Many of you might have come across the remarkable 2.5 gigapixel photo (see here) created by the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research that allows you to zoom right up to the modern office and retail parks that hedge the historic core of Delft. Now, according to an article from Wired, a former Cold War […]

Koren Zailckas has written a memoir, Smashed, about her drinking experiences and her eventual renunciation of the bottle. The only surprising thing is that Zalickas penned this tale at the tender age of 23–in other words, she’s somehow managed to cram the whole cycle of tentative experimentation, excess, and clear-eyed abstinence into less than a […]

I might have given Colm T�ib�n�s novel, The Master, a bit of an uncalled-for kicking the other day, but I have to admit that his waspish criticism is very much worth reading. He seems to have a gift for showering his subjects with faint praise. Or lauding their achievements while demurring on one or two […]

It’s gone too far, and somehow this exploding cult needs to be reined in. I’m talking about the way supporting football clubs, in particular those in the English Premiership, is becoming less a hobby and more a means by which people are beginning to identify themselves. The hysterical coverage of the game is one of […]

Late last week I received Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Beach and hope to post a review on the main Three Monkeys site in due course. When I was reflecting on how much I like Murakami’s work, I tried to remember what it was about my first encounter with his writing–reading the incredible Wind-up Bird […]

No doubt as I type this some guru is preparing a book for O’Reilly or some other press on the ‘ethics of blogging’. (For example, is it permissible to correct errors “invisibly” after posting or should you always highlight changes after the initial publish?) And of course the idiosyncratic nature of blogging is being slowly […]

Apologies to all my countless readers in the blogosphere for being remiss in offering recent posts. (I bet at least 25% of all blog postings consist of similar apologies.) It’s just that as I approached the end of my employment with “A Once-Leading Irish Software Company, Erstwhile Great White Hope of the Dotcom Bubble”, I […]

From Seymour M. Hersh’s article in this week’s New Yorker:”The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran�s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging […]

You write a post about the lingering fascination of Nazism and what happens? The nice-but-dim third-in-line to the British throne is snapped wearing a swastika armband. Considering the Windsors are about as British as bratwurst, such antics were likely to prod the broadsheets into dredging up the Royal Family’s (and particularly King Edward VIII’s) rather […]

The Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch once said something along the lines of the Second World War cannot really be said to be over until parents could innocently name their child “Adolf.” That day seems to be retreating further into the future, in part due to excellent programs such as the BBC’s Auschwitz: The Nazis and […]