Grains of Sand

There are lists. There are lists of lists. And, presumably, there are lists of lists of lists. If I were going to make a list of lists, w...

Musah Muhammad lives between the dump and the stagnant lagoon. His is unequivocally the worst bit of land in Sodom and Gomorrah, a freshly ...

Much but not all of what I read this year was work -related.  My recommendations are: Owning the Earth by Andro Linklater Cosmigraphic...

...There’s an ethnography of Alaska’s Athabascan peoples, by Richard Nelson, called Make Prayers to the Raven. Its gist is that these “anim...

I have review essay on Alberto Manguel's Curiosity in The Guardian today. Here are some further notes. as children...      Recalli...

Q. What aspects of the music did not prompt a universal response?  A. We looked at whether the music evoked happy/joyful or sad/scary fee...

For rebellious behaviour, slaves are pinned to the ground, and burned by degrees from the feet and hands, burning them gradually up to the ...

Here are a few additional notes and comments relating to a  review  of  The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time  published in The G...

I have contributed a comment to the blog for the Inspired by Blake* festival in Oxford, which begins on 18 January.   This follows a pos...

My recommendations for this year include: Listen : an interview about Syria with the surgeon David Nott  and many episodes of Radiolab ...

I have a review of  Ten Million Aliens by Simon Barnes in the Telegraph.  The following passage was cut in the edit: ...The point is n...

We live in these places out of necessity, lucky to have them out of the terrible explosion of humanity. But we visit and remember lakes, for...

Paul Kingsnorth's LRB review  of This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein and Don't Even Think About It by George Marshall is wor...

This post contains some additional notes and comments to my review of The Copernicus Complex by Caleb Scharf , which is published here ....

I have a review in The Guardian of Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom and A Rough Ride to the Future by James Lovelock. I wasn't...

...At first there weren't any rivers either, the waters ran deep under the ground. All you could hear of them was a distant roar, like ...

On 4 May I presented a small Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene at the First Athens Science Festival . The event was filmed .  H...

I spent a good part of a day in February with Richard Mabey, and wrote a piece for The Telegraph , which was just published (see note). ...

The apparent confusion between the reality of dreams and the reality of waking life... allows writers to use dreams to question reality wi...

At a talk at the Oxford Martin School titled Artificial intelligence: examining the interface between brain and machine , I asked Anders Sa...

  I have a review of The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert in The Guardian. Here are a few notes and comments on points which I did...

Prompted by a recommendation here , I am reading The Reindeer People by Piers Vitebsky.   He relates that the Eveny of Siberian used to...

I have a review in The Guardian of Sonic Wonderland by Trevor Cox.  Here are some further notes. Several of the wonders mentioned ...

Nietzsche...warned that the emergence of something, whether an organ, legal institution or a religious ritual is never to be confused...

A cheerful report ( Nuclear war would 'end civilization' with famine, study says ) puts me in mind of the first book in a “top five”...