Vincent James Hooper, at The Blogs

Vincent James Hooper

Sep 13, 2026, 9:31 PM

On Tuesday morning, a Boeing C-17A Globemaster III (more than seventy-seven tonnes of cargo capacity, four Pratt & Whitney turbofans, and the wingspan of a widebody airliner) descended through overcast skies into Moscow's Vnukovo airport. Flightradar24 logged its tail...

Sep 12, 2026, 5:10 PM

Daylight Robbery

Walk through Bath, or Edinburgh, or the terraces of any Georgian town in England, and you will see them: windows bricked up from the inside, their outlines still visible in the stone. They are not decorative. They are three...

Sep 11, 2026, 6:25 PM

What the Ocean Kept

In Disney's live action Moana, which reached cinemas last month, the ocean parts its waves on a Polynesian shore and places a small green stone in the hands of a child. The stone is the Heart of Te Fiti,...

Sep 10, 2026, 12:32 PM

The Forecast Factory

In 1922, Lewis Fry Richardson imagined a vast hall, a theatre in the round, filled with sixty four thousand human beings, each computing the weather for one small patch of atmosphere. A conductor stood at the centre on a...

Sep 9, 2026, 3:20 PM

The Coffee House Theorem

In 1688, Edward Lloyd opened a coffee house on Tower Street in the City of London. It was not remarkable for its coffee. It was remarkable for what happened inside it. Ship captains brought news of voyages. Merchants brought...

Sep 8, 2026, 1:17 PM

The Folded Tree

They called it the Habsburg jaw. A mandible so deformed by generations of intermarriage that Charles II of Spain, the last of his line, could barely chew his food. Three marriages between uncle and niece figured among his parents,...

Sep 5, 2026, 6:02 PM

The Gaviota de la Paz

The Police played the Quinta Vergara in 1982, when the amphitheatre was still learning what it could hold. Bucks Fizz and Shakin' Stevens followed in 1983, Sheena Easton in 1984. Then, for a long time, the British invasion paused....

Sep 4, 2026, 3:42 PM

The Drawing on the Blackboard

On the day Niels Bohr died, 18 November 1962, someone photographed the blackboard in his study at the Carlsberg mansion in Copenhagen. On it was a drawing. It depicted a box of light, the thought experiment that Albert Einstein...

Sep 3, 2026, 4:52 AM

You slept fine. But then you checked your smartwatch. And Israel knows more.

A BBC Reel feature published on 26 June 2026 introduced millions of viewers to a word most had never encountered: orthosomnia. Coined in a 2017 paper in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine by researchers at Rush University Medical...

Sep 1, 2026, 3:07 PM

The Membrane and the Wall

Why the dream of a borderless world misunderstands what borders are for The borderless world is one of modernity's most seductive ideas. Tear down the barriers, let people and capital flow freely, and prosperity will follow as surely as water...

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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!