The English language has very many strange quirks – some derived from the influence the languages of many different invaders over many millennia, others derived from rather more recent influences. I’ve chosen two articles to illustrate this.

The first is this article from BBC News which discusses the origins of one of my least favourite hackneyed metaphors: that of “battling” cancer. Their short but interesting discussion tracks this back to Richard Nixon’s “war on cancer”, but the fact that the BBC is discussing this use of language at all is almost more interesting than what they have to say.

The second article on language is almost a decade old, but only came to my attention very recently. It was written by Jack Winter for The New Yorker, and is called “How I Met My Wife“. To avoid spoiling the linguistic surprise, I’ll say no more than that!

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays – except the Wednesday in two weeks, which I’m skipping because it’s New Year’s Day. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

Communicating scientific findings to a wider audience is a tricky – but nonetheless important – business.

Writing in Prospect, Michael Billig reckons he knows why academics can’t write: it is, apparently, a problem of big nouns. I think he has a point (his comparison between academic-speak and management-speak certain, and his article is also very funny in places – it’s well worth a read.

But what’s it like if you do a good job at communicating the messages of your research, and end up being invited to do the media rounds to talk more about it? Katie Haighton’s post on the Fuse Open Science Blog gives a fascinating insight.

I think these two articles make a brilliant pair!

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

Published a fortnight ago, my last 2D post offered two articles about technology giant Apple. With an originality rarely surpassed by this blog, today’s 2D post is about… Apple.

Having come across two more brilliant articles about the company in the last couple of weeks, I didn’t want to deny you the pleasure of reading them simply because I’ve done something similar recently.

My first selection today is this recent Guardian article by their technology editor Charles Arthur. He makes the point that while the Apple Maps app is often a source of ridicule, within the US at least it appears to be winning the long-game, with Google Maps losing millions of users to Apple’s version. It’s one of those interesting articles that explains why the cultural narrative around a certain story borders on counter-factual.

My second selection is this article from The New York Times published last month, and written by Fred Vogelstein. It’s been pretty widely shared, but I only got round to reading it last week. It’s a remarkable account of the development of the iPhone, and – perhaps most interestingly – the development of the iPhone’s launch announcement, and how buggy the iPhone was at the point it was announced. It’s a remarkable tale.

Next time round, I promise you something that’s not Apple…!

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

A couple of weeks ago, Apple announced the iPad Air. You probably noticed some of the extensive media coverage which always follows Apple’s carefully choreographed product announcements these days.

One thread that’s often spun after the announcement of a new Apple product is “Apple isn’t what is used to be under Steve Jobs”. I could’ve chosen any number of articles following any of Apple’s recent product launches to illustrate this point, but Hartmut Esslinger’s piece for Time magazine is a particularly fine example:

The company already has fallen back toward a marketing-driven strategy, not an innovation-driven one. What we’ve seen from Apple since Steve Jobs passed away implies that Apple largely may be done innovating in any groundbreaking fashion. It’s all been refinement since then.

But are these claims true? Amusingly, Harry McCracken in a different edition of the very same magazine says not:

The golden age of Apple never existed. Steve Jobs didn’t change the world every two years like clockwork, and he was incrementalism’s grand master. For every great leap forward Apple ever made, it accomplished at least as much through small steps that made its products easier, faster, thinner, lighter, more polished and/or more useful. Tim Cook has been CEO of Apple for only a little over two years, so there’s nothing deeply troubling about the fact that he hasn’t boiled any oceans yet.

I personally find Harry’s argument the more convincing of the two, but perhaps you will disagree. If you get chance, it’s also worth watching Doug Aamoth’s video at the bottom of Harmut Esslinger’s article – it’s a rare example of a self-consciously amusing technology video that actually made me laugh.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

I think this is probably the most tenuously linked pair of articles I’ve chosen for my 2D posts to date, but both are great reads nonetheless… The link I’m claiming is that both discuss religion in somewhat unexpected places.

The first is Ian Leslie’s recent piece for New Statesman, in which he makes a somewhat convincing argument that everyone should wear a veil when appearing in court. It’s a great example of subverting expectations on a subject and revealing fresh insights in the process.

The second was written by one of my public health colleagues in the North East, Avril Rhodes, for the Fuse Open Science Blog. It describes the curious similarities between community outreach events run by the church, and those run by academics. This is a great example of an article that made me view things from a slightly different angle, and perhaps consider them a little differently.

