Vincent James Hooper, at The Blogs

Vincent James Hooper

Nov 14, 2026, 12:35 PM

The rule is posted before you reach the plaza. It is printed on the signs, published on the cemetery's website and enforced by a young soldier with a rifle on his outside shoulder. Silence and respect. It binds schoolchildren...

Nov 12, 2026, 9:47 PM

The Palace at Megiddo

Beneath the Sea of Galilee lies a core of grey mud about 18 metres long, and in it is a record of the end of a world. In 2013 Dafna Langgut and Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University, with...

Nov 11, 2026, 8:15 PM

The Seats That Were Empty

When Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint meeting of Congress in July 2024, he set a record. It was his fourth such speech, one more than Winston Churchill. He also set a less welcome record. J Street counted 68 Democrats...

Nov 10, 2026, 3:42 PM

The Granary Washington Won’t Fill

On Monday in Paris, on the sidelines of the G7 foreign ministers' meeting, Marco Rubio said two things that cannot both be true. The first concerned the United Nations. The secretary of state told reporters that the UN is not...

Nov 9, 2026, 6:45 PM

The Fly in the Machine

In September a fruit fly learned to play Minecraft, or at least its wiring diagram did. On 3 September, Cell published the first complete wiring diagram of an adult male fly's central nervous system: brain, optic lobes and nerve...

Nov 8, 2026, 5:30 PM

The Roof and the Strait

On Sunday Gulf News reported that the International Energy Agency expects the United Arab Emirates to become the world's largest producer of solar electricity per person by 2031. It is a story about the sun. Read in the Gulf...

Nov 7, 2026, 5:12 PM

The Ballot and the Strait

Seventy years ago this week, Dwight Eisenhower won a second term on the same day the guns fell silent at Suez. On 6 November 1956 Americans voted while British and French troops were still advancing along the canal and...

Nov 6, 2026, 12:10 PM

The Jar on First Avenue

Fill a jar with marbles and press down the lid. At some point the loose heap stops behaving like a heap and becomes a solid. Physicists call this jamming. In June, the Nobel laureate Giorgio Parisi and Francesco Zamponi...

Nov 4, 2026, 9:20 PM

On One Leg

Last month the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank held their annual meetings in Bangkok. Kristalina Georgieva, the Fund's managing director, described a world economy standing on one leg, the AI leg, and asked what happens if it...

Nov 3, 2026, 4:07 PM

The Fee That Stayed in Kingston

In 1975 an American actress flew to Jamaica to shoot television commercials for a property company. She was paid in Jamaican dollars and then found she could not take them home. Jamaica's exchange controls, tightening under Michael Manley's government...

About Me

Religion: Church of England/Interfaith. [This is not an organized religion but rather quite disorganized]. Views and Opinions expressed here are STRICTLY his own PERSONAL!