Sitting in the sofa, as I’m writing, to protect my legs from heat, my laptop is cushioned on the FT weekend magazine and FT life and Arts. And what a fine weekend FT it is!
One of the many things I like about the FT weekend is its sometimes uncanny ability to explore exactly those topics which I have been pondering or made brief comments about to my friends during the week. To give you an example, a few days ago, walking down Broadway market with my partner, I mentioned to him that yet another friend of mine had sent me a link to a TED talk. I’m sure the talk is interesting since the friend that sent it to me is (I haven’t had time to watch it) but for some reason I got slightly irritated to see a reference to TED talk and particularly to note that it had gotten my friend excited to the point of wanting to share it with me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there is something about the popularity of TED and the increasing amount of references to TED talks as a piece of enlightenment that got me enough worked up last week, to keep punctuating conversations on different occasions with half coherent statements about the weirdness of the TED talk phenomenon.
So, Saturday morning I buy the FT and there it is on the cover of Life and Arts: The new age of reason: Part Glastonbury and part Davos, the TED conferences are billed as a talking shop for the world’s most brilliant and dynamic thinkers. Peter Aspen attends to discover if these gatherings really can find new solutions to the planet’s problems.
Imagine my excitement! If you can’t, here is a brief re-count of it: There I am in the sofa, eating a piece of bread with butter and honey. I open the paper a bit ungraciously as I have only one free hand. On the front page of the Life and Arts section, I immediately spot the all too familiar red TED logo. I try to read to verify that the article bellow the photograph REALLY is about what I think it is but by now I am too excited to focus my eyes. All I manage to do is to start shouting “SEE!! I TOLD YOU! REMEMBER I TALKED ABOUT IT!! HAVE YOU SEEN??” Luckily, my partner, to whom I was directing myself, had already seen the article and (as this is not the first time I shout similar things when I open the FT magazine on weekends) anticipated my reaction. Just as I was about to start hyperventilating, he said ‘I know! nice!’ with just enough excitement to confirm, in my mind, that I could safely claim this coincidence as yet another proof of my ‘special’ almost telepathic relationship to the FT’s editorial team.
Although I did not anticipate Tyler Brûlé’s column, The Fast Lane, to be almost a parody of his own writing, nor did I have a hunch about Lunch with the FT being with the BBC director-general Mark Thompson for whom I harbor a cautious admiration and, to be honest, I hadn’t mentioned Western Sahara and its people for some time now, I was extremely pleased to see all of this and so much more included in this weekend’s FT.
So this weekend, you really don’t need to bother reading any other papers, know that you can just walk over to your local newsagent and pick up the outrageously expensive FT weekend.
Happy Sunday!
brownbookproject 