So… the connection between the two might be stretched to breaking point, but they are both worth a read, and both tickled my brain!

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

BuzzFeed is the incredibly popular site that combines humans and computer algorithms to curate viral content from across the web. It is not uncontroversial, receiving accusations of plagiarism on a reasonably frequent basis. But it is not the ethics of the site that my two chosen articles discuss this week.

The first article, by Eliana Dockterman at Time magazine, has the rather lovely title: How the news got less mean. It isn’t a long article by any means, but it discusses the interesting influence of social media and viral trends – as curated by BuzzFeed – on the type and tone of modern journalism.

The second article, by Mark O’connell at The New Yorker, also has a brilliant title, parodying those that often appear on BuzzFeed: 10 paragraphs about lists you need in your life right now. It discusses the impact of list articles, or “listicles” (ugh), on journalism.

So: two articles essentially discussing two different ways in which BuzzFeed affects journalism. The conclusion appears to be that the future of journalism is snappy and happy. This isn’t all bad news. But I am glad that there are those who also see the future in longform in-depth journalism, and even innovation in the sector, from approaches as diverse as Matter and NSFWCORP, and everything in between. But that discussion is probably for another day…

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

My last 2D feature was on being late… and this one continues the theme of “lateness”. I hope you won’t conclude that I’m obsessed!

My first recommended read on the topic is “Oh, stop your whining!” by Jean Adams on the Fuse Open Science Blog. Unlike my usual 2D selections, it’s not a long article. But Jean’s reflection on her own changing perceptions around people’s work:life balances made me reflect on my attitude.

I think, like many people, this is something I struggle with to some extent. I don’t feel I overwork (at least not very often), yet I frequently stay in the office until late into the evening or arrive early in the morning, I frequently read and respond to work emails at weekends and on holidays, and struggle to say “no” to anyone offering extra work.

I don’t expect others to do the same. In fact, one of the pleasures of catching up with work out of hours is the lack of distraction, and the fact that I can reply to emails without them bouncing straight back. If everyone did the same, it would be far less satisfying!

Occasionally, I’m given cause to reflect. I recently got annoyed at someone who, when realising I was on holiday, refused to continue an email conversation. When someone called my view of time off “abstemious” – as a compliment, I think – it played on my mind. And when I saw Jean’s post, I wondered again about my work:life balance.

I rationalised, as I always do, that if I’m happy then the balance is good. But perhaps an occasional pause for reflection on the topic is no bad thing.

My other selected article on this topic looks at working “late” from a slightly different perspective: in the New York Times, Steven Greenhouse writes “Working late, by choice or not” about those working beyond the typical retirement age in the United States.

I was particularly struck by the story of Dr Rafael Garza, who is still doing ward rounds at the age of 87… having moved to a new specialty at the age of 74. I suppose that if I’ve still got (at least) sixty years to go in my present career, I’ve got plenty of time to work out the best work:life balance…!

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

I’m a stickler for timing. Few things irritate me in quite the same way as meetings starting late, or people turning up late. Punctuality is important, and the busier I find myself the more a lack of punctuality irritates me. So here, I’m presenting two articles on being late.

The first is from National Review, and is a little New York centric. Kevin D. Williamson posits that “wasting somebody else’s time is a great sin”. I tend to agree. I particularly liked his description of the commuter holding open the train doors as someone “who is not in such a hurry that he can be bothered to precede the train to its stop but in such a hurry that he cannot wait three minutes for the next train”.

The second is from Medium. It is Max Strom’s advice from life experience on how to cure oneself of being perpetually late. It starts from the position that riunning late is an problem of “life span management and commitment integrity”.

Strom makes some points that I thought were common to everyone – probably because they are things that I always do. Does anyone really plan to arrive on time for an appointment, rather than a few minutes early? Does anyone really fail to plan to fill up their petrol tank? But, on the other hand, some of the advice is stuff I disagree with: my watch always runs a couple of minutes fast, and my brain falls for the con every time… which is a kind of self-sabotage in itself, as it makes me disproportionately annoyed when people arrive late.

Both of these are great reads, and come highly recommended.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!

