Performative has helped understand so much about the world in 2018. Gender as the assemblage of performative cultural acts. Democracy degenerating into performative absolute statements of "blood red lines".

But the best has definitely been from the Guyliner though: "performative alcoholism is no substitute for a personality". Quite.

It doesn't take long playing the new Walking Dead season to get back into the Kirkman mindset of nihilist despair and remember Telltale's weird obsession with child anguish.

On encountering a room of supplies you know that despite appearing to be abandoned the correct decision is to not take other people's stuff. You know that on encountering other people compassion or forgiveness is impossible. It isn't enough to move people on or maybe steal their stuff in compensation.

Instead slights must be avenged, face must be saved and "justice" must be done.

When late in the first episode Clementine tells you that if you don't kill all of your attackers then they'll just keep coming after you, you know its true. Because its true, when you fail to kill all of them, they come after you and then kill an entire settlement as collateral damage.

The child horror is unrelenting as well. Clementine sports a homemade tattoo but at least that's a moment of her choosing to commemorate something, she has also been branded and I feel that's not going to have been a positive, life-affirming event.

You know characters are going to die but in the middle of having a life-affirming moment with a ten-year old, her brains are blown out, by middle-aged bandits. You may want a bleak story but consistently maiming and killing girls starts to feel less than just despair about the human condition and more about a desire to smother life at birth.

The underlying weakness of this instalment of the series though is the refusal to have your choices make real impact. I chose to tie a character's hands, only to see them effortlessly free themselves two scenes later.

The rules of the genre are also becoming clearer to me, when someone blames you for something why try to forgive them or talk them round? By now we know grudges are things that are to be savoured and nurtured. It is easier to kill any new character who seems bitter.

Crazily even their friends accept your story of self-defence. Shaking their heads and telling you that you are "the boss".

I have a strong emotional connection to Clementine, a tribute to the writers who made you raise a virtual child in the hardest circumstances. But Kirkman's individualist philosophy and commitment to the evil of humanity is as dull now in the game as it was in the comics.

Two interesting editorials from the tail end of the year: the first is the less interesting one, from the Guardian on democracy; the second is from the Economist on liberalism.

Both detect the failings the year found in their chosen strand of political philosophy and understand that changes are needed to restore vitality to them. The Guardian editorial tries to put the tension between democratic passions and reflection into a historical context and correctly identifies both the resurgence of political engagement in Scotland as a result of the independence referendum and the broader lack of engagement in turnout and politics beyond niche area campaigning.

Sadly it doesn't offer much in the way of suggestions for correcting this. One thing I felt was important from 2016 was the disconnect between popular democracy and the first past the post system of electing MPs. UKIP's failure to turn their popular vote into parliamentary representation was a bad outcome for both their supporters and their critics. While that Alternate Vote system was rejected for general elections, the fact that it is used so widely for other forms of elections means that it would be worth finding a vote system that might find general agreement. One that might avoid the curse of safe seats and wasted votes. If the government is decided by tens of constituencies not by all of them then we should expect a cynicism about the value of turning out to the polling station.

The Economist on the other hand is full of fight and proposals, it points out that the early challenges to liberalism resulted in universal suffrage and education. It is worth thinking big and trying to genuinely tackle the hard problems of our times rather than reheating a Cold War capitalism to ever diminishing returns.

Distribution of wealth, opportunity and a better understanding of the consequences of global equality are worthy problems. Looking at what the future of education should be and how people can genuinely reskill and retrain rather than be deskilled is of real social value.

Reversals of progress are disappointing but inevitable, it is when the will to respond with new answers fails that the rot truly sets in.

This weekend was the Battle of Ideas, this year instead of challenging the concept of Identity politics is basically piled in with a wild leg-breaking two-footed tackle. In the midst of the melodrama though it did help me think through something that has been bugging me, namely the concept of being an "ally".

I've primarily seen this concept in terms of feminism and Black Lives Matter and superficially it seems a positive thing. In the particular case a way for men or white people to declare themselves as active supporters of a movement. However during a panel discussion on the struggle for black civil rights one of the panellists pointed out that people claimed equal rights not because they are black but because they are human. A movement that claims rights merely for one particular group was weaker than one that claimed them for everyone.

There is no need to be an "ally" for equal rights, civil rights or human rights. You can believe in them and want to create a system that ensures that everyone has access to them and recourse when they are denied them. Your personal identity is completely irrelevant to your belief and your commitment to it.

Generalising this the principle of equality is universal and anyone can believe that people should have equal access to society and government. Your gender, sexuality or lack of it, race or any other personal characteristic is irrelevant.

