Category Archives: Culture

Over the past few years, I’ve been slowly developing a theory of what I call built-in obsolescence in art. It’s still far from fully formed, but in a nutshell it says that all art becomes obsolete eventually, and that there’s … Continue reading →

Chalk this one up for the annals of self-defeat: it won’t take long before the tireless spiders of Google chance upon this posting and thereby rid my favourite web page of its punch. ‘Your search – “literary financial journalism” – … Continue reading →

It’s probably fair to say that there’s been virtually nothing really new and different in popular music over the past few years. It’s been nearly ten years since a band has come along which has changed the world’s musical vocabulary … Continue reading →

There is very little in the way of curatorial interjection in MoMA’s Gerhard Richter retrospective. There are only two wall texts: one at the beginning, saying, essentially, that writing about Richter is futile; and one half-way through, giving the necessary … Continue reading →

Last Monday, I flew to New York from Toronto, where I’d gone to watch my sister become a Ph.D. I was booked onto a 9am flight, but I got there early enough that I had time to make it onto … Continue reading →

The New York Times Magazine this weekend has an interesting, if slightly confused, article about how self-esteem is overrated. It’s based on research by, among others, Nicholas Emler of the LSE and Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University. Here … Continue reading →

I’m uploading this page to my web server over my cable modem internet connection. Time Warner Cable used to have a monopoly on internet cable service in Manhattan, but over the past few weeks we’ve started seeing a rash of … Continue reading →

Just finished reading Austerlitz, and everything the reviews say is true. Sebald really did manage to come up with a whole new genre of book, neither memoir nor novel nor concatenation of postmodern digressions. Austerlitz is a great and haunting … Continue reading →

It turns out that there are at least two legal lesbian marriages in America. Not civil unions in Vermont, mind, but fully-fledged bona fide marriage. And they’re in Texas! This fact emerges from an article in the New York Times … Continue reading →

One of the side-effects of the all-out war on terrorism has been a complete absence of any mention of the war on drugs. The two are linked, however: Afghanistan is one of the largest opium exporters in the world, and … Continue reading →

It’s 11:55pm, New York time, and I’m on Continental Airlines flight 31 from Newark to Sao Paulo. They’ve served the meal already – I accepted the mini-bottle of Cotes du Rhône – and I’ve also popped a couple of the … Continue reading →

Memory can play nasty tricks on one. I "discovered" Anthony Lane long before Tina Brown, for instance: he was the film reviewer for the Independent on Sunday before he moved to the New Yorker, and I always loved his reviews … Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, I rented a medium format camera and went out shooting bridges at the weekend. I was using slide film, and got the film developed that same weekend; a lot of the shots came out great. So … Continue reading →

1. The wastebins are back! The wastebins are back! Finally, that empty bottle of Oasis Classic Lemon which you drank while walking down the street has somewhere to go! I can’t remember exactly when it was that they went – … Continue reading →

I’ve just come back from a performance of Berg’s Lulu, at the Metropolitan Opera. It’s a great piece, of course, although weirdly much of the audience didn’t seem to think so: it was noticeably thinner by the end than it … Continue reading →

Not exactly known for sensationalism, the British Journal of Sports Medicine has just published what sounds like a very interesting study showing that among amateur basketball players, those who wore shoes with air cells in the heel (that’ll be Nikes, … Continue reading →

In the latest issue of the New Yorker, the magazine’s music critic Alex Ross has a profile of John Adams. That, in itself, is no great surprise, and in fact the profile tells us little new about the composer. The … Continue reading →

I have an old LP at home, I can’t play it, because I don’t have a record player. But it’s sitting there all the same, a 12-inch plastic pill which never fails to make me happy when I’m feeling blue. … Continue reading →

When I was growing up, I used to get extremely excited whenever a letter arrived for me in the mail. Just as I could never understand why grown-ups didn’t just eat Mars bars the whole time, I couldn’t comprehend how … Continue reading →