Sport
On a tennis court there is no bench, no coach to advise you mid-match and no partner to share the blame with. In a team game defeat is divided; in tennis every ball is yours alone. Why the loser is not the one with the weaker shot but the one whose nerve goes first, and what the court teaches beyond sport.
IT
Data is the new oil is repeated so often that the second half has been forgotten: oil underground is worth nothing, and value appears only after extraction and refining. Gigabytes of logs and clicks are noise on their own. Why the database decides more than the algorithm, and what makes the difference: order, not volume.
Society
The young are spoilt today — the line turns up in texts thousands of years old. If the young have been spoiling for three thousand years running, perhaps they are not the problem. They are a barometer: they show with heightened sensitivity where opportunity is missing and where adults say one thing and live another.
World
In the popular mind Africa is reduced to two pictures — poverty and wildlife. Neither is false so much as hopelessly incomplete. It is the youngest continent on the planet: half the population is under twenty. Many people without work are either an engine of growth or a source of instability. The outcome is not yet decided.
Politics
It is easy to be disappointed by elections: it can seem that nothing changes anyway. Their point is not only who wins on a particular day. Their main function is quiet and constant — they make power dependent on people. A peaceful button marked replace is one of humanity's underrated inventions.
Society
On 17 July Andy Burnham became Britain's prime minister as the only admitted candidate: 379 members of parliament nominated him and no vote was held. He is the seventh prime minister in ten years, a rate not seen for almost two centuries. The episode tests the argument that stability matters more than plurality.
Economy
Inflation is discussed in percentages as though it were the weather, but behind the average figure hides a very unequal distribution of pain. For a comfortable household it is holidays and gadgets that get dearer; for a poor one it is bread, medicine, transport and rent — the things that cannot be given up.
World
Central Asia is often spoken of as somebody's periphery. It is enough to look at the map without the centre-and-margin frame: for centuries roads, ideas and goods between East and West passed through this region. A crossroads is a position of strength. But it carries a temptation — to serve other people's routes.
Culture
The theatre has been pronounced dead since the invention of cinema, then television, then the internet, then streaming. More than a century on, some of its killers went out of fashion before it did. A film is the same on Monday and on Friday; a performance never repeats. Why that irreproducibility is the thing it sells.
World
A century ago textbooks condescendingly called Asia the sleeping East. Today half of what you are holding was invented or made there. Step back two thousand years and the picture reverses: paper, gunpowder and the very numerals you count with came from there. The lag was the exception, not the rule.
IT
A good interface goes unnoticed: you notice it only when it is bad — when the button cannot be found and you are getting angry. Complexity is easy to build: keep adding features until you are lost yourself. Simplicity takes the courage to leave things out. Behind every simple button lies a heap of discarded ones.
Sport
On 19 July, on the fifteenth stage of the Tour de France, Jonas Vingegaard crashed twenty kilometres from the summit of Solason: a broken collarbone, surgery, and the first abandonment of a grand tour in his career. He was lying second, four and a half minutes behind Pogacar. On how we overrate merit and underrate chance.
Culture
A language is not only a means of communication but a way of thinking and of remembering who you are. Losing it means losing not a dictionary but part of your view of the world. Why the choice between the native and the useful is false: Kazakh does not stand in the way of Russian or English — each strengthens the other.
Society
Two hundred years ago a literate person was one who could read letters. That is no longer enough: a new literacy has appeared — the ability to read not the text but the source. Three questions to put to any message: who said this, how do they know, and what do they want me to do after reading it.