Mass-movements and universal principles seem to have fallen out of favour or are expressed in only absolutist terms like the concept of the caliphate. I think there is much to be gained be reviving them and no movement based on affirmation of identity loses by participating in them.

The LRB seems to me to have done the best in-depth reporting on the referendum and the surrounding issues that I've read. How to grow a Weetabix is a wonderfully wide-ranging piece that looks at the nature of Britain as it actually is and the various issues that have built up to this moment.

It also nailed a point I was struggling to see for myself, that the Leave campaign can do and say anything and be a protean figure that anyone can get behind. I was already wondering about the fact that the money currently going to Europe has been re-spent ten times over during the debate.

This quote from a Brexit-supporting farmer, Stuart Agnew, wonderfully summarises the magical thinking.

As we talked I realised he was treating the referendum as if it were a general election; as if, instead of resolving a single issue, whether or not to stay in the EU, a vote to leave would usher in a new Britain, where farmer-hampering officials, Agnew-unfriendly regulations, scientists whose analysis he disagreed with and popular hostility to genetically modified food would fade away of their own accord.

He blamed the EU for forcing him to bury sheep rather than cremating them. He blamed the EU for stopping him growing GM crops (he was one of England’s trial growers). He blamed the EU for excessively tight control of pesticides and for forcing him to place an electronic tag in the ear of each sheep.

As the writer points out, leaving the EU isn't going to magically convert the British into feeling different about GM food or mad cow disease or foot and mouth disease. Climate change isn't going to depend on whether Britain is a European Union member or not.

But Remain is fighting for the status quo and Leave has the freedom to offer everything to everyone. Since no-one really knows what will happen after handing in notice of Britain's membership there is a chance, no matter how small, that anything might be possible. Farm subsidies might go up, migration might go down, we might be able to deport more people, we might be better off, wage might go up.

Saying yes to every possibility ends up with absurdity though. Some of the things that the Leave campaign are starting to promise are in direct contradiction to one another.

I loved this article, entitled Europe's sullen child, on the London Review of Books.

In recent years countries like Hungary and Poland have started systematically to dismantle democracy and the rule of law within their own borders. They have weakened the judiciary, captured the media, and attacked all opposition as illegitimate and unpatriotic. Brussels isn’t the great threat to the rule of law in Europe, it is increasingly authoritarian individual governments that pose a real danger not just to their own citizens, but to anyone holding a European passport; as long as they are represented in the European Council, the decisions they make affect everyone in the EU.

Because the majority of British people don't feel threatened by their own government right now (although certain segments, like the former miners, are rightly suspicious of the benignity of their government's intentions towards them) there is a tendency to forget why the rules and restrictions exist in the first place. Europe, including Britain, has never been a place of steady, untroubled progress. It is not a straight-forwardly good thing to let nation states do what they want without any external restrictions. Look at Yugoslavia, was the right time to intervene after the massacres had started?

The impression that right-wing populists like to give of themselves as defenders of democracy is, needless to say, deceptive. For one thing, the EU states have not ‘lost sovereignty’. That the UK can hold a referendum on whether or not to leave, while at the same time treaties can be amended only by a unanimous decision of all states together, is enough to demonstrate this point (which is not to say that individual states haven’t ceded many powers or that they aren’t, on a day-to-day basis, subject to bureaucratic decision-making in Brussels and rulings by the European Court that can go strongly against their national preferences).

In Britain, prisoners don't have the vote. Judgements by the European Court of Human Rights have been routinely ignored because the popular mood in Britain is that prison is a punishment and loss of voting rights is part of that punishment. When we choose to we happily ignore European rules that contradict our national desires.

The British Parliament exercises sovereign rights frequently, but erratically, making it difficult to differentiate between what is the will of British politicians and what is the result of aligning to the single market and European harmonisation. I personally suspect that that isn't a coincidence. Vote with your conscience in the lobby, blame it on Europe on the doorstep.

Populists always need enemies and conspiracies to explain why they aren’t already in power, or, when they do get to rule, why they aren’t succeeding and why there can’t be such a thing as a legitimate opposition. The EU has served them well in this regard. But it is naive to think that, even after getting rid of the supposed dictatorship of Brussels (and Germany), they would rest content.

If there are illegal migrants crossing the Channel in small boats then it is not because of the EU. The EU has not made Britain reduce its budget for the navy and border protection. That's something we've chosen to do ourselves as it is one of the "invisible" cuts we have made as part of our mania for austerity-lite.

In some ways I actually think a Brexit might be better for the country while worse for me personally. The first step towards recovery is being able to be honest with yourself and while we have the EU to be the bogeyman beyond the Channel, the whipping boy for any unwelcome news or poorly conceived policy the British nation seems incapable of seeing itself and its actions clearly.

