nextwavefutures

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Why we should pay more for parking. Or, we’re all Shoupistas now. New post at The Next Wave.

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Ticking away

The Green Man is a 1950s British comedy written by the outstanding comedy writers Sidney Launder and Frank Gilliat. It stars Alastair Sim as Harry Hawkins, a clockmaker who has a sideline in assassination. But his last big job—in which he is to kill Sir Gregory Upshott, a City of London bigwig—starts to unravel because of a copy made by a stray piece of carbon paper under a scribbled note. Ah,…

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Creating a politics of the future

I was asked to talk about resilience at an event last month organised by the architects Perkins & Will, and decided to speak to the idea of “a politics of the future”, which seems increasingly important if we’re going to navigate a world of climate disruption and psychic loss—quite apart from the practicalities of de-carbonising our societies. This is a slightly expanded version of my remarks…

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Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Diamonds and Rust. New post at Around The Edges

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The Deep Blue Sea is a period piece that can only be set set in the 1950s. It gets revived because the self-destructive triangle at its heart is compelling.

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Limits to Growth was right about collapse. Academics have re-populated the model with new data, and decline still starts about now. New post on The Next Wave.

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British gangsters on film—watching Brighton Rock and Get Carter.

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On Midsummer’s Night Dream

I always end up writing more pieces than I publish, and I found a long note about the BBC’s mini-Shakespeare festival that the BBC put on in 2023 to mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio. Despite the delay, it seems worth sharing to mark Shakespeare’s birthday. ‘Mini’ is underselling it. There were the four history plays that make up the ‘Hollow Crown’ sequence,…

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‘In your Easter bonnet’—Astaire and Garland in the Easter Parade. New post.

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Trump’s tariffs do have a worldview. Unfortunately, this is completely detached from how the modern global economy works. New post.

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Driving away from home: watching the unusual road movie Locke. New post.

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Whooping it up for the boys—Watching Apollo 13 again. New post at Around The Edges.

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Ainsley Hamill:a fine younger Scots voice

The Scots singer Ainsley Hamill seems a bit of a well-kept secret, at least judging from her Spotify hits, but it’s not clear why. Her latest record, Fable, is her third solo record, and she’s been in the business for a decade or so, recording and performing with well-regarded musicians. This might be about to change. Tracks from Fable have been getting some deserved airplay, in the admittedly…

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Blowing the bloody doors off

Blowing the bloody doors off: for a well-made caper movie, The Italian Job runs quite deep. New post at Around the Edges.

Watching, yet again, the original 1969 version of The Italian Job—the Michael Caine version—I was struck by how much subtext there was about Britain’s status in the world. (And not just subtext.) The script was by Troy Kennedy Martin, who wrote several of the more knowing police series of the era, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. And The Italian Job is knowing all the way…

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The steps to an American oligarchy

The steps to an American oligarchy. New post at The Next Wave.

On US election day in November I posted a piece at my Just Two Things newsletter discussing a long interview that Fiona Hill had given to Politico on the subject of autocrats, in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Hill, who was born in the north-east of England, worked for the first Trump Administration, although I think it is fair to say that she’s no longer a fan. Part of that…

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Lying low

Gangster’s moll Barbara Stanwyck meets the seven professors, and Gary Cooper, in a fish-out-of-water comedy by the master of genre, Howard Hawks. New post at Around the Edges.

Ball of Fire is a Howard Hawks comedy that was released in 1941, a couple of years after his great screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby. It has some affinities with the earlier film, although the characters are altogether less ditsy, and their motives, and the action, are a lot easier to follow. That might be down to the fact that the script was written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett from a…

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‘Power and interest’ as an actor mapping tool

This is part of an occasional series here on methods that I use in my facilitation and workshop design A method I sometimes use to deepen my understanding of what’s going on in the H2 (second horizon) space of a Three Horizons map is a version of Eden and Ackerman’s ‘power and interest’ grid. It helps you to understand what is happening with the different actors involved in the second horizon,…