George Bush’s ways with the language are beginning to rub off on his Secretary of State. Yesterday, after it emerged that State Department staff had improperly accessed electronic passport files of the three American presidential candidates, Condoleezza Rice declared that she was going to “stay on top of it and get to the bottom of […]

There are passengers who always manage to stretch their legs or get to the loo just before the captain says “We’re in for a spot of turbulence — please fasten your seatbelts.” How do they know it’s coming?
  If they’re flying with United Airlines, they’re probably tuning into Channel 9. According to a story in […]

Now that our back pages are available on the website, there’s no excuse for freelances who approach us with stories we have recently published. We ran a piece on jazz in New York as recently as November. Mind you, the writer who sent the following note wouldn’t have been commissioned anyway. The reasons should be […]

Steve Jobs of Apple, launching his skinny laptop this week, took a swipe at developments being made by other companies, including Amazon’s electronic reading device, the Kindle.
  “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is. The fact is that people don’t read any more,” he said in an interview with the New York […]

The train, thanks to Eurostar, may be the transport of the moment in Europe, but in the United States the most surprising story is the return of the inter-city bus. For the first time in 40 years, bus services have been growing in both the east and west, according to a study by the School […]

When the American tourist industry began to worry that travellers were avoiding the States, its response was to commission a saccharine film of smiling residents to be shown at airports and ports –- made with the help of Disney.
  Now that the authorities in New York are planning to redevelop Governors Island -– which was […]

Seth Stevenson, writing in today’s New York Times, wants us to think twice about using wheeled luggage. He’s fed up with people running over his feet or asking for help to lift an overstuffed case into the overhead lockers on aircraft.
  I’ve pretty sure I’ve never done either. Though I’m a great believer in carrying […]

As Edinburgh is to Rebus and Oxford to Morse, so New Orleans and its surroundings are to Robicheaux. The streets of the city and the bayous of the surrounding countryside are the place where James Lee Burke’s hero, a recovering drunk and a Vietnam vet, does his policing. Though I’ve never been there, Burke has […]

The Thanksgiving holiday is approaching, the skies above the United States will be crowded with planes, and the government has been looking for ways to ease congestion, according to today’s New York Times. Its answer: to let passenger aircraft use flight paths “through areas off the Atlantic coast where the Air National Guard and the […]

On the cover of his book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen is described as a “digital media entrepreneur and Silicon Valley insider”. He sounds, though, like a very angry outsider.
The book is a polemic against Web 2.0 — that phase of the internet in which the audience, rather than just reading and watching […]