The article is also excellent on the British abandonment of its European agenda, as a country it encouraged others to join Europe with a view of creating a new consensus on the kind of Europe we should have. After the ascension of Poland I feel we suffered a complete failure of vision and nerve and have retreated into "sullen" isolation, one that primarily seems aimed at avoiding our own failures than those of Europe and the Euro.

In general the film is a model of racial representation (although the white guy is still at the top, even in the future). On the other hand I was thinking about how the film fairs when it comes to the Bechdel test.

There are two women characters in both the Earth team and aboard the spaceship.

Those on the Earth team didn't seem to interact, instead making their contribution to a male character who was mediating the overall conversation.

On the spaceship the women do interact but aside from exchanging orders and confirmations the only other conversation I noticed is when the crew is discussing whether to force the ship into the slingshot orbit or not. While this is notionally an exchange of views about the the mission it's actually a discussion about whether the women should risk themselves to save Watney. So the conversation is ultimately about their relationship to a man and hence fails the test.

A boy was murdered near where I live recently. The spot where he fell has become a temporary shrine with flowers and graffiti. On the weekend a group of kids had started hanging out there (they hadn't been there during the week), there were talking nosily and shouting out to passers-by while another kid aimlessly (and dangerously) cycled around the streets surrounding it.

I realised that the kid on the cycle was spotting and the group at the spot were showing themselves on their ground.

There was a surreal quality to it. There in the middle of a regular Saturday of building, trading and shopping. There on the streets with their Jaguars and Aston Martins. There was a boy caught up in his own drama of patrolling the streets where one of his group had fallen.

The lines of the territory are invisible to people like me, as the article I linked to says the area consists of people of all different classes and wealth overlapping in the same metres of territory. The Bemerton estate at the centre of it, a mess ever since I've been here.

This kind of violence is mostly class-based and isolated geographically. I might get robbed but I'm isolated from the threat of being killed because of who I am and where I spend my time.

The article is wrong at least in talking about the reconstruction of Kings Cross. Caledonia Road has been that way ever since it was created to connect Kings Cross and Archway, initially through marshy farmland. To the east the planned streets, to the west the land between the road and the railway, the road itself evolving into the necessary neutral zone between the two where shared needs meet.

London, and Islington in particular, feels unique in having these social layers sharing the same geography, every other city I've ever been to links boundaries to geography, streets serve as borders. Here in a crowded city we're all creating our own psychogeography in the same physical space.

The latest Hunger Games film is almost inexplicable to me in terms of popular culture. Apart from the usual rumbling American distrust of government and "the capital", the latest instalment feels more like an indictment of the whole society that has created it.

Opening with a set of hooded executions it then proceeds to take a visual tour of the atrocities of more than a decade of the war on terror.

There are the forced statements of prisoners to camera, a pastiche of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the horror of sheltering from relentless bombing and shelling, the collateral damage of precision bombing (or the killing of civilians as you might prefer to call it).

And through it all are laced the ruins of Lebanon, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq. Buildings with their facades delicately eroded by countless bullets, sheltering refugees in their cadaverous interiors and reduced to nothing but concrete rubble pits by the jets roaring overhead. A world of poverty reduced to a mausoleum.

If this is entertainment it is grim stuff and pretty subversive for a film whose certificate doesn't allow it actually show a single killing on screen.

Issue 1305 of Le Monde Diplomatique had some interesting ideas around the concept of direct payments and basic income.

Basic income is the idea that the government organises a payment to all its citizens of a sum of money without conditions or obligation. The value of the payment is subject to discussion, but let's say here it is a sum of money that is sufficient to survive, to pay rent, utilities, food and clothing. In short the basic income is sufficient to be a full functioning member of society. The income is paid regardless of the other income you have and therefore all other sources of income are in addition to your needs.

The basic income replaces all welfare and benefit payments and because it applies universally it is easier to run than varied, conditional benefits.

Does the world owe you a living? Good Protestant embodiments of the work ethic tend to say no. However there is something deeply strange about a world where you are denied a living or society doesn't regard it as a matter of importance as to whether you can live or not.

Although Europe seems to be engaged in a strange experiment to see how long it can continue to function while denying access to employment to the majority of a generation I think that society and the state does actually owe its members a living. In fact it one of the major purposes of these institutions that they create and defend the opportunity to create a life secure in the all the needs including the opportunity for leisure and self-expression.

Our current systems of social welfare are based, in essence, around the concept of insurance and bridging payments. During periods of work you are making contributions to a social fund and during periods of unemployment you are making withdrawals from that fund.