I feel we’ve reached an interesting point in the history of sexism: I seem to read a roughly equal number of articles complaining about sexism against both sexes. And today, I’ve picked a couple of interesting examples – both of which are quite short.

Firstly, here’s an article by Hadley Freeman of The Guardian (usually their fashion writer) about the sexism at Wimbledon and, in particular, the holes the BBC dug for itself:

One need only substitute the sexist nature of his comment with an equivalent racist slur to see how lightly the BBC apparently treats highly public verbal abuse of women.

It’s an interesting point, and the comments John Inverdale made during the Winbledon coverage were very clearly unacceptable. But I wonder if the BBC has ever issued an apology for sexism against men? I cannot recall such an incident. This might well be because such comments are less common, but they certainly occur.

My second selection for today is an article from Time by Jeffrey Kluger (usually their science editor), which will be familiar to subscribers of sjhoward.co.uk news. His discussion about the anachronistic commentary surrounding Prince William’s childcare skills, and the wider media portrayal of fathers, resonated with me.

The persona of the doofus dad was not something I signed up for when I became a father 12 years ago. I felt no less capable than I’d ever been, but in the popular culture, I’d crossed a line: Like all fathers, I’d become the sitcom buffoon who can’t boil an egg, warm a bottle, or be trusted to do the laundry without neglecting to add detergent and then exclaiming afterwards, “So that’s what that bottle of blue stuff was!”

Political correspondents often say that if they receive equal complaints from both ends of the political spectrum, then they’re probably doing something right. And, I guess, there’s an argument that if there are equal complaints about discrimination against men and women, then we as a society are doing something right.

That’s not a position I hold. I believe that the sort of casual discrimination against both men and women that these two articles discuss is clearly unacceptable. I hope that one day we, as a society, will get this right.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them! The photo at the top of this post was posted to Flickr by Beth Granter, whose parents “censored” this childhood storybook. The photo is used under its Creative Commons licence.

Bankers have barely been out of the news for the last couple of years, yet – as with so many long-running stories – there are relatively few good articles that give any perspective to the day-to-day happenings. For this 2D, I’ve found two articles that do just that.

The first article I’ve chosen is from the London Review of Books, was written by John Lanchester, and was published in July. “Are we having fun yet?” uses all sorts of arresting comparisons to contextualise the behaviour of banks, and also explains aspects of it that I had previously not really understood. Here’s one example of a breathtaking statistic:

Lloyds’ total provision for PPI has now hit £6.7 billion, getting on for the full cost of the London Olympics, just from that one bank.

I often find it hard to conceptualise the value of a few billion pounds; maybe things should be costed in “London Olympics” from now on, in the same way we measure things in “Nelson’s Columns”.

Lanchester briefly touches on the computer meltdown at RBS a couple of years ago that caused a lot of disruption to me, personally, as well as to many thousands of other customers. His discussion with one banker poses on of the major questions I had at the time, and which still mystifies me to some extent:

‘It’s a mystery why people weren’t angrier,’ one banker told me. ‘I mean, how much worse can it get than people not being able to get hold of their own money? I don’t think people realised just how big a deal it was.

I also confess that I enjoyed this particular aside:

I know that lots of people refuse to subscribe to Sky because of its connection to Rupert Murdoch, but News Corp owns only 39 per cent of BSkyB and the Murdoch family owns only 12 per cent of News Corp. That means that more than 95 per cent of Sky is owned by not-Murdoch, which as far as I’m concerned puts it in the clear. Murdoch’s 4.68 per cent of Sky is only a fraction more than Libya’s 3.27 per cent share of Pearson: I’ve never heard of anyone refusing to buy a Penguin book because of Colonel Gaddafi.)

The second article I’ve chosen is somewhat different: a Reuters blog by Felix Salmon (which, pleasingly, mentions the LRB article above). “Adventures with ‘free’ checking, transatlantic edition” talks about the “myth” of free banking in the United States. This is something I’ve read about so often in the UK media that I’ve become somewhat immune to the shock the articles often try to induce in me. Reading about the problem in the context of a slightly different banking system helps points like this to stick:

If you think your bank is being transparent about how it’s making money from you, or if you think that your banking is free, then you’re almost certainly mistaken.

I also thought that the personal story with which Salmon opens his post offers a nice counterbalance to the rather grander scale on which Lanchester talks in his article. I think these two articles work very well together.

2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them!