January 2012
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John Lanchester on financial crisis
Published in the London Review of Books, Lanchester’s is some of the best, most memorable writing you can get on the origins and meaning of the world financial crisis and the City of London financial district.
Cityphilia (January 2008)
Cityphobia (October 2008)
John Lanchester has also published a book on the crisis — Whoops!
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How to make a solar water heater from plastic... →
Retired Brazilian mechanic José Alano invented a simple, cheap, energy saving rooftop solar water heater which is benefiting thousands of people. Here’s how it’s done …
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Europe: who lives where – map →
An interactive map that shows how many foreign Europeans are currently living in other European countries (the figures reflect only the officially resident).
More than half a million Poles live in the UK, and almost the same number again in Germany. Germany also has 556,000 Italians living there. There are 391,000 Britons in Spain, and more Germans than I imagined living in the UK – nearly...
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I have often have wondered what kind of a person I would be today if I did not...
– — Elizabeth Taylor.
via Miss Ava Gardner
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Sunday = backup day
Just backed up my Tumblr. If you want to back up yours, you can download a little app from the Tumblr blog, and it’s very straightforward. Note that although it doesn’t say so in the FAQs, it won’t work if there are any posts queued in your Tumblr. Other than that, it seems to have worked well.
I don’t know if it’s possible to restore from this if the worst happened,...
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Has Microsoft Word affected the way we work?
‘But has word processing changed the way we write? … The most interesting academic study I looked at found that writers using computers “spent more time on a first draft and less on finalising a text, pursued a more fragmentary writing process, tended to revise more extensively at the beginning of the writing process, attended more to lower linguistic levels [letter, word] and formal...
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John le Carré in 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'
John le Carré’s cameo in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (at 1:15:55, approx; via deareje). I love John le Carré’s books more than almost any other author’s – he’s in my top three writers of great, great reads.
I didn’t spot this cameo in the film tonight (at Reserva Cultural, Avenida Paulista, São Paulo), but I saw him – ‘Christmas party guest’ – in the credits....
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Who Are These People? →
To mark the 5th anniversary of the iPhone, an excerpt from Mike Daisey’s one-man show wherein Daisey - performer, investigative journalist and “worshipper in the cult of Apple” - began to wonder “where all our crap comes from,” and travelled to the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China to talk to workers and find out. A great piece from Ira Glass’ This American...
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This is Brighton – a beautiful portrait of my home town by the sea by the young photographer Caleb Yule, who used more than 45,000 still photographs to make this film.
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