Basic income is a radical departure from this conception of welfare. Under basic income the state makes an undertaking that all members of society receive enough money to meet their basic needs.

When governments currently want to encourage the creation of jobs they often, despite their protestations, pay a subsidy to employers and business to recruit people. Why is it better to bribe a business to pay someone a wage than it is to simply direct that money straight to the individual?

When talking about basic income with people I think the biggest issue people have one of moral hazard. If people don't have to work to live then why will they work? This is a curious argument in my mind, is more moral to reduce a person to penury to force them to find work? A lot people seem to say yes, an affirmation of their experience of having to find work without support in their own lives.

It puts a strange emphasis on the importance of work, as if it was something moral or spiritual rather than a system of exchange.

If we put our personal experience aside I think it makes sense that people work. Not to survive but to help provide meaning in their lives: self-worth, companionship, to have an impact on the world which they individually could not to achieve. Most likely they would also work to switch from merely existing in the world to acquiring the capital required to become an owner of property (of both goods and land) and therefore root themselves more firmly in their society and the world in general.

These incentives remain even with basic income. Not having to work does not destroy the positive aspects of work. However the inverse is not true; as the old trade union adage has it work without leisure and rest is no different to slavery.

Basic income also aligns with conservative economic policies that attempt to remove the tax burden from the working poor and to pay benefits and tax credits on time since the poorest in society also have the highest velocity on their money. They are forced to spend almost as soon as they receive it and therefore are the fundamental liquidity of their local communities.

But what of those who were once called "feckless". In many ways we've moved beyond the fallacy that the poor are somehow deserving of their situation and are incapable of changing their circumstance. Microfinance and a genuine more humane impulse of sympathy sees that economic constraints can conspire to make it impossible to change your circumstances without external intervention. The poor are the poor not because of their moral character but simply because they were born poor.

The more challenging category of the addicted and mentally ill are not served well under a society dedicated to the primacy of paid labour. Does basic income solve their problems or does it simply enable their issues? I suspect basic income does nothing for these people except remove the delusion that they would be fine if they had to hold down a job. Dealing with mentally illness is one of the greatest challenges known to modern society as no general measures will touch the individual chaos of these lives.

However I think basic income means that help and support can be focussed on those for whom financial circumstances are only part of their wider problem.

Imagining a world without mandatory work seems challenging but thinking that our world of labour exchange is inevitable and has always existed requires a stubborn lack of imagination.

This is a popular history book about a relatively small chunk of London that is now famous for its numerous jewellers and purveyors of engagement and wedding rings. The story reaches back to the medieval period and as ever the amount of fidelity modern London has with the layout of its ancient forbearer is amazing. Hatton Garden still essentially follows the bounds of the Fleet river and the monastic estate that lay beside it.

The book traces how precious metalworking and the diamond trade came to end up in Hatton Garden and how in recent years it has declined, perhaps terminally. While there is a lot of emphasis on the Jewish refuges and their community (partly because Lichenstein is a descendant of some of those refugees), there is also an excellent review of the Italian community that bequeathed the Italian church that lies on Clerkenwell Road.

It is also good at charting the way that areas rise and fall, alternating between putrid slaughter houses, crime-ridden rookeries and fine houses and rising rents that force out the craftsmen that give the area its modern reputation. It is a good picture of a city in constant motion, always changing and becoming something new.

See also the Guardian's review

I went to see the matinee of Great Britain, which falls somewhere between a farce, satire and a play from the headlines. Dancing around the legal boundaries it tries to tell the story of modern British newspapers and tell the story of Andy Coulson, Rebecca Brooks and Rupert Murdoch and Richard Desmond.

In some ways it tries to synthesis the political turmoil of a succession of scandals: phone hackings, MPs expenses, the corruption and racisim of the Metropolitan police, Murdoch's television monopolies and a sequence of child murders starting with the Soham murders and intersecting with the rest of the issues with the murder of Milly Dowler. The play feels like an attempt to accuse the complacent British public and to throw back their Little Englander attitudes back in their face by pointing what little of value is left in British society and in particular its institutions.

However it never commits to the satire and instead heads to the safety of comedy. Our leaders are self-serving idiots rather than being truly corrupt or more frightening, ideologically committed to the changes they make in society. It is easy to see a series of tactical expediencies as not something fundamental rotten in the British character but rather something temporary and an aberration that will soon pass in the face of fair play and the green and pleasant land.

The vision of Britain it paints is bleak and fundamentally depressing but it was telling that during the performance the audience laughed readily and easily as if they were in on the joke rather than its target.

