The late Michel Serres on angels and messengers
At the start of this month, the French thinker Michel Serres died aged 88. He had an eclectic range of interests, as evinced by his Wikipedia page: Over the next…
Category: deception
#AprilCountry, “Satan is Real”, The Louvin Brothers
It would be easy to mock the Louvin Brothers’ “Satan Is Real”, with its lurid and rather literal cover. Easy that is, until you listen to a song of evident…
A first hand account of being in the eye of an online shame hurricane – “Shame Storm”, Helen Andrews |
At First Things, a highly thought-provoking essay by Helen Andrews on online shaming, and specifically her own experience. One of the most repellent features of online and social media discourse,…
Don’t trust Alexa Crazy Fact: the name “Wendy” wasn’t invented for Peter Pan (and pig orgasms don’t quite last as long as all that)
One of the skills of Amazon’s Alexa is Crazy Fact. This skills allows Alexa to pop up with a fact which is a little unusual or offbeat. From this, I learnt…
Ricky Jay RIP
Ricky Jay, scholar of magic and mountebanks, “the greatest sleight of hand artist of his generation”, has died Here is a 1993 New Yorker profile of this extraordinary man. It…
The perils of double bluffs – Operation Ottrington
A while back I posted on the unintended consequences of too secret a secret codeword. Here’s a bit from Jonathan Gawne’s “Ghosts of the ETO: American Tactical Deception Units in the…
Séamus Sweeney 