“In that sense “Amarillo” is pulling on the longest thread in this whole blog series – the way Britain’s light entertainment establishment, centred on the BBC, is so crucial to pop and to the charts. The infrastructure of British pop was born from it, from the old music hall venues pop stars performed in, through…

“This was a very-1970s guerrilla production. Before it was over, Goldman had stolen rain and snow overlays from Disney’s garbage. A young Glen Keane created the sound effects for a truck’s exhaust pipe. Bluth, Goldman and Pomeroy animated most of the film, but Bluth’s main memory of Banjo was mixing cel paint by his swimming…

“In the place of a legion of 15 really good NFL quarterbacks, we are left with about four or five excellent ones and the rest dependent on consistently inventive schematics, marginal improvements made through advancements in coaching and technology and the whims of their owner and general manager (along with their ability to acquire surrounding…

“There are several explanations for Vance’s drift. In the aftermath of his book’s unexpected success, he grew wary that readers would use his memoir as an excuse to look down on his Rust Belt and Appalachian kin. “If you’re an elite white professional,” he said, “working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have…

“As you might expect, the wealthy Silicon Valley types who have jumped on the Trump bandwagon with both feet, are being extremely normal about everything. In the wake of the assassination attempt, we were all treated to a rather unpleasant glimpse into the personal fantasies of some of these folks, which seem to follow a…

“The update, which was meant to teach the system how to spot a particular type of cyber-attack that had already been observed in the wild, instead “triggered a logic error that resulted in an operating system crash”. I’ve been covering this sort of thing for more than a decade now and my guess is the…

“I find never progressing past the musical tastes you had when you were 17 a little sad, and there’s a whole world of discovering new music without trying to stay in the scene as your hair greys. But I do find sticking with what you already loved vastly more adult and sympathetic than the alternative,…

“Most modern clients look much different. Some wait to receive the most elementary instruction at base camp from Nepali guides, practising with their crampons and ascenders and ice axes. These clients don’t have months at their disposal to trek to a mountain and acclimatize to the altitude. They have weeks, at most. But they have…

“A digression: It is considered very impolite in the U.S. professional managerial class to observe that a particular, named professional manager is incompetent at their job. An individual who makes a habit of it will be optimized out of decisionmaking processes featuring PMC members, which is… all decisionmaking processes, effectively. That deviant is ipso facto…

“One of the funniest biannual traditions in tech journalism is “shocked coverage of tech-industry figures supporting Republicans season,” during which a spate of articles and tweets are published marveling at the fact that many prominent Silicon Valley executives and investors are Republicans, and often quite right-wing Republicans, at that! I’m not sure how many of…