It uses archetypes and caricatures which are easily dismissed, the truth is more complicated and far less amusing. Also telling the play is stuffed full of monologues which indicate how little faith the writer has in the drama to convey a message.

The cast is pretty good and obviously attention has been focused on Billie Piper's lead role (she makes the transition to stage well with excellent presence) but the cast is far stronger than the material. Robert Glenister does a great job of portraying a tabloid editor, filthy, furious and out of his element once he leaves the newsroom.

The final monologue is the one where Piper's identity as a celebrity makes the accusations more interesting. As Piper's character justifies her intrusion into the lives of people like Piper herself we get close to what the play could have been, interrogating the nature of celebrity culture and what it is doing to all the participants in it.

Great Britain left me with the desire to see a play with a really great analysis of the role of the press in society and another that tries to stake of what Austerity Britain has become.

This book was a birthday present but one that immediately grabbed my interest as it told as the story of an academic who decided to learn to play the guitar after enjoying the Rock Band and Guitar Hero rhythm games. Along the way he does a lot to explain the psychology and neurology of music as well as some basic music theory (although that thread tails off too quickly in my view). There isn't enough discussion of how folk, blues, jazz and pop songs are structured for example or the basic chords structures.

There are pen portraits of various ways children are taught music and comparisons to adult teaching as well as discussions as to why so many musicians are self-taught or at least wait a long time before undergoing formal training. As part of that discussion Gladwell's 10,000 hours theory is discussed with a few simple counter examples that show that famous musicians started getting paid session work at different intervals indicating that something other than time invested is at play. For Marcus talent is the multiplier, all musicians benefit from practice but innate musical ability makes the practice more valuable. Marcus is also careful to differentiate between mastery of formal recital from the practice of creating new popular music. Creation does not seem to be subject to the experience limit in a meaningful way.

One of the interesting themes that runs through the book is the question as to how difficult adult learning is and the extent to which adults can achieve expertise in things like music or language if they start post-adolescence. This is a very optimistic book from that perspective, stating that it is possible for adults to learn very complicated new skills like playing the guitar or learning a new language. However as the learning experience is more difficult motivation, support and structured learning are much more important to adults than children. It also makes the simple observation that children have more time to invest intensely in things, whether they be computer games, instruments or the statistics of sports teams.

There is a lot of interesting stuff about the neuroscience of music, apparently there are no specific areas of the brain identified with music and instead creating and listening to music is one of the general brain activities that requires many parts of the brain. However a lot of music matches and uses the language capabilities of the mind. Things like meter, rhyme and structure are common and there are some interesting examples of how children care about the words of a song than dissonance in the music.

It also ventures an explanation as to why everyone likes the music of their youth, saying that when it comes to music and songs familiarity breeds satisfaction. The more you listen to a song the more you like it. Human memory makes it hard to hold a piece of music completely in the mind, we use an overall impression of a piece of music to store the high-level details and the short term memory only really accurately remembers the latest minute or so of music. So we value harmony in proximity but fail to notice shifts in key or subtle alterations in phrasing. It also means that we are forever discovering new things in music that we like. Subtleties in harmony, rhythm or the lyrics.

The music of our youth really represents the time that we can invest in listening a great deal to music and therefore it is always pleasing to us in future, more so than more recent unfamiliar music.

I've read some of Caroline Alexander's books before including the brilliantly left-field depiction of polar exploration, Mrs.Chippy's Last Expedition.

The war that killed Achilles (Guardian review) is a brilliant exegesis of The Iliad that attempts to reclaim the story as one about the dreadful waste of war. Achilles is envisaged as a rebellious warrior as eager to return home to obscurity as he is to vengefully fight for glory. Homer is the poet that humanises the fallen victims of a war on both sides and sees in the conflict the fall of both Greek and Trojan.

There are lots of interesting observations throughout the book. Achilles mother Thetis is an immortal, already estranged from her mortal and aged husband and soon to lose her son. Her grief will be all the greater for being immortal and eternal, her son is short-lived but the grief of his death must be born forever.

Hector decides to save his life and flees Achilles, only to be tricked by the gods into facing him and subsequently dying.

Alexander is also adept at invoking the fate and tragedy of the women of the Iliad. Taken as prizes and put to the service of the murderers of their family, removed to foreign lands and utterly powerless.

Ultimately she feels that the true message of the Iliad has been usurped and this is an attempt to re-position it as the ultimate and complete tragedy, corrupting and destroying everyone who takes part in it, including the gods themselves.

I hadn't heard of Harry Callahan before this small exhibition of his work at Tate Modern. The exhibit was divided into street scenes, urban and rural landscapes and portraits of his wife Eleanor.

