And with a tropical dial, something sincerely has gone wrong: around the middle of the last century, Rolex primed its dials with a finish that was supposed to protect the watches from sun damage. Bizarrely, it had the exact opposite… Read More ›
Articles
To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time
When my wife died, my life was thrown out of time. My past didn’t seem to connect to my present. How had the last 13 years turned me into an only parent of two young children, owner of a house… Read More ›
How did the qwerty keyboard become so popular?
Typing at 60 words per minute (wpm) – no stretch for a good typist – means five or six letters striking the same spot each second. At such a speed, the typist might need to be slowed down for the… Read More ›
Instagram is awful
Recently I decided to set up a new Instagram account and to write about Tudor watches. I wanted to experiment with simple images and longer form text than you normally see on Instagram. No great ambitions here, just something to… Read More ›
No backdoor…
Cook and Sewell met with Eric Holder and Jim Cole, then the deputy attorney general, in late 2014, and FBI agents told them they were “interested in getting access to phones on a mass basis.” This was way before the… Read More ›
Behind Brexit lies a yearning for a past we destroyed
Was that period perfect? Of course not. Bad things happened, poverty existed, governments screwed up, and there were wars and reversals and crises. But the general trend was for increased wealth, health, life expectancy, security, openness, home-ownership, saving, disposable income,… Read More ›
When your grail is not the best, it’s still your grail
When I first became very interested in watches, there was one particular model that I always aspired to own. It was the Tudor Black Bay Red and this feeling never really left me. Aspirational is the word because after running… Read More ›
Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean the algorithms aren’t out to get you
By no means are all malevolent programs an accident; some are designed with mischief in mind. Bots can be used to generate or spread misinformation. Jamie Bartlett, author of The Dark Net (US) (UK), warns of a future of ultra-personalised… Read More ›
The humbling of Britain
This is not “taking back control”. This is not the proud, independent, liberated Britain that the Brexiteers promised. It is grotesque, calamitous, an epic act of self-harm brought about not by some war or disaster but by our own stupidity…. Read More ›
When Life’s Noises Drive You Mad
“My heart starts to pound. I go one of two ways. I either start to cry or I just get really intensely angry. It’s really intense. I mean, it’s as if you’re going to die,” she says. Rapp has been… Read More ›
