues, two of them expressed the classic put-down of Twitter: “I’m not interested in knowing that someone has just had a cup of tea and put the cat out”. The point of Twitter for me is not really what’s going on my contacts’ lives, but what’s going on in their heads. And that’s what I mostly get from the service, and it’s worth having.
On this day…
… in 1954, the United States Senate voted to condemn Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R Wis., for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.”
Jamie Boyle’s new book is out
Hurrah! And available as a pdf download as well as through the usual channels.
Yellow Peril
Doh!
Seen in a colleague’s office through her window.
Lighting up time
Puzzled? I would be too if I didn’t know the context. It’s an uplighter cunningly inserted in a distressed Art Deco mirror.
Photographed in a nice Cambridge restaurant last night.
Speed Bumps Ahead
In the next few days Memex will be moving to a new server and an updated version of WordPress, so service may be patchy for a day or two. Apologies in advance.
Gladwell debunked
I enjoy Malcolm Gladwell’s writing. But anyone who can get $30,000 for an appearance has to be riding for a fall. Today, Andrew Orlowski has a go. Knockabout stuff.
Have you ever had the nagging sense that there’s something not quite right with the adulation that follows Malcolm Gladwell – the author of Tipping Point? But you couldn’t quite put your finger on it? We’re here to help, dear reader.
Gladwell gave two vanity “performances” in the West End – prompting fevered adulation from the posh papers – the most amazing being this Guardian editorial, titled In Praise of Malcolm Gladwell.
It appears that we have a paradox here. A substantial subclass of white collar “knowledge workers” hails this successful nonfiction author as fantastically intelligent and full of insight – and yet he causes an outbreak of infantalisation. He’s better known for his Afro than any big idea, or bold conclusion – and his insights have all the depth and originality of Readers Digest or a Hallmark greeting card. That’s pretty odd.
So what’s really going on here? Who is Malcolm Gladwell? What’s he really saying? Who are these people who lap it all up? And what is it that he’s saying that hold so much appeal?
Orlowski coins a memorable term of abuse. Gladwell, he says, is a walking version of ‘Reader’s Digest 2.0’. Ouch!
Writing by candlelight
We had a power cut today. Our house — and indeed the entire village — was without electricity from before noon until late afternoon. Sobering experience. And a salutary reminder of how much our lives depend on stable electricity supplies. Basically, nothing in our house worked: no lighting; no heating; no cooking; no hot water; no TV; no broadband; no chargers for mobile phones. I lit a blazing log fire, so we wouldn’t have frozen, and we could always have gone out to restaurant if there had been no power for cooking. As I say, sobering. And also a reminder of why, global warming or not, no democratic government is going to allow electricity supplies to falter. So we’ll have nukes, or whatever else it takes to keep the lights on.