Sony WF-1000XM3 review: Noise-cancelling earbuds just got sexy September 4, 2019 The guy in charge of naming new Sony products sits bolt upright in his bed, cold sweat dripping from his forehead. In a corner of the room, illuminated by the pale moonlight, is a whiteboard. Every inch of it is covered with hastily scrawled ideas, each of them struck through. WB-1010XM? No. FMX-700D? Ridiculous. GTF-006? [...]
Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 review: A dramatic escalation in the war on noise August 28, 2019 Things have quieted down, if you’ll excuse the pun, in the field of noise-cancelling headphones. At the top of the unchanging pack sit Sony’s MDR-1000XM3, Sennheiser’s PXC 550 and the ageing champion, the Bose QuietComfort 35. Once seen adorning the crowns of every other commuter, the QC35’s long reign as London’s preferred method of blocking [...]
Brainiac Live review: Anarchic science stunts for kids who are really into loud noises August 15, 2019 Sky One’s Brainiac television show feels like it aired approximately one hundred years ago, in the foreign land that is the years 2003 to 2008. Fronted by Top Gear man Richard Hammond, and then later by the excellent Vic Reeves, it was a vehicle for pop-science tomfoolery and explosive hijinkery which deftly walked the intellectual [...]
Fatt Pundit review: Chinese-Indian fusion food in the heart of London August 13, 2019 A small plates restaurant in the heart of London, Fatt Pundit specialises in traditional hakka cuisine, an Indian-originated style of cooking from a region of east Kolkata that leans into Chinese flavours and ingredients. It’s a culinary crossover that’s a little more special than your typical Asian-fusion food, and while it’s been knocking around for [...]
Phantom islands thought to exist for hundreds of years are being “undiscovered” July 24, 2019 On a voyage from Manila to Mexico in 1528, the Spanish captain Alavaro de Saaverda reported stopping off at a pair of islands a few thousand kilometres north of Papua New Guinea in the Philippine Sea. He named the islands Los Buenos Jardines, and wrote in his diary about the friendly natives he’d met there. [...]
Yesterday review: A chilling account of the harrowing symptoms of one man’s brain injury June 28, 2019 The phrase “feel-good comedy of the summer” should cause no small amount of bile to rise in your throat, but Yesterday is inescapably just that. A movie that seems algorithmically laser-targeted for success, it arrives just as ravenous audiences are lifting their faces from the dessicated carcass of last summer’s Mamma Mia 2, and are [...]
Kalifornia Kitchen review: Vegan health food in the heart of London June 25, 2019 Walking into Kalifornia Kitchen is like slipping through a Goodnight Sweetheart portal, except rather than arriving in World War Two you’ve been teleported across the Atlantic to Venice Beach, as seen through an Instagram filter. It’s as though this healthy-eating vegan diner has been surreptitiously airlifted from the West Coast to Tottenham Court Road in [...]
Xperia 1 review: Sony’s new flagship is a tower of power June 19, 2019 Look at this incredibly tall lad. Sony’s new flagship, the Xperia 1 is a monolith, a towering glass slab that looks just as likely to trigger the next stage of human evolution as it is to book you an Uber. Take this thing outside and you’d need to let air traffic control know ahead of [...]
Biff’s Jack Shack review: Unapologetically filthy vegan burgers June 18, 2019 Vegan food is at the literal bleeding edge of culinary science, but before there were heme-infused burgers, pea protein mince and steaks made of specially cultivated soy chunks pounded into the vague shape of a cow by a man in a lab coat, there was the humble jackfruit. The flaky, stringy, melting flesh of the [...]
Flamboree review: The tarte flambée touches down in London June 11, 2019 The first tarte flambée restaurant in London, Flamboree! has got an exclamation mark right there in the name, meaning you’re obliged to shout it out of a window or pop a balloon every time you say it. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves: what exactly is a tarte flambée? And why should [...]
