2020
Today I learnt that COVID has led to the permanent closure of London’s cereal cafés.. 🥣😢
Twitter, death threats and civility: rethinking journalism on social media
(Or why your spicy hot takes are making everything worse.)
Why we need a new framework for discussing powerful women — and it’s all the fault of the Greeks
It’s disturbing how easily the California fires slip off our radar, just as the Australian wildfires did.
I don’t so much want slow news as future-looking news; the stories that will continue to matter in the long-term.
15 years on, journalists are still talking nonsense about blogs
This person has no idea what they are talking about:
The reason no one talks about “blogging” anymore is that, for what blogs were good at — sending your personal views on the news (or some other topic) to a dedicated audience — other tools offered simpler, more effective tools for doing just that, most notably social networks. Why go through the trouble of setting up your own blog and slogging through a cumbersome back-end CMS when you can just create an account on Twitter and start sharing hot takes in a couple of minutes?
Well, here’s an hack who clearly has it paid any attention to what’s happening in blogging right now.
Plenty of people talk about blogs and blogging. Just not in politics and news journalism. Go and have a look at fashion, and it’s a different story.
It makes it hard for me to take the rest of the story seriously, though.
Well, I never thought I’d reach a point where the US president announces he’s ill with a potentially life-threatening disease — and my first response is scepticism.
But here we are.
I just experienced this when I had to pop out in the car briefly. It’s a big improvement: Apple Launches Revamped Maps App in the United Kingdom and Ireland 🗺
It’s possible that our HomePods are the most used pieces of digital tech in our house at the moment. We’ve lived the six months of the pandemic to a background of music, and it really helps.
I could do with fewer plays of the Trolls World Tour soundtrack, though…
This is a fascinating long read. It suggests that COVID-19 is largely spread by a small number of people in particular settings - super spreading events. And so R may be the wrong way of assessing its spread: K: The Overlooked Variable That’s Driving the Pandemic
Today’s learning: six hours of Zoom feels very different to six hours of in-person lecturing.
However, I’m not facing 90 minutes of travelling before I reach the comfy sofa, so there’s that. 🛋
Today, I am mainly thinking about the health impact on lecturers of spending six hours in front of an iMac Zooming, rather than gamboling, gazelle-like, between lecture theatres and seminar rooms.
