Translation is an extraordinary process. It is holding on to the essence of a thing while stripping away everything which expresses that essence and replacing it with a different language or a different form. Having pulled off this remarkable feat, the fate of the translator is then to be ignored: the integrity of the original [...]
This is a story of joined up government. This is a story of not very joined up government. It is quite a long story: there are well over a thousand words here, describing a bit of activity which took no more than a few minutes to do. There are no heroes in this story, but [...]
In the continuing fight for the greater availability of public information, it may seem churlish to observe that sometimes what’s wanted is not more information, but less. The picture above shows a typical display on a Countdown sign at a London bus stop. This particular stop has buses from two routes. At a quick glance, [...]
My dishwasher has a bit of whatever the white goods equivalent is of bling. It has a display panel on the front conveying mostly irrelevant information fairly inefficiently. I assume it is intended to communicate whizzy modernity; it certainly doesn’t communicate much useful information. It cycles through three screens in, only one of which tells [...]
Some evenings on my way home from work, I play a small private game of chicken. Now I have played it for the last time. If there are too many people at the bus stop – and no, I don’t know how many makes too many – that’s a sign that the gap between buses [...]
I went to a fascinating discussion on the use and abuse of contemporary history at the RSA this evening. Andrew Rawnsley was in the chair, with Peter Hennessy, Timothy Garton Ash and Tessa Jowell all on fine thought provoking form. Part of the discussion touched on the abundance of near contemporary sources compared with even [...]