The rural landscapes were interesting, one in particular (labelled Detroit but presumably in the city periphery) of a road and telegraph poles from a foreground of a pool or swamp was great but felt very intense due to its small size. The detail and density of the image was overwhelming.

The street photography was okay but no great shakes. There seemed to be a few experiments with double exposure or composition on the photography paper. The best of these was the pensive face of a woman, perhaps waiting at a crossing, superimposed on the window of a shop with shoppers bustling up and down in front of it. I felt like it captured the tension of when shopping shifts from leisure to chore.

The urban photography was the section I liked the most with a very bright saturated look at cities like Chicago that made them look like the Mediterranean. However the picture that I liked the most was a picture of two men standing outside a gaudy burlesque club. The are almost symmetrical, leaning in towards one another but both looking in the same direction down the street at something happening outside the frame. The natural posture of their relaxed waiting contrasts with the busy decoration of the venue and its contrived spelling, there's an innocence that contrasts with the vice.

This week the Guardian won the 2014 Pulitzer prize for public service. It is an amazing moment to be part of the organisation, which after all has a lot of people doing a lot of mundane stuff day after day to create the platform from which you can change the world. I feel proud of what the Guardian has done and I do feel that my job has made some kind of contribution towards to making this possible.

It has been a strange time after the Snowden revelations, the UK government succeeded in having a chilling effect on reporting in the whole of the UK with their ongoing commitment to what they term "national security" and persecution of anyone who questions it. There is no doubt in my mind that winning awards like the Pulitzer is an important part of justifying the reporting that the Guardian has been doing and restoring some press freedom in the UK.

It is moments like this that makes working at the Guardian different from any other job I have had.

I thought the first Captain America film was pretty dreadful so I was surprised to see how well reviewed the follow up was.

The addition of Black Widow (Scarlet Johanssen) to the cast brings some quippy dialog between the leads that creates a spark that was lacking in the first film.

It is an interesting film in that it is stylistically very indebted to the language of comics and the plot is so formulaic I couldn't imagine anyone being surprised as it unwinds.

What does make it interesting is the layer of contemporary comment that runs through it. Captain America (Chris Evans) feels out of sync with the modern world but the film has sympathy for his old-fashioned values of liberty and freedom in the face of the technocratic plan for world order advanced by SHIELD and (ho hum) the UN.

Banding (and bonding) together with Iraq veteran Falcon (Anthony Mackie), an excellent take on a not very interesting member of the Marvel Universe, strikes a blow for individual liberty against the state and gets his groove back under the Stars and Stripes and via massive property destruction.

By interrogating the spy state, the imperatives of national security, the nature of a soldier's service and the limits of their loyalty the film engages in a way that only the best pop culture can.

Essentially when the film isn't featuring driving then it is pretty bad, even some of the driving sequences are absurd, such as vehicle to vehicle refuelling. The dialogue clunks along like the actors are hitting it with spanners. The leads are good but they are given nothing to work with. Imogen Poots and Aaron Paul have good chemistry, Dominic Cooper broods in his villainy, but it's mostly about cars and men looking grim as they steer them. Like dance-off movies the reasons why people have to race cars are very contrived, even when they are given a way to resolve their goals they choose to ignore it in favour of driving... very.. fast.

Despite this there is some interesting screencraft, the one time that the heroes are in genuine jeopardy is when they are being shot at in a scene that calls back to the end of Easy Rider.

The relationship between the male and female lead is curiously chaste until you realise that they are almost literally id and ego. Julia is Tobey only without the grief and remorse, they like the same things, they can do the same things, you're almost expecting a Fight Club resolution at the end.

There's some silly sexist behaviour and this is a script from before the Bechdel test so don't hope for much on that front.

However when it comes to cinematography for street racing this film does actually move things along.

One of my Christmas presents was a copy of Whedon's take on Much ado about nothing. Shot in black and white and featuring a lot of Whedon's regular television collaborators the entire film was shot in Whedon's (large) house and nearly in chronological order.

I like the play, it's one of my favourite Shakespeare pieces, but I was also curious to see how Whedon would handle it.

I wasn't disappointed the film is clever and makes great use of the Californian environment and stellar talent Whedon has access to. The performances are universally great and while the language is a little laboured at times the flying barbs and mockery flows well.

Of the interpretations of the material, I liked the idea that Borachio is in love with Hero but felt that the idea that Benedick and Beatrice had a one-night stand prior to the play doesn't really fit in with the idea of Hero's public "shaming".

