David Cameron is a funny colour for a politician. Compared to the tanned orange of Tony Blair close up, he’s positively pink. For some reason it doesn’t look that way on TV, but when he walked a few feet in front of me on his way to the lectern at Demos yesterday, it was the first thing I noticed. Cameron doesn’t project the strange charisma [...]
Better Humans?
Madeleine Bunting has written a good piece in today’s Guardian hooked on the book out next week that I’ve edited with James Wilsdon called Better Humans? The book is a collection of essays about human enhancement, and as Madeleine writes: “It’s time we got our heads around this debate on this side of the Atlantic so that we can influence what technologies are developed, rather [...]
Get Back in the Box
Douglas Rushkoff has written an excellent new book called Get Back In The Box. I’ve been reading it on the beach in Kerala after picking up a copy in Bangalore airport. Not that I’m rubbing it in or anything. I hesitate to call it a business book, although that’s definitely the market it’s aimed at, because it’s much more about the implications of changes in [...]
The Country of the No
The best book about India I’ve read so far is undoubtedly Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay lost and found. He begins the book with his experience as a returnee to his childhood home of Bombay (or Mumbai as it’s called now) from New York and how difficult it was to set up home for his family. ‘India is the Country of the No. That ‘no’ [...]