Merry Christmas, my friends. All best wishes for every happiness for the festive season and into 2018. There are a couple of posts coming to round off the year, but otherwise I’m taking a short break and will be back blogging in early January. Copyright © Matthew Wright 2017 Advertisements
These days I am left thinking that the flood of ‘fake news’, baseless scare-mongering and other rubbish pouring over and around us from Facebook – and the internet in general – has reduced news to village gossip. Back in the old days – by which I mean less than ten years ago – journalism involved … More Fake news and village gossip – 2017 style
Albert Einstein once explained that nuclear weapons changed everything – except the way we think. He was right, of course. That worries me. There’s been a lot of talk about rogue-state nuclear weapons of late. A war using such appalling devices seems a real possibility – more so than during the dark days of the … More Einstein’s warning – and why even a small nuclear war could destroy humanity
I’m a huge fan of all sorts of music. Maybe not surprising given that I formally studied it for longer than anything else, including history and writing. I like almost everything – especially jazz of all genres, but also classical (meaning medieval, baroque, classical, romantic, modern orchestral and so on), all styles of rock, metal, … More Katy Perry vs Taylor Swift vs Tove Lo vs Lorde
This week the world seemed to be well down the road to hell in a handbasket. There is, I think, no need to recap the events that have been flooding social media and news feeds. If this is the shape of where things are going, I despair for the world. What’s going on? What the … More Is the world is going to hell in a handbasket?
There was, I suppose, a universal sigh of relief when New Year 2017 ticked over and the world left the Year from Hell. We do like our arbitrary calendar dates. Reality, of course, seldom conforms to calendar dates. After all, Lemmy Kilmister kicked off the 2016 celebrity die-off just after Christmas 2015. A friend of mine suggested … More Reality isn’t just defined by calendar dates. Unfortunately.
There’s a common belief that the work of historians consists of collecting ‘the facts’ from documents and writing them down. And that’s it. I mean, how hard can it be? I can’t even begin to express the issues I have with such thinking. But let’s start with the obvious one – ‘the facts’. It’s something … More Figuring out the historical facts from the fakery
