What exactly is this message, displayed on the London Underground? Is it a come-on from a tonier paper--The Times, perhaps? A pitch to get off dead-tree communications altogether, and follow The Guardian online? No, as the fine print makes clear, it's a plea from the Mayor of London and Transport for London to avoid subway clutter by disposing of your reading matter in an appropriate recycling receptacle: Newspapers left on the Tube can jam doors and cause delays to your journey. Take your newspaper with you or put it in the bin to to be recycled.  ...

29 May, 2012

Ben Goldacre, a physician who hosts the Bad Science website and writes the UK Guardian's Bad Science has produced a witty compendium of the year in dodgy scientific research in the UK and elsewhere. Moneyquote: A £6m Home Office drugs education study was published with no results, because it was so flawed it couldn’t produce any, we saw MPs being foolish about cervical screening and moon magic, and then when they didn’t like the scientific evidence they got from Professor David Nutt, they sacked him. If politicians want us to take them seriously on the evidence for global warming, they have...

20 December, 2009

The UK Guardian, a trailblazer in the quest for newspaper survival in a digital era, has an Advent calendar of its best datablog entries for 2009: Hat tip: Cheryl Cook....

18 December, 2009

The big story in the UK today? A British soldier dies in Afghanistan. The PM sends a handwritten a condolence letter, but misspells the soldier's name. The mother makes a stink. The PM calls. The mother records the call. The mother turned the tape over to the tabloid Sun, whose outrage barely masked its glee. The Guardian and the Times have more balanced accounts. There are few things more sacred in journalism, politics, and life than the grieving mother of a soldier killed in action. In this case, however, having listened to the call with rapt horror,  my symathies go to Brown. [UPDATE] Geraint Jones writes check in...

10 November, 2009

You have to wonder who in Michael Ignatieff's camp thinks it's smart for him to keep giving long form interviews to plummy foreign journals. First it was the New Yorker, now it's The Guardian, a left-of-centre daily in Britain, where Iggy hosted a BBC-TV arts program for six years. Interviewer Rachel Cooke is a tad shaky on Canadian politics—she calls Ignatieff "the man most likely to be Canada's next prime minister," and describes the Harper government as "on its knees"—but she does get off a few delicious zingers. On his return to Canada: [H]e likes to attribute his return at least as much...

27 September, 2009
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After one too many disappointments, Biblically named British writer Hephzibah Anderson swore off boinking for a year, then wrote an intriguing article about the experience. Moneyquote:
"Beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes," Thoreau cautioned, but today I am shopping for a chaste wardrobe. The clothes I pick out are generous and tough, nothing flimsy or flyaway. In my newly chaste state, my instinct is to wrap up and hide away.
02 July, 2009