Author ArchivesJohn

This outfit was considered too sexy for SouthWest Airlines: last July, 23 year old Kyla Ebbert boarded a flight from San Diego, California to her doctor’s office in Tuscon, Arizona, wearing the outfit she’s pictured in here. She was called from her seat and lectured by a customer service representative ...

This is brilliant. The Manifesto Club is holding an event in London which celebrates Thanksgiving by provoking debate on America: “We have invited a range of cultural commentators, journalists, politicos and Manifesto Club members to take part in a ‘balloon debate’. America, we say, is a great balloon that is ...

Good morning and happy Monday! We’re now three days from Thanksgiving in the United States, one of my favourite holidays. The great commute begins now: families getting together all over America at a time which is historically busiest for air travel and road travel. Yet it seems to me that, ...

Sorry to be so late on this: thanks to Liam for first raising the issue on this blog here, and Crawley’s made a comment here. For a summary of the debate so far, the BBC has a piece here. For those who haven’t read the story, cleaners at a hostel ...

For a guy in retirement, Garth Brooks has been phenomenally busy for the past few months, culminating in a sold-out show in Kansas City last night, a concert which was simulcast to digital theatres throughout the world. I went to the Cinemark theatre in Mesa, Arizona to see the show, ...

Today is UNESCO World Philosophy Day 2007. Who knew? And what is knowledge?

Remember this (Morford, ‘Christian virgins are overrated’)? Now a study makes a surprising conclusion: not only does teenage sex not contribute to delinquency, but the exact opposite may be true: Perhaps most surprising, the Virginia study found that adolescents who had sex at younger ages were less likely to end ...

Dear Tim Dowling, Perhaps you feel that the views of an America-bashing American will be more palatable for the liberal British readers of the Guardian than the views of an America-bashing Brit. In this, sir, you have sold out – not because you lack the right to criticise – but ...

So. Atheist Sue Blackmore is to debate theist Alister McGrath tonight at Bristol University on the motion that that “belief in God is a dangerous delusion”. Interesting! As a theist myself, I hope McGrath does a better job tonight than he did while being interviewed by his colleague Richard Dawkins ...

David Weigel reports from the ground on the massive Philadelphia rally for Ron Paul on Saturday: “Here was the best example—better even than the churning, cheering rally of at least 4000 people— [US News says 5000] of how the Paul movement has grown. No one crashes Dennis Kucinich or Duncan ...

I recently wrote a piece on cellulosic ethanol, fuel created from two-thirds of what we’re currently throwing away, and what many are coming to believe will be the future of energy. In fact the more time one spends thinking about it, the more inevitable it seems that we’ll eventually be mining ...

I’ve always known this to be a despicable sentiment. But never moreso than when I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time and came upon Francisco d’Anconia’s money speech, which is reprinted with permission from the Estate of Ayn Rand in the current edition of Capitalism Magazine. Everyone could benefit ...

Thanks to my fellow blogger Stephen Graham for a recent spate of great contributions – I know they’ve been popular – including one in which he berates George Monbiot for his atrocious ignorance on libertarianism. Richly deserved. Moonbeam is, rightly, a target of this blog on occasion. He represents the ...

I love Ron Paul. This guy is my dream presidential candidate. He’s articulate and smart, slightly old-codgerish, and outright, honest-to-God, straight-up libertarian. Not only that, he’s gaining ground. Yesterday recorded the biggest single day of fundraising by any Republican candidate, ever. And that candidate was Ron Paul. As the San ...

‘Don’t worry, everyone, we’re not cancelling Christmas!’ That’s the message from IPPR’s Rick Muir after some accounts were made public of the think tank’s upcoming report, to which I responded in this post on Thursday last week. Muir responds with an article in today’s Guardian (some pre-publish damage control).

And it’s all about Google. After Apple released the revolutionary iPhone earlier this year, there have been rumours that Google would release a phone too, dubbed the gPhone. Well, the project announced today by Google – called Android – is much more exciting than that, and means most mobile phones ...

As part of the KLPZ Morning show today, I produced a segment which explored the results of placing various items in a microwave oven to see what would happen. Call it ‘practical science’, live on the radio. I was outside the studio with a cameraman and a microphone, and during ...

‘Dog the Bounty Hunter’ is no more. The show was shelved by the A&E network on Friday, which is something I feared would happen when I wrote this post on Thursday. The network “stopped short of saying” they’d cancelled the show, although I’ll tell you in a few minutes what ...

Andrew Tyler has a piece in today’s Guardian which suggests that veganism is the new vegetarianism. It seems that being a vegetarian in modern Western society has become so common that the moral case against eating animals must fall exclusively to the vegans. I’m with them on this, actually. I’ve ...

Around the web today: Lev Grossman lends Time Magazine’s coveted honour to the Apple iPhone as it’s branded the “Invention of the Year”. I agree: the iPhone is a smouldering jewel of capitalism, a white-hot fusion of technology, ease of use and style, in your pocket. William Crawley reports on ...