A couple of years ago I was invited to lecture in the US. To arrange for a work visa, I rang the US embassy in London. Thus began my first relationship with voice-mail. Within a couple of rings I was...

How do charities spend their money?

The internet is dominated by US companies and universities. What happens there is therefore profoundly important for the future of cyberspace. And what is happening there now stinks. Take a look at...

Driving back from Plymouth airport about three years ago, engaged in polite conversation with a hitch-hiker I had just picked up, we were hit by a car coming from the other direction. We shot into a...

Ernest Gellner died on November 5th in Prague, the city where he lived as a child and to which he returned in 1992 to establish the Centre for the Study of Nationalism. In September this year the...

 

The first time I contracted amoebic dysentery, it was on a three-day hike up Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. I had so many bowel movements that I ran out of toilet paper and had to resort to using...

Stephen Fry reveals in the Daily Telegraph how the Internet "saved his soul." I suppose I should not be surprised to hear that spiritual salvation can now come from cyberspace. After all, the Vatican...

Anyone who has ever tried to travel the Internet will realise that information "superhighway" isn't really the right term. The Internet is one vast tangle of alleyways and cul-de-sacs, libraries and...

Imagine what it would be like to have your country invaded by hundreds of thousands of people from a different culture, with different values, who sometimes do not even speak the same language as...