The complete visual failure of the new Amazon building

Something is growing on the banks of the Spree. Like a verruca it has been growing slowly, for many years, and as its size increases so too does the discomfort it is causing. This malignant infection is called the ‘Mediaspree’ and it is actually a large-scale property development project with the goal to build a skein of corporate buildings along the river in Friedrichshain, my neighbourhood. The buildings are diverse in style but ugly on an impressively consistent level, and the idea is that they shall house all kinds of media and telecom companies, thus invigorating the neighbourhood. And one...

For her

Bike shopping makes me nervous. I do not like looking at all the beautiful, fiendishly cool machines that my heart yearns for but I could never afford. I do not like how the small bikes for teenagers leer at me from the edge of the store, whispering that they are probably more likely to fit my puny stunted body than the adult bikes. I do not like the mild, nagging fear that whichever bike I choose will seem fantastic in the shop but will turn out to be the completely wrong choice the moment I leave the shop and accidentally...

How to create a vegan recipe for the internet in 2023

It has never been a better time to be a vegan. The world of vegan cooking has never been more exciting, more diverse, more creative. There are no limits when it comes to what fabulous dishes you can create! Having said that, there are several extremely strict rules that you are legally obliged to adhere to when cooking vegan food online in 2023. I’m here to talk you through them so that no one has to make any silly mistakes and end up doing something dangerous or just looking like a cretin in front of everyone (not pointing any fingers...

Let’s be informed voters – together

There was an election for the Berlin House of Representatives in 2021 and for various tedious reasons it was a right cock-up. There followed months of discussions and disagreement before it was eventually decided to redo the election this year. We will be voting tomorrow. In the weeks leading up to the election, something happens which I have only ever seen in Germany: stiff signs made of correx (deeply environmentally unsound) are strapped with cable ties (which probably end up in the waterways) to every single lamppost and vertical pole in the city. They accumulate until there are four to...

A Comedy of Errors

Gather round, because I’m going to tell you a story. This story is exceptionally delicious; it has so many different layers to enjoy. It is a story that intrinsically tells so many other stories, stories of man’s folly and of art and of human behaviour and of municipal decision-making. Bear with me. From where I work it is a short walk to Potsdamer Platz, a strange, lifeless arena of enormous and heavily-architected office buildings and shopping centers. It was intended as a gleaming modern hub for the city where locals and tourists could come to work, eat, shop, and enjoy...

An early draft of my upcoming PhD thesis

Working Title: A Comparative Sociopolitical Analysis of Crisp (Potato Chip) Culture and Flavours in Germany and Great Britain Around Christmas I spent almost three weeks in the UK. Three weeks is a short time, and yet in that time I consumed more crisps than I usually do over the span of several calendar months, if not years. Brits love crisps more than we love our mums; we love crisps more than the royal family, more than complaining about traffic, more indeed than a really well-timed cup of tea. That last one was a joke OF COURSE THERE IS NOTHING WE...

An open letter to the people who designed the Android alarm app

Good afternoon. I say ‘Good afternoon’ because I get the sense that you lot are not the kind of people who are used to getting up early. Back in olden times, people used to use things like alarm clock radios or Teasmades or even those ones with the bells on top to make sure they would wake up early in the morning in time to get ready for work and feed the chickens, or whatever it was they needed to do which was counter to their innate biological instincts. But things have changed, and now almost everyone uses the alarm...

A central heating meter perched on a fire escape sign

The straw that broke the camel’s back

Look. You don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be here, but the problem is that there is still so much I have to tell you. In fact, for every thing I talk about a dozen new things happen that I also have to talk about and so there’s this enormous backlog now, you see. Like my pile of unsorted tax documents, I have been putting it off for so long, but recently I had a day where so many things – baffling, unbelievable things – happened in such a short space of time that it was frankly...

Phys-Dread

Recently, Boris Johnson – the wispy-haired cretin who tripped over a gollywog doll and fell into being Prime Minister of Great Britain – launched a bombastic ‘obesity crackdown’. There is so much wrong with the way he has done this. The fatphobic messaging which completely fails to engage with the reasons why people struggle so much with their weight. The emphasis on disincentivising the bad stuff and the simultaneous complete failure to effectively incentivise the good stuff. The cognitive dissonance of conflating ‘thin’ and ‘healthy’ to claim that these two words are one and the same. The guilt-tripping of overweight...

Paradise lost

It is a well-known fact that German allotments are an intense environment of competitive gated-community style policing of each other’s plots, enforced with glee by the leathery pensioners who own half of the gardens in the space. Vladimir Kaminer even wrote an entire book of humourous anecdotes about his time as an allotment owner. Either your tree is too close to the fence, or not close enough to the fence, or the square meterage of lawn is insufficient, or the quantity or quality of your barbeque smoke is unacceptable – there is, reputedly, nothing one can do to avoid that...