BLOGS & PUBLICATIONS

There’s always that moment, usually the Monday after the clocks go back, when you look out the window at 4.30pm and think, surely not. It can’t already be dark. The sun’s vanished, the streetlights are flickering on, and your laptop screen has quietly become the brightest thing in your life.

There are few modern mysteries quite as baffling as the rise of the public speakerphone call. Somewhere between the dawn of Bluetooth headsets and the death of shame, we collectively decided it was fine to conduct full-blown conversations at full volume,  in cafés, on trains, in the queue for coffee.

I’ve just returned from a week in Japan, and among the many things that impressed me; the efficiency, the courtesy, the precision of even...