August 2010
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Is long form journalism starting a new chapter?
“With the help of Twitter and sites such as Long Form and The Awl, longer articles are finding a new lease of life as people take the time to find and read them”
You can read the rest of this piece I wrote in today’s Guardian, following my recent blog post about IfYouOnly.
IfYouOnly isn’t just about long form journalism — just important, interesting journalism, which...
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Why buy a Kindle?
Tempted by the increasingly low cost of the Kindle, we ordered one a few weeks ago. It arrived today. The screen is vastly improved, and it is smaller, lighter and faster than its predecessors.
A few people have asked “why not get an iPad”? Well, good question. The first answer is price: the Kindle costs $139, versus at least $499 for the iPad. The second is that I still...
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Inside the heart of the 21st century
A few years ago, you might have said that Silicon Valley was the centre of the electronics industry. Companies like Intel and HP, which forged new ground in the computing revolution, controlled the world through technology.
Today, however, the Valley is more about a service culture and internet business than hardware — though the huge names continue. Instead, the balance of power (at least...
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If you only read one thing today, make it this
I’ve been playing around with Twitter for a long time now — and although my relationship with it has been up and down, I think it’s great fun. I’ve set up lots of accounts, some personal, some private, and some have been very, very public (@guardiantech, which I originally set up to send myself text message alerts, now has 1.6 million followers).
The other day I was thinking...
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On the Shenzhen Metro
Shenzhen’s underground system is new, just like the city itself, and has some interesting quirks.
For example: locals use their RFID-enabled passes, the sort of contactless system familiar that’s now familiar all over the world but was pioneered just across the border in Hong Kong with the Octopus card.
Visitors, however, receive these little tokens.
Despite looking like simple...
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Weeknotes: 20
Thomas Mann said once that “a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people”. It feels as if this week has been doing its best to prove that.
It’s now a little more than a week since I returned from China, where I was on assignment for Project Moke. It was an incredible place, and I was quite taken with it. I had expected somewhere alien,...
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Weeknotes: 17
I was sitting on the train the other day and had a sudden panic: I have three deadlines looming over the next six weeks. A wave of terror gripped me, and I sat wringing my hands trying to work out how I could possibly cope with the workload.
Then, just as suddenly, I snapped out of it. How pathetic to worry that I have 11,000 words of writing to complete in more than a month! In the past I...
