Category Archives: Culture

It was a close-run thing, but Studio Daniel Libeskind has won the competition to design the new World Trade Center site. Today was probably the biggest day of his career, but he got there not through shameless self-puffery, as some … Continue reading →

I haven’t had a lot of luck with air travel of late. My flights always seem to be delayed – and for some reason, when a flight is delayed more than half an hour, it always turns out to be … Continue reading →

You probably didn’t notice, but I recently restructured my website. Entries which used to have unwieldly URLs like https://www.felixsalmon.com/mt-blogfiles/archives/felixsalmon/000067.html now have nice simple addresses like https://www.felixsalmon.com/000067.php – a change which has more than simply cosmetic benefits. Now, I can check … Continue reading →

The cliché about things designed by committees is going to have to be rethought. The committee in charge of deciding what’s going to be built on the World Trade Center site today announced its two finalists – and they were … Continue reading →

Anybody with an interest in space exploration has known, pretty much ever since the Columbia first launched in 1981, that the space shuttle was, scientifically speaking, a white elephant. It was designed as a workhorse capable of taking large loads … Continue reading →

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, better known to New Yorkers as the MTA, is proposing to abolish subway tokens as part of its drive to help close a budget gap of $2.8 billion (or $951 million, depending on whom you believe) … Continue reading →

Steve Jobs, Apple’s $1-a-year CEO (not including the 10 million shares and $90 million corporate jet that the grateful board gave him for turning the company around) excelled himself in showmanship yesterday. He was giving his annual keynote address, which … Continue reading →

A long back-and-forth I was having at 2Blowhards the other day prompted Brian Micklethwait at Samizdata to nominate one of my postings as "the silliest and most potentially disastrous blog comment of the year 2002". His problem was that I … Continue reading →

I went to the unveiling of the new plans for the World Trade Center site this morning, and they’re miles ahead from the vague and unimaginitive plans we saw five months ago. There are nine plans in total, from seven … Continue reading →

A standard lament in the communications industry is that American consumers have been slow to adopt broadband internet connections. DSL and cable modems have been around for years now, but the vast majority of internet users continue to stick with … Continue reading →

I went upstate on the weekend after Thanksgiving, and stayed at the Hudson House in Cold Spring, "the second oldest continually operating inn in the state of New York". It’s a pleasant enough hotel, a nice place to spend the … Continue reading →

Over the weekend, I went to see a fantastic new play, which is running at the Vineyard Theatre on 15th Street: The Fourth Sister, by Janusz Glowacki. Full disclosure: I’m a friend of the translator, Eva Nagorski, and I went … Continue reading →

You wait years for a major piece of contemporary non-secular art to blow you away, and then two come along at once… Back in New York after my trip to San Francisco to see Saint François d’Assise, I accompanied a … Continue reading →

I’m sure that I wasn’t the only New Yorker to book a flight to the west coast when I heard that the new general director of the San Francisco opera, Pamela Rosenberg, had decided to put on a production of … Continue reading →

Three stories for you: • Two air marshals panic on a flight from Atlanta to Philadelphia, brandishing guns at terrified passengers and arresting a blameless former Army major (of Indian descent, natch) for "observing too closely" what was going on, … Continue reading →

Stefan Geens, a man whose description of his blog on nycbloggers.com starts with the sentence "free trade is good," has gone decidedly off Milton Friedman’s deep end in his latest post. It reminds me of the old joke: How many … Continue reading →

More traveller’s thoughts: this time one of those ideas you have when you wake up in a strange hotel room at some time of day when you’re really meant to be going to sleep, not waking up, and you’ve just … Continue reading →

No one seems very impressed by the six plans which have been put forward for the redevelopment of theWorld Trade Center site. The pretty much unanimous view seems to be that they’ve been hamstrung by the requirements to include 11 … Continue reading →