By Babette, Germany. Babette does not love roller coasters. Her children do. Somewhere between growing children, theme parks and one unexpectedly quiet day, she discovered that courage can arrive one ride at a time. There are certain signs that your children are growing up which are easy to miss. One day you are helping with…
Bruce Lloyd, London and Frank Peters, Cleebourg. AI can produce more information than any of us can absorb. The harder question is what we choose to do with it — and whether asking better questions may matter more than having more answers. I had been watching Bruce’s output for some time, and there was something…
By Alexander, Germany. When two people move in together, they do not arrive alone. They bring cupboards, habits, childhood rules, standards of cleanliness — and completely different ideas about where the keys belong. Julia and I never sat down and discussed the rules of our household. There was no constitution, no negotiation and no list…
By Frank Peters. You are surrounded by systems designed to capture your attention, predict your behaviour and keep you there. Almost none of them are interested in what you have to say. You are halfway through telling somebody a story. It matters to you. Perhaps not enormously. Nobody has died. No government has fallen. It…
A small public service announcement from Fruitloop & the Mayor. Pineapple now has its own little home on your phone. There is no app store to visit, nothing to buy and no need to search through a sea of apps wondering which Pineapple is ours. You simply add Pineapple to your phone and open it…
By Babette, Germany. Babette went to Egypt hoping for a wonderful family holiday. She came home with a wobbly bed, an improvised cocktail, a stingray she couldn’t photograph, four massages and a firm belief that Egypt deserves another chance — just somewhere else. Coming home from holiday is difficult enough. Coming home to three weeks…
By Bruce Lloyd in London & Frank Peters in Cleebourg. We worry about whether artificial intelligence will escape our control. But perhaps the deeper question is older and more ordinary: how much of modern life already depends on trusting people we will never meet? Frank told Bruce a story from his days as a receptionist…
Lunch with Rosii, (Brazil), Janita (Fruitloop, South Africa), Frank, (The Mayor, France) We use them, lose them, complain when they stop working and almost never wonder who invented them. Then Fruitloop suggested replacing the doorbell with a mousetrap, and ordinary life became considerably less ordinary. Some inventions arrive with fanfare. Others quietly enter our lives,…
By Sylvie, France. From tennis nerves and supermarket calculations to concert crowds, safari nightmares and the quiet art of letting someone go first, an ordinary conversation about waiting kept finding somewhere else to go. Sylvie lost her tennis match 6–2, 6–1, which did not particularly surprise her. What mattered more was that the score did…
By Janita Le Grange, South Africa We left early on Friday morning for the 380 km drive to Thabazimbi to visit my grandparents and attend their annual festival. We planned a few stops along the way, starting with Hartbeespoort Dam. General Hendrik Schoeman had a vision, a pocket full of ambition, and a pile of…
