Author: Connor Tomas O’Brien

When supermarket shopping, I’ve been drawn to the self checkout machine like a green-bag-toting-moth to a flame. Instead of waiting in line for the privilege of having my cereal blipped through the barcode scanner by a sullen and underpaid high school student, the self checkout gives me the power to skip faux-friendly “How do you…

If we’re forced to write in under 140 characters on Twitter, do we subconsciously constrain ourselves to write – or speak – in under 140 characters elsewhere? Matt Katz has used Python to parse and analyse a short story by Robin Sloan. Sloan’s story, for the record, comes out as 75% tweetable.

So Amazon are bumping the starting price for the third-gen Kindle down to only $US139. That was enough to get me thinking, “Hey, maybe I could do with one of these.” I decided to search out several titles I’m vaguely interested in, to see how much I could theoretically save (over the long run) in…

Sebastian Mallaby’s ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty’, a profile of economist Paul Romer, is the most thought-provoking piece I’ve read all week. “What if Western nations could create cities inside poor countries?” asks Romer (I’m paraphrasing). The crux of this idea is that these Western ‘charter cities’ would necessarily succeed or fail on their…

When we broach the concept of obsolescence, what first comes to mind are fast-disappearing objects, faded relics of another age: mix tapes and vinyl records, quill pens and love letters, penny-farthings and Polaroid cameras. Obsolete objects, of course, never die: they’re turfed out of our houses as trash, only to turn up in antique stores,…