This post was published in 1843 Magazine and can be seen in the June/July 2017 edition. The Crematorium Hofheide is situated in the middle of a lake in Holsbeek, Belgium. An elongated core of earth-coloured stone wrapped in a layer of rusty steel, it appears to float on the water – although on sunny days,…
Category: Published in The Economist
Of MiSK and risk: Saudi Arabia
This article was published today in The Economist’s Espresso news app The inaugural forum of the MiSK Foundation, founded by Muhammad bin Salman, the deputy crown prince, starts today in Riyadh. The two-day culture-and-technology event is aimed at youth in the kingdom and the wider Arab world. Attendees will hear from Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder,…
Oil be damned
PROSPECTORS used to taste the stuff to determine its quality, and the oil tapped on February 16th in the Surrey countryside sounded delicious: light, sweet and less than 1% water. UK Oil & Gas (UKOG), the firm operating the exploratory well at Horse Hill, just north of Gatwick airport, says its first two tankers-worth are…
Bored of the Big Man
I wrote this article for The Economist, based on my Ugandan trip. It can be seen in the paper here. THE buildings stormed by Israeli commandos in 1976 still stand on Entebbe airfield. Now they are joined by the occasional C-17 Globemaster of the United States Air Force, part of an American presence trying, among…
Singing like a bird
IT IS one thing to possess the ability to interfere with the avionic systems onboard an aircraft. It is quite another to announce to the world the intention of practicing such capabilities. But it takes a galactic level of stupidity, hubris or, perhaps, courage to tweet that you are going to do it when you…
Walking on water
IN 1983 Christo surrounded 11 islands in Biscayne Bay, off Miami, with 600,000 square metres (6.5m square feet) of luminous pink fabric. The installation, called “Surrounded Islands”, was completely removed after two weeks. On one morning of its brief existence an elderly woman entered the project’s main office. She was livid. “It looks like you’ve…
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