Embraced by millions, Turbocharged virtual button that changed the world

Early 2000s, Yelp a start-up came up with a novel and friendly feature for the emergent world wide web. Ordinary users could post reviews of restaurants that everyone could read. As there were very few people who were really interested in writing things on the internet. Yelps engineers needed to give them a reason to. The story of how they incentivised this user-generated content is the jumping off point for Like.  Yelp reckoned people might be compelled to post reviews if they received compliments from others. Did you know, over 160 billion times a day, someone taps a like button. How … Continue reading Embraced by millions, Turbocharged virtual button that changed the world

Consequences of our choices

A brother and sister lost and found, in a novel from the author of the Patrick Melrose series, Edward St Aubyn’s Parallel Lines, the novel seizes your heart and enthrals your mind. “We set off in opposite directions and walked around the world until we met, and I’m very pleased we have…”. It is summer. Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him with a fragile hold on reality and a bigger to connect with the mother who abandoned him. His therapist, Martin Carr, also faces challenges, including his adopted daughter Olivia’s tenuous relationship with her biological … Continue reading Consequences of our choices

Feast of Memory and Trauma

German Novelist Judith Hermann weaves together themes of psychology and friendship, unconventional childhoods, summers of the North German Sea shore in a series of three interconnected stories. Children are born and grown up, careers established and abandoned, love affairs, marriages and friendships made and dismantled.  Contemporaries sicken and die, parents get old. “Every story has its first line. Not the line with which the story begins in the book; the line with which it begins in my mind”. This is a literary narrative reflection on when life becomes fiction, now dependable memory can be, and how close one’s dreams can come … Continue reading Feast of Memory and Trauma

Correlating rigid thinking to political extremes

  Political Neuroscientist attached to Cambridge University, Dr Leor Zmigrod discovers the biological factor that drive ideologies to extremes and her research into the physical and psychological origins of extremism. Her definition of ideology is a rigid and dogmatic way of thinking that discourages thought in favour of a pre-determined and hermetically sealed belief system. Her findings “Prejudiced children’s rigidities were not constrained to one domain: they were everywhere. Rightly spilled into every response, every reasoned thought and miscalculation.” Zmigrod reveals the hidden mechanisms driving our beliefs and behaviours. She using powerful tools of neuroscience to show that our political … Continue reading Correlating rigid thinking to political extremes

Brief Liaison encounter

All lives are nothing more than the chronicle of countless stinging might-have-beens that continue to haunt us. In the scorching heat, a hundred people wait to be selected as jurors. Paul, a lawyer reading Wall Street Journal. Catherine, a psychiatrist reading Wuthering Heights. So, begins a whirlwind flirtation over cappuccinos in Manhattan and gallery trips to Chelsea. Paul and Catherine, strike up a conversation and leap to judgements. Catherine thinks she could read him like a book, Wall Street, Park Avenue, Ivy League – arrogant self-satisfied, clearly prejudiced and knows it too. With lawyerly precision, Paul sums her up as … Continue reading Brief Liaison encounter

Idiotic luxury indulged by people who do nothing, but moved by the spectacle of suffering

French philosopher Vincent Delecroix’s novel, translated by Helen Stevenson, Small Boat, weaves a short, sharp, shocking tragic story shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. In November 2021, an inflatable dingy carrying more than 30 migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel killing 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, at 1:45 am the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. Since the boat was about a kilometre from British waters, the same passengers kept calling Cross, shockingly, the female … Continue reading Idiotic luxury indulged by people who do nothing, but moved by the spectacle of suffering

Media Circus: Golden age of Magazines

Graydon Carter’s brilliant raconteur of his own life of how he made his mark as one of society’s most talented editors and shapers of culture. Carter born in 1949, arrived in New York from Canada with little more than a suitcase, a failed literary magazine in his past and a keen sense of ambition. He landed a job as a floating writer at Time magazine in New York, selling 4 million copies a week, with salaries and expenses to match. After five years he was reassigned to Time’s sister magazine, Life, which “had become a zombie monthly, close to dead”. He … Continue reading Media Circus: Golden age of Magazines

Ultimate vigilante story

The Feather men is the riveting story of a secret organization whose efforts by a private British vigilance committee, founded in England in the late 1960s.  Their 14-year attempt to eliminate a band of coldblooded contract killers of a number of British ex-servicemen in Britain and abroad. From 1977 to 1990, three hired assassins known as the Clinic tracked down and murdered four former British soldiers, one at a time. Each of the assassinations was carried out in such an ingenious fashion that there would be no hint of foul play, but one clue these killings has in common was that … Continue reading Ultimate vigilante story

You can’t outrun the past

When New York law professor, Tom Layward’s wife, Amy’s infidelity was revealed, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest daughter turned eighteen. Twelve years later, while driving her to Pittsburgh to start university, he remembers his pact. It is a commitment born of spite and pride, unlikely to stand the test of time. As soon as his daughter is settled in her dorm, though, he gets in his car and starts driving. His destination – friends, relatives, exes, the basketball courts beloved of his youth – is anywhere but home. It doesn’t help that Tom’s job in … Continue reading You can’t outrun the past

Swimming with dolphins…

A English girl named Ishmaelle “born in a windswept cottage in the coast of Kent in the year  1843,” where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After the death of her parents and infant sister, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Call Me Ishamelle reimages the epic battle between man and nature in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick from a female perspective. Guo was inspired by a real-life story of 18-year-old Rebeca Ann Johnson who sailed out of Nantucket to Massachusetts, as the American Civil War breaks out in 1861, as part of the crew of the Nimrod, … Continue reading Swimming with dolphins…