One absolute standout is Nathan Fillion's performance as Dogberry. It is one of the best I've ever seen and almost crying with laughter funny.

It was a great present and I think this version of the play stands equal to any of its predecessors.

There was a time when you had to physically buy and keep music. The amount of music you had access to was a function of your ability to purchase it and store it. During such a time the value we put on music was higher and therefore we cared more about what we should expend our money, space and time on. Critical opinion mattered as a guide to what was worth of such devotion.

Now you can possess years of music in a mobile-phone sized device. If you're honest then you can have the same from a streaming service. The cost for streaming is less than what you'd pay for a CD so now the music you have available is effectively infinite.

The nature of criticism has also changed. Once you needed to convey the nature of music in words, so someone could picture what kind of music you were talking about.

Want to know what Lorde's Royals sounds like? Well there's a link right there. You can go and listen to it. Did you like it? Well then bookmark that link, now you can listen to it when you like.

The need to describe music has disappeared in the digital age. You can just listen. It's actually an improvement over the dreadful formulas of things like "Afrobeat Neu! meets Southern-fried rock".

What hasn't changed is the act of recommendation and curation. When I used to go to record shops I loved to delve into the stacks and find the little hand-written notes and stickers describing what was on the record or CD and why you shouldn't leave the store without it. That kind of loving curation (mostly by talented and aspiring musicians themselves) just doesn't exist in the anti-septic world of "likes". Comments on Soundcloud are mostly assine.

A record shop was also finite, you could exhaustively check all the sections once a week and be satisfied that between such obsessive trawling and the occasional kind under the counter reservation by the staff that you had seen everything that was available.

You can't listen to the internet. You need a like-minded friend to help guide you and you need to be a guide too.

I have a venerable blog about music that started in the era of obscure CDs issued by labels that didn't seem to last longer than a couple of years. Recently I decided to restart posting to it. Although I don't have amazingly obscure tastes I felt that culturally there is an embarrassment of riches and that while some bands and musicians are internet savvy and have their own websites and online presence there are still a lot where it is difficult to just Google the artist's name and find something relevant.

What I want to try and do is re-create that record store post-it, if for no-one else then at least for me.

The Walking Dead (and its not unique in this regard) has as one of its basic tenets that it is not the zombies of its fictional apocalypse that represent the true danger to the survivors but other humans.

At the risk of sounding ridiculous, how realistic is this though? Groups coalesce when faced with shared hostilities. Zombies represent a genuine existential threat to humanity and possess no common social structures. They are the ultimate "other". No human can find common cause with a zombie. A zombie regards humans purely as food, we have more empathy for wolves or tigers.

While it is true that humans require the same resources of energy and food as one another the desire to co-operate to maximise the availability of those resources seems to be the historic norm. We don't routinely steal food from our neighbours and we never have.

In addition the zombies have no interest in the resources that humans desire. They have no need for food, shelter or comfort. Destroying zombies to reclaim resources seems more sensible than attacking other humans. Violence between groups of humans negatively affects all humans but violence directed towards zombies has no negative effects on human survivors and if effectively applied then humans benefit.

There seems to be no real reason why humans would not find it easy to find common cause with other survivors in a zombie apocalypse. Normal power relationships and dysfunctions would of course continue but the conventional boundaries of politics and nationality would dissolve.

But zombies are not really zombies. They are amongst the most symbolic of monsters. In the Walking Dead with its gothic backdrop of Georgia forests and southern heat you feel that the spectre that truly haunts the survivors are not the undead but instead the rotten issue of race.

It is not zombies that want to burst inside our barricades and undo all that we have made. Only other people have the capacity to do that.

Any zombie fiction that features the "humans are the real monsters" trope seem to me to be essentially reactionary. Seeing zombies as the masses who fail to share in a dream of, often, idealised American masculinity makes you realise that the zombies are less the Others than simply others.

The friction between the bands of survivors makes more sense as a portrayal of the fratricide of fringe movements be they left, right or those of feminism or animal rights.

You can trust no-one but yourself is their badge. Individuality is their shibboleth.

The survivors are not the heroic holdouts of a better time but instead the bitterenders spitting their defiance in the face of history and indifference with a hail of bullets and a stockade.

I am a pretty heavy consumer of print media but even as a fan I know that ultimately that is not how people are going to read the majority of their news, analysis and reviews in future. The interesting thing is that as a "loyal" subscriber I am getting all kinds of interesting and weird offers.

PC Gamer UK for example offered me the chance to subscribe for three years while paying just two. On the face of that its not a bad deal given that I've been a subscriber for years. However ironically the offer made me wonder how well the magazine is doing financially and whether the upfront money would just disappear if it folded.

