I like the BBC’s More or Less, which takes a look at what it calls the numbers in the news. This morning I caught up with the most recent podcast of the World Service edition, which included an item on the exact measurements that determine whether a food shortage is a famine, or merely a humanitar...

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You can follow someone on Twitter and friend them on Facebook, but real friends are people you break bread with.

Got that?

David Carr, in a piece for the New York Times, related eating bread baked by Clay Shirky, a web hero of considerable renown. It came as a surprise to Mr Carr (as it di...

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Lotteries, raffles and the like are not generally my friends. But last night, I was lucky enough to win not one but two Regency Wraps reusable parchment sheets, which unlike other reusable baking sheets can be cut to size. This happens so seldom I just had to share my good fortune. There will be a...

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Garret Hardin's idea that the emotion of shame can help to manage a common resource has always been a favourite for me. Up to 150 people, as Hardin suggested, can help one another do the right thing (for them all) by instilling a feeling of shame in transgressors. Seems he and I have been wrong. Not about the role of shame, but about what to call it. Brené Brown told me so in her TED talk, listening to Shame.

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That’s the title of an article in the New York Review of Books blog by Tim Parks.

My laconic friend Luigi’s answer was “No”.¹ Parks comes to much the same conclusion, but in support he adds a great deal of insight and historical learning, which I am sure Luigi shares, internally.

I’ve yet to...

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