Change Agents is a podcast about terrorism, crime, intelligence, warfare and all manner of gnarly stuff, hosted by former Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf. Let’s just say it’s not my normal audience! But I joined Andy recently for a conversation about the North Korean pretender scam. (See my recent story in Wired or read the background post for more context.) I haven’t watch the whole thing back, but I think I did a pretty good job […]
For those who aren’t following along, I run a small book subscription service called Curious Reading Club. It’s focused on sharing non-fiction books that I’ve enjoyed, often about science, technology, history and society—mostly new (but not always) and with a curveball memoir or handbook thrown in for fun now and then. The books I choose are generally written from a journalistic point of view, and I particularly try to find titles and authors that deserve […]
We just spent three weeks in the UK and Italy, and it was glorious. Family, mostly, plus a few friends, a little culture, a lot of food, and plenty of pizza and pubs. On the quiet side we visited the Isle of Mull and the Suffolk countryside, and on the busy end we hit up Naples, Rome, Florence and London. We explored Pompeii and the Coliseum, we watched Shakespeare, lots and lots of football, and […]
After two years, I’ve wrapped up my time with the Steve Jobs Archive. I’m extremely proud of the crew and the work we’ve put out there… and it’s also time for something new. Honestly I don’t know exactly what’s next, so I’m taking a little time off to think about where I want to put my energy. But here are some things I am looking for right now: —Conversations around consulting projects, particularly if you’re looking […]
File this under niche jobs: Camera operator and former pro rollerblader John Lyke has a specialist skill: filming while on skates (per Trung Phan). You can see his work in HBO’s Winning Time. He has a YouTube channel. And he’s talked about the process too, in this podcast.
• Jonathan Katz has the best piece I’ve seen about the current attempts to rewrite the history of the New York Times op-ed controversy in 2020. (You remember, the one that engulfed the paper when it published Tom Cotton’s call for federal troops to end Black Lives Matter protests? The one currently undergoing a revisionist reconstruction project which is being laundered by Semafor as a way to get attention?) • Some people dredged up a […]
I learned about them this week: They’re called the the joker de luxe in France, the expensive players brought into a football match as a late substitute to try and change the game. There doesn’t quite seem to be an English language equivalent: they’re a super-sub but they’re costly; your aging star who gets paid a packet but can’t hack the whole game. We probably have them in workplaces outside football too. Great phrase.
One of the problems that excites me most in journalism is what you do when you’re presented with a lack of information. It’s been the genesis of some of the most interesting projects I’ve worked on, including Ghost Boat (“how can you find people who disappeared?”) and the MITTR Covid Tracing Tracker (“who is doing what with digital contact tracing?”) So I was really interested by this Buzzfeed investigation that effectively asked “Where are China’s […]
There are many pieces about the problems of journalism, and of journalists, and Sarah Ditum has certainly written one of them. I hesitated to post it because at some points it felt tritely rosy about life in the trenches of journalism before the internet, and at others it’s stuck in a stage of pseudo-self-awareness as an example of the very thing that it regrets. The seemingly mandatory piece of thinly-veiled commentary on outrage culture didn’t […]
Books I read: Unintentionally, both my reads this week were about the ways in which men dominate women, and the ways in which rules can be made to damage people. First up was The Handmaid’s Tale, and it’s probably 20 years since I read it—I was struck by how vibrant and clear it felt, and of course how much more possible everything seems now than when I read it in the glow of turn-of-the-century optimism. […]
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