homunculus

Last week I had the immense pleasure of going to the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk to interview the pianist Leon Fleisher in front of an ...

This morning I found myself sitting outside a café in upper Regent Street watching passers-by sample three types of water and offer their...

I have a review in Nature of Albert-László Barabási’s new book Bursts . The book is nice, but the review was necessarily truncated, and ...

I have a piece in the FT about the forthcoming events on ‘music and the brain’ at the Aldeburgh Festival . The piece is so unadulterated...

There’s a piece in today’s Guardian Review by American author and novelist Marilynne Robinson, who bravely challenges the materialistic...

I’m still not sure whether I did right to join the panel for the online debate being launched by Icon Books on ‘The World’s Greatest Ide...

I’m thrilled to see my friend, photographic and video artist Lindsay Seers , being given some respect in Ben Lewis’s excellent piece for...

Artificial life? Don’t ask me guv, I was too busy last week building sandcastles in Lyme Regis. However, now making up for lost time… I h...

In his excellent article on ‘denialism’ in this month’s New Humanist , Keith Kahn-Harris mentions that one of the problems debunkers face...

I was the guest today on Radio 3’s Private Passions, where I get to choose half an hour of music and talk about it with Michael Berkeley....

It seems kind of cheap to win the ‘most commented’ slot on Nature News simply by writing an article about science and religion. You just ...

Here's a little piece I've just written for Nature's news blog The Great Beyond  . The good news is that your future can be...

Here’s a little piece I wrote for Prospect, who deemed in the end that it was too hard for their readers. But I am sure it is not, dear b...

I have a little piece on the BBC Focus site about the work of sculptor Peter Randall-Page  , with whom I had the pleasure of discussing p...

Message to a heedless world : Please remember that the O in the formula H 2 O is a capital O meaning oxygen, not a zero meaning zero. Wat...

Here’s the pre-edited version of my latest Muse for Nature News. The paper I discuss here is very long but also very ambitious, and well...

Here’s the pre-edited version of a Muse that’s just gone up on Nature News. There’s a bunch of interesting Human Genome Project-related...

There are some extracts from The Music in the Eureka science supplement of the Times today, although oddly they don’t seem yet to have...

Here's a little snippet I wrote for Nature's news blog. The authors seem to take it as read that magnets can alter brain functioning...

This is more or less how my review of Ian McEwan’s new novel Solar in Prospect started out (the final paras got a little garbled in the...