After 30-odd years as a working reporter, investigator, stopper of bankers from behaving like bankers, and now lawyer, I wonder sometimes whether my ability to be surprised by idiocy that (putting it charitably) borders on the malign has been exhausted. Good news. It hasn't. That much was shown
Stop me if you've heard this one before, but the distinction between lies and bullshit is a critical one. Yes, yes. I know you've heard it before. Not least, several times, from me. But stay with me. This is going somewhere a bit different. Just to
I'm tired. Partly this is because this has been a pain of a crunch of a week. One of those tsunamis of clashing deadlines and obligations where you just try, somehow, to surf the crest without toppling off and letting anyone down too badly. But mostly because of
We often think of the roads less travelled in our lives. More often than we might think, that phrase should end with the word "yet" - my becoming a barrister in my 40s is testament to that. (And something I, too, often overlook.) But still, sometimes doors do
I can't be alone, thank goodness, in taking a particular joy in other people's success. It's great to win, of course. One's own victories are sweet indeed. But I think there's something truly special in that wave of delight that
I can’t stand zero-sum thinking. Never could. It represents much of what I think is poisonous in the world. A simplistic, stupid, short-sighted approach to life. The idea that for me to win, you have to lose is puerile at best; much more often destructive. I’m not saying
I am not a writer. Sure, I’ve spent most of my adult life being paid to put words together. (Not just the putting of pen to paper - or far more frequently finger to keyboard or stylus to screen. But the thinking and reading and researching and talking to
Because I'm a barrister, I'm regulated by the Bar Standards Board.
A truth in life is that the older you get, the more endings and fewer beginnings there are. You don’t lose beginnings altogether. Heaven forbid. There is always the space to to encounter something or someone fresh, unknown, inspiring or just piquing your interest. But inevitably, people and things
Most of us, I think, have people online whose stuff they'll mostly (if not always) at least glance at: people who, over years, have proved themselves to have thought-provoking, interesting or just worthwhile (for whatever reason) things to say. Dan Davies is one of mine. I've
Well. For four months, cryptolaw nerds have been awaiting this one: Mr Justice Mellor’s judgment in COPA v Wright. Everyone knew it wouldn’t be kind to Craig Wright, the Australian who has asserted for years (often litigiously) that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous progenitor of Bitcoin. After
Well. I guess that last post took a bit more of a bite out of my creative muscles than I thought. So to keep things ticking over, a scattering of things that caught my eye; and that may, I hope, prove to be food for thought. The death (again) of
It was my dad's old driving gloves that brought me face to face with the fact that my mum was going to die. We’d lost my dad in late 2014, in the fourth year after his retirement. The first year had ended with his stroke. The second
There's a rule of thumb in compliance work. I can't remember where I picked it up: it might have been from Jim Nelson, my first financial crime boss in banking, to whom I owe a huge amount. Or it might have been from Hui Chen, an
One could argue that this post is a wee bit previous. But yesterday was a huge, huge moment - for the crypto industry, certainly, but also for a whole raft of lawyers who've been following this case with bated breath for years. Which case? The one where an
For years, I've looked without success for a downloadable or streamable copy of a BBC Radio 4 show called The Tingle Factor. Not the whole thing; just one episode, which I must have caught on the radio entirely by accident while driving years, and years, and years ago.
Work is piling up. And so are the quarter-written posts. So pending a moment when I have the brainspace to finish a couple of them, it's time to drop some hopefully interesting stuff into the pot. The Science Fiction of the 1900s: by Karl Schroeder. Karl is a
There’s a fundamental philosophical difference between official attitudes to whistleblowers here and in the US. (Or at least it’s sometimes intimated that it’s “philosophical”. I’m far from convinced.) In the US, various statutes enable the compensation of whistleblowers. At federal level, the main one is the
We're tool users, us humans. Often we don't think about the tools we use. They're just there. Extending our limbs, our brains, our capabilities. Our ability to do this is pretty much a definition of who and what we are. But anyone who does
I have nothing terribly useful to add to the tale of Alexei Navalny. All I can do is bow my head to someone who's (a) been murdered - yes, I know this isn't technically proven, but please; (b) by someone who's self-evidently a dictator