While I dithered I got a reminder about the offer and a coupon to further reduce the price. The cost was high but something that I could shrug off after a couple of months and the magazine isn't going to fold in that time. I've gone for it.

My father in law is a subscriber to the London Review of Books and their offer to him was even crazier. Essentially I am get a two year free subscription to the LRB just because he is a subscriber. I can only assume that this is some crazy subscriber number deal to increase the value of the advertising they are carrying.

Two political journals Le Monde Diplomatique and Foreign Affairs are struggling to make the transition from print. Foreign Affairs has a relatively no-nonsense electronic subscription (which makes financial sense for an international sub). However the electronic copy is distributed as a PDF of the print edition, one that includes screen unfriendly two column layout and the print adverts as massive image files. Collectively the result is such a disaster that you would be better off picking up a paper copy from the newsagent.

LMD is even stranger, subscribing to the website or an electronic edition is such a pain that I just went for the paper edition and then got given access to the website for free as part of the paper sub.

Virtually none of this makes sense to me except that all these publications are desperately trying to find some way to survive in a rapidly changing environment.

There was an interesting Moral Maze the other night which featured a discussion of whether young children should only learn chronology and the location of dates and people within that chronology. The idea being that a grounding in facts is required as basis for later doing the demanding act of historical analysis and interpretation.

My problem with this is that immediately you have to enter the world of value judgements just to be able to form a chronology with any kind of periods and groupings. The traditional reigns of kings and queens grouped by dynasties fails to map onto meaningful changes in society. The classic example of how bad this can be is the concept of "Victorian" England. The country ruled over by Victoria was substantial different at the start, end and middle of the queen's reign and to construct the concept of "Victorian" society we actually take a segment of the later part of her reign and project it earlier and later than the historical facts allow to produce a homogeneous concept. Not to mention radically simplifying imperial and labour politics to give the impression of consistency.

Even the broad categorisation of history into things like the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages is an awkward construct as global transitions in staple material construction simply didn't happen in lockstep. Essentially when you use these periods you tend to be referring to Western Europe and the Mediterranean and even then you are using a gross simplification.

I think the best analogy is with science teaching on the subject of the atom. Several simplified models of the atom are used until finally you get to the point where there has to be an admission that the "adult" world is continuing to work on understanding how the atom actually works.

The balance has to be in explaining that the model is a simplification while still teaching the benefits of the simplified system. No-one expects the majority of people to truly understand relativity after all, Newtonian physics is good for a lot of things.

If we choose periods, dates and "facts" as the way that children learn about history we also have to teach them that these chronologies are constructs and what the rules are that are used to construct them.

Press regulation in the UK is a difficult thing, its hard not to be queasy about the limitation of a free press but the trouble is that that right has been abused by a small section of the press beyond all reason. I would have preferred to see the problems dealt with through criminal prosecutions of those actually responsible but there is no denying that press self-regulation completely failed to deal with a blatant and endemic problem. Giving unreformed self-regulation a second chance was just never going to work.

However the legislation that got pushed through yesterday seems to be just a tactical patch to deal with newspapers as they are currently constituted. The failure to adequately deal with the internet means we opening a massive amount of legal uncertainty for all forms of news media and there is no final settlement but just something that is going to be kicked around for years for the sake of saving the legislative agenda in this parliament.

Leveson isn't irrelevant but all the discussion of where on a front page an apology could appear indicates where all the thinking has gone in this regulation.

Europe seems to have taken a remarkably short-sighted view of its interests in imposing a tax on Cypriot savers. While it is tempting to coerce a contribution to a country's bail-out the effects of effectively taking money from insured savers should be fairly obvious. After all the insurance schema exists because governments fear the effect of bank runs and the harmonisation of the scheme across Europe was to stop the contagion of confidence from one bank to another.

It may seem pretty easy to impose a penalty on a small island nation but really this about shoring up confidence in the Spanish and Italian banks. It is already too late for Greece, why would anyone keep their money in a Greek bank?

The whole situation seems to be yet another effect of the creeping incrementalism that marks European solutions. I wouldn't be surprised if this part of the package is undone later but only after the damage to confidence in the system has been done.

The reason I wanted to give Posthaven a go (not having ever really used Posterous) was the admirably simple pitch for the business. To be able to claim to offer a permanent repository for your posts there has to be some way to pay for the servers and the storage. Paying to post makes simple sense.

I was also intrigued by the idea of having to stake a small amount of money to enter the beta rather than comparatively stale idea of simply registering an email address.

I see Posthaven and App.net as real tests of whether people truly want to be customers or in fact they are happy to be the product.