Ben Lazarus | The Spectator columnists & writers

Every few months I take out a box of essential oils and carefully lay them out on my kitchen table, organising them in order from sweet-smelling to musty. On the left will be scents like juniper berry, lime, frankincense and bergamot; in the middle, woodish fragrances such as sandalwood and cedarwood; on the right, the darker stuff of patchouli and pine needle – and occasionally, when I’m feeling brave in my endeavour to make the perfect beard oil, lavender. Next I fill several large vials with a mixture of carrier oils, usually almond, jojoba and argan (and normally with almond making up the bulk as it’s the cheapest). I then begin mixing in various essential oils: a dash here, a dash there. There’s no science to my method, just free-pouring and nose work, as I bob around like some sort of Willy Wonka-style perfumier.

Harlan Coben on David Foster Wallace, writing the perfect book and becoming a Netflix sensation

‘There are two kinds of writers,’ Harlan Coben says with a grin. ‘There are those who, one day, hope to see their books on screen, and there are those who are lying to you.’ Coben, a New York Times best-selling crime writer, knows how fortunate he is. You can’t flick through Netflix without seeing trailers for one of his shows with their short and punchy titles: The Woods, The Stranger, Safe. The stories might not win Pulitzers, but the plot twists and murders of Coben’s suburban noir are wildly popular. Netflix has signed him to an unprecedented 14-show deal; ten have already been made for British, American, Polish, French and Spanish audiences. Yet Coben shied away from the movie business until later in his career.

The algorithm myth: why the bots won’t take over

Google once believed it could use algorithms to track pandemics. People with flu would search for flu-related information, it reasoned, giving the tech giant instant knowledge of the disease’s prevalence. Google Flu Trends (GFT) would merge this information with flu tracking data to create algorithms that could predict the disease’s trajectory weeks before governments’ own estimates. But after running the project for seven years, Google quietly abandoned it in 2015. It had failed spectacularly. In 2013, for instance, it miscalculated the peak of the flu season by 140 per cent. According to the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, this is a good example of the limitations of using algorithms to surveil and study society.

‘Prince Charles is more socialist than the Labour party’: an interview with Nigel Kennedy

‘If I needed a guide to go up a mountain, I’d choose someone who knew the way,’ says Nigel Kennedy. ‘So if