General

As the son of an Anglican preacher man in the Northern Cape (when it was still only a part of the Cape province — not that that makes any difference), I used to travel vast empty dusty grinding distances with my dad from one remote congregation to another. In some places church was somebody’s house. […]

“Govt was warned about power” — the lead headline on News24 trumpeted this morning. Apparently some municipal boffin warned last century that darkness was on the way and would hit by 2007. The news in that is when the warning was made. The content is nothing new. Perhaps the warning should have been expanded to […]

Professor Steven Friedman, sir, I write in response to your blog entitled “Eskom, Zuma and some people’s nightmares“. As a white South African, I am greatly disturbed by you (a professor) casually calling disgruntled white South Africans “racists”. Please allow me a little story to illustrate part of my point: I once met a lovely […]

Ever the self-righteous optimist, I was up at 6am on Boxing Day for the first of many runs along the glorious stretch of coastline that runs from Sea Point to Clifton and beyond. But I was not the only person to hit the Atlantic Seaboard early that morning. By 6.30am, when I finally got moving, […]

Not long ago I remarked to a colleague that I had not run into much trouble while moderating reader comments on Thought Leader. Apart from the occasional personal insult or such, readers were mostly contributing well-reasoned and interesting comments, putting forward their views without attacking Thought Leader bloggers or other readers unfairly. Sadly, in the […]

What do Marilyn Manson, the Testical Festival and Queen Elizabeth have in common? They’re all on YouTube. No longer only the domain of the cute, the weird and the insanely boring (think family holiday videos), YouTube is becoming a platform for information dissemination and community engagement for more serious content. Scholars, international organisations and the […]

Thought Leader is a Mail & Guardian-hosted blogging forum. Because of the content of the newspaper, an unsuspecting reader should be forgiven for going into Thought Leader expecting to read mostly political content. It therefore seems reasonable that if our hypothetical reader came upon a blog entitled The Silwane Files, Ndumiso Ngcobo with a picture […]

I’m not sure why but I feel that I need to mention that I am new to blogging. I previously avoided reading blogs as I perceived them to be some kind of diary input where people revealed their soul and discussed how they lost weight in 30 days — with details of what the burger […]

Naomi Klein’s recently published book The Shock Doctrine is itself a shocking revelation of the cynicism underpinning the relentless manner in which what she calls “disaster capitalism” opportunistically (mis-)uses various kinds of collective disorientation to establish new “markets”. Behind all of this lurk the economic theories of Milton Friedman — once discredited in the US, […]

During my search through cyberspace to find the best live reports on Steve Jobs’s keynote speech at Macworld yesterday, I came across an ad that had the caption “In Steve we trust”. Very funny. See it on the Popular Mechanics website. It’s entertaining writing about Apple and possibly even — dare one? — mentioning something […]