Michael Pollan advocates abattoirs with glass walls: Sometimes I think that all it would take to clarify our feelings about eating meat, and in the process begin to redeem animal agriculture, would be to simply pass a law requiring all the sheet-metal walls of all the CAFOs, and even the concrete walls of slaughterhouses, to […]
Books. It’s all very well to limit other things to the useful and the beautiful, but how does a reader throw out books? I discovered I had more to say about this than would sensibly stay in the comment thread, so here are some scattered thoughts on the owning of books. I grew up in […]
Some of us just don’t get around to clearing out our junk. But most hoarders are shackled to mountains of stuff because of one of two sentences. #1 ‘But it’s bound to come in handy one day!’ #2 ‘But it has a lot of sentimental value…’ If you’ve got the headspace and storage space, I […]
To remind you, this is the pin that redeems my Pinterest obsession with home organisation. I may have been a bit hard on good old Pinterest the other week. It’s simple and clever and handy for keeping track of things efficiently and prettily. And I use it plenty, so need to watch my kettle-black-calling! When […]
The story of the Jamestown colony in Virginia goes like this, as far as I can remember from law school. The first settlers wanted to build a Utopia where all property was held in common. They set up one big farm that they all worked together, and planned to share the harvest out between everybody. […]
I’m pretty torn about my obsession with Pinterest. The virtual scrapboard for online images – initially aimed at collating images, so most used for fashion, photography, design, etc – has expanded to a visual diary for everything you love online but can’t keep in your brain. You can follow any interest (tech, tattoos, tagines), as […]
I admit to being a bit of an AirBnB evangelist, because it has made such a difference to our family finances. I want you to have more money! We’ve been letting out our house in Wellington, New Zealand with AirBnB for as long as we’ve owned it, whenever we’re not in it ourselves. We’ve had […]
No one is too young to make the world a better place! Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize when she was only seventeen. She began her public life as an activist for girls’ education in Pakistan when she was just eleven years old, blogging about life under the Taliban. She’s proof that ordinary young people can have genuine influence […]
How do you want your kids to turn out? I mean, to the extent that anything we do has or should have influence, what do you really care about? What do you really hope will stay with them? What if you could know that, say, three things you teach your kids will actually stick in their lives? […]
Well, I love a good book list challenge. Danyl from Dimpost has written a list of 50-odd must-read novels to recommend to people. The difference with his list is that he omits anything too long or ‘hard’ that might turn out to put people off: A few weeks ago I was arguing about lists of […]