Sathnam Sanghera

Dec 4, 2024 | thetimes.com | James Marriott |Caitlin Moran |Hilary Rose |Sathnam Sanghera

Spotify Wrapped — the personalised round-up given to every customer on their listening habits — is, above all, a genius marketing campaign. Despite all the reports about the breadcrumbs artists receive for their work from the streaming service and the subsequent squeezing out of musicians from the industry, every winter, the moment Wrapped drops has the joyous fever of Christmas Day.

Dec 1, 2024 | thetimes.com | Sathnam Sanghera

There’s not much in the way of good news around at the moment, but some comes via the North American division of Korean car manufacturer Hyundai: the button is making a comeback. Fighting the fashion to plaster every surface of every car dashboard with touch screens, the manufacturer has said it’s bringing back old-fashioned switches. Focus groups told them people get “stressed, annoyed and steamed when they want to control something in a pinch but are unable to do so”.

Nov 3, 2024 | thetimes.com | Sathnam Sanghera

If you want sympathy in 2024, don’t fall ill or get fired, lose your mobile phone. I left mine on a seat on the London Underground the other day, having only just replaced one I’d broken, and was struck by how keen people were to help. A member of staff at Shepherd’s Bush station lent me their own phone to ring it, to see if anyone had picked it up. A security guy at Tiffany at Westfield, where I thought I’d tracked it down to, asked each member of staff if they’d seen it.

Nov 1, 2024 | thetimes.com | Hanif Kureishi |Sathnam Sanghera

A few months after Hanif Kureishi had a fall that left him unable to move his limbs, he was visited by a friend bearing an envelope of photographs. It included one taken of the writer in 1993 at a book-signing for his first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia. It showed him sporting a Levi’s jacket that he still owned; otherwise he could barely recognise himself. His fashionable long hair was pinned behind his ears, light was illuminating the smooth skin on his “pixie-like” face.

Oct 6, 2024 | thetimes.com | Sathnam Sanghera

My most self-defeating personal habit is keeping an electronic diary of work and social commitments but then, on the day itself, only half-glancing at it, or failing to consult it at all. It results in all sorts of entirely avoidable mayhem, not least the decision to attend a party at the British Museum the other day.