Posts from year 2011
Found 29 hits, currently showing 11-20.
Review: Livet är ett äventyr
This is a collection of short stories by Staffan Heimerson, the veteran Swedish journalist who seems to have spent much of his career turning up in places where sensible people were either evacuating or strongly advised not to go.
Hultsfredsfestivalen back from the dead
Hultsfredsfestivalen was supposed to be dead. Last year it flatlined, another casualty in the long list of festivals that discovered nostalgia doesn’t pay the invoices. But then, in true horror-movie fashion, the corpse twitched.
Review: The Terminal Man
Some books are best read in the place where they happened. I first opened The Terminal Man while waiting for a flight at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
Review: Full Circle
The BBC travel shows with Michael Palin are among the most well-produced mainstream narratives out there. Many of them are also available in book format, such as this one. Full Circle describes a lap around the Pacific Ocean, a quite original itinerary.
Review: Anatomy of Restlessness
Bruce Chatwin had a peculiar way of writing. One moment two people are having a perfectly ordinary conversation, but three sentences later he’s contemplating the nature of civilization, human migration and why we apparently made a terrible mistake when we stopped wandering around and started buying furniture.
Content overdrive
Historically there has been always been a steady increase on connectivity. This has led to all sorts of innovation and progress.
Review: On the Road
On the Road is Jack Kerouac’s 1957 hymn to movement, caffeine, jazz, drugs, automobiles and the persistent belief that whatever you’re looking for is probably somewhere over the next state line.
The Google age
There was a time when finding out Abraham Lincoln’s birthday required actual effort. You’d walk into a library, hunt down an encyclopedia that smelled faintly of dust, flip through hundreds of pages until you found the answer.
Storage and data overload
Each day, an estimated 100 billion clicks are made on the web due to 55 trillion links in HTML pages. That amount of links almost match the synaptic wiring of the human brain, but unlike the brain, the web double its capacity every two years.
The wave of social media
Social media has conquered a disturbingly large chunk of our lives in a remarkably short time. And one of the chief accomplices in this little coup has been the smartphone.