Lovely WashPost column by John Kelly. The last two journalists in America sat at a card table in the middle of their empty newsroom. They faced each other, about to flip a coin. The coin was to decide which one would be the second-to-last journalist in America and which one would be the last journal...

To nobody’s surprise except its own, ITV is in deep, deep trouble. Paul Graham has been musing about how broadcast TV lost the war. “About twenty years ago”, he writes, “people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they’...

Yesterday saw one of the most hopeful developments in years — the first nationwide meetings of the Convention on Modern Liberty. One of its driving spirits is my Observer colleague Henry Porter. In today’s paper he reflects on the experience and on why he’s putting himself through ...

You have to hand it to ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin over his refusal to contemplate giving some of his £16million pension pot back to the taxpayer. This is a guy who doesn’t care about winning friends and influencing people. It’s bad PR and might even be dangerous for him in the long ...

Nice piece in this week’s Economist about groupings on social networks. Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “groomingâ€�. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and whyâ€...

Today’s Observer column. That left only Facebook as a focus for irrational exuberance. But how much was the preppy social-networking site ‘worth’? Arcane formulae were deployed by investment analysts to rationalise a range of fantastic valuations. Then Microsoft blew them out of th...

I’m a big Obama fan and am delighted that such a handsome couple have made it to the White House. But there’s something depressing about seeing Mrs Obama draped on the cover of the latest edition of the premier fashion rag. She’s a clever and interesting woman, but the glossy media...

From Mark Anderson. Now that we no longer have a chimpanzee in the cockpit of the F-16, some folks may be wondering, just who is the most dangerous man in the world? The answer, I think, is simple: A. Q. Khan, “founder� (or perhaps chief thief) in charge of Pakistan’s first nuclear program, an...

Madeleine Bunting had a thoughtful column in yesterday’s Guardian about the search for political ideas following the implosion of Reaganite deregulated liberalism. She focusses on Philip Blond, a theology lecturer at the St Martin’s College, Lancaster who in addition to writing a book on...

Interesting WSJ.com piece. Internet games, gambling and other forms of online entertainment have seen significant surges in use in the several months since the economic downturn deepened. Social-networking services like Facebook, blogs and discussion forums — all well-known time sinks even dur...