Steve Hogarty

Shortly after the turn of the century the former mayor of Quito, Roque Sevilla, bought up a vast chunk of the Ecuadorian cloud forest from a local logging company, and turned the land into one of the largest privately owned conservation areas in the country.
Somewhere in the centre of it all, on the site of a defunct sawmill, he built Mashpi Lodge, a $10 million box in the dense jungle that’s part futuristic research station and part 24-room boutique hotel.

Last year, Paul Whitehouse appeared alongside his lifelong friend Bob Mortimer in Gone Fishing, a BBC Two show in which the comedians travelled the riverbanks of the UK in search of rare species of fish. In contrast to an increasingly bleak news cycle, it was relentlessly genial television, uncomplicated, familiar, cheerful and good-natured.

Seems like Google really took criticism of the Pixel 4’s short battery life to heart. The new flagship, 5G enabled Pixel 5 is the longest lasting phone I’ve used since my old Nokia 3310. Like some demented Duracell bunny, it simply refuses to die.

Exhibitions about videogames frequently land wide of the mark. Either they’re bogged down in dusty arcade nostalgia – that decades old aesthetic of Pac-Man pixel art and bleepy chiptunes that just won’t go away – or they have the desperate air of a culturally sidelined medium crying out to be taken seriously by art critics.

The Brompton is a magical object. The most popular bike in Britain, it appears to defy several laws of physics when it folds in on itself, collapsing like a neutron star into the size of something approaching a sugar cube.

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 centuries, Fatt Pundit is bringing it to the Instagram masses.

A wealthy author of best-selling murder mystery novels is found dead in his study on the morning after his 85th birthday, his throat cut in an apparent suicide. His family, a viper’s nest of self-serving narcissists played by an ensemble cast of Hollywood A-listers, all have their own motives, and so it’s up to the incredible sleuthing powers of the world famous Detective Benoit Blanc to crack the case before the killer strikes again.

Having spent a lot of time on planes, I like to think I’ve gained a basic understanding of the principles of flight. I once saw that diagram of air molecules going over a wing to create an upwards pointing arrow labelled “lift” and thought, hmm, yes, that makes intuitive sense to me.

Air travel, it’s easy to forget, is arcane magic. We strap ourselves into big metal tubes to be voluntarily catapulted thousands of feet into the sky, a place where there’s free sour cream and onion flavoured pretzels and tiny bottles of vodka, and where we’re furious when the wifi doesn’t work.

Fish are basically the potatoes of the ocean. And potatoes are just a kind of fish that lives in the dirt. When these two edible stewards of the underworld come together we call it fish and chips, and nowhere is the pairing better exemplified than at Golden Union.

Ostensibly a 50-minute long children’s show in which a series of realistically animated and life-size dinosaur puppets stomp around on stage, Dinosaur World Live at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is, beneath the veneer of Jurassic spectacle, an unflinching treatise on the irreversible effects of climate change, and the energy industry’s plundering of the remaining fossil fuel resources of developing Polynesian nations.

The first time I rode a moped, I immediately crashed it into a parked car near my house. Just ramped up onto the pavement like Steve McQueen and smashed into a Fiesta, causing several pounds worth of damage. I was 15 years of age, which is so long ago now that no policeman can arrest me for it.

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the very first electric bikes were as big as houses, cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and needed to be recharged every 300ft.
But since their advent, the underlying technology has been continually refined and improved.

Shadow of the Colossus was a quiet epic, launched at a time when games were predominantly about things exploding loudly in your face. In this minimalist and melancholic saga, you ride your faithful horse across a vast wilderness to track down and slay 16 enormous stone giants. The world, desolate and littered with the collapsed remains of some long-fallen civilisation, is soundtracked only by howling winds and the thud of your steed’s hooves.

The bright yellow King logo above the entrance to a London office on Wardour Street must trigger some kind of Pavlovian response in the pedestrians who pass by it every day. King is the studio responsible for Candy Crush, which is less a game than a global phenomenon. Since its launch in 2012, games in the Candy Crush franchise have been downloaded 2.73bn times, and 1.1tn rounds have been played.