The website of James Harkin, author of Niche, Cyburbia and Big Ideas
Seven years ago, a skinny American political theorist called Barry Schwartz strolled into The Gap in search of a new pair of jeans. It took more time than he had bargained for. Schwartz had committed the cardinal error of entering … Continue reading
The eight tourists killed in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest would, according to the travel writer Jan Morris, have been well aware of the dangers of their journey into ‘the darkest heart of Africa’. Ken Wiwa offered a radically different interpretation … Continue reading
Read it here
My comment piece, which was in last thursday’s Guardian. Read it here
Read it here
Read it here
Here
Read it here.
With me and some other talking heads; watch it here
Was on Today programme this morning, arguing with the charming and usually pretty good Tory culture secretary Jeremy Hunt about the internet. About three years later than everyone else, including the magician Derren Brown and an amateur league team from … Continue reading
When, at the beginning of November, the Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw delivered a speech to rally New Labour’s “luvvies” to the defence of the arts, he omitted to mention that there has been a recent dwindling of their ranks. For … Continue reading
Read it here.
Snark, by David Denby Picador, £9.99 Gordon Brown’s former special adviser Damian McBride wouldn’t have known it, but those innuendo-laden emails he sent around about the Tory leadership were textbook snark. There was something ethically snarky about the surreptitious video … Continue reading
Year 10: It’s 8am on Wednesday morning, and Half-wit has been called to the diary room. The news is not good. After the initial novelty, he is informed by the anonymous interlocutor, the public has grown weary of his antics … Continue reading
Read it here. Will be in conversation with Dominique Moisi at Edinburgh Books Festival on Thursday 27th at 330pm.
In the Spring of 2006, a trainee teacher and single mum called Stacy Snyder was summoned by Millersville University in Pennsylvania and informed that, despite having passed all her coursework and earned all her credits, they were not going to … Continue reading
So the wise old lion has roared again. Rupert Murdoch has threatened the orthodoxy and offered a possible lifeline to the struggling newspaper industry by declaring that his titles will start charging for online content. But how did anyone seriously … Continue reading
Is now available here.
Late last year, for one night only, fans of the musical The Lion King were turned away from the Lyceum theatre in London’s West End. If they had been able to peer inside at the stage they would have witnessed … Continue reading
Has anyone seen Duplicity? The film stars Clive Owen and Julia Roberts as two former spies who can’t help bumping into one other. The film jumps back and forth so much, the time frame is so scrambled, that it’s impossible … Continue reading
Read it here. After all the talk about the “network effect” and its “accelerating pace of change”, it turns out that US growth in the last decade has been based on cutting costs and cheap credit. The lesson is that … Continue reading
In the space of a single decade, internet search has changed the way we look out onto the world beyond recognition. Google has become our binoculars and our window out on the net. With that blinking cursor on our internet … Continue reading
Great news story, if it’s true, from today’s Sunday Times, which claims that Chinese parents are subjecting their children to electronic shock therapy to wean them off their ‘addiction’ to computer games. Fantastic irony in the idea of using electric … Continue reading
Is Twitter making us twits? There’s no doubt that our time online changes us, but is it ultimately harmful? DON TAPSCOTT 30 May 2009 The Globe and Mail LOST IN CYBURBIA How Life on the Net Creates a Life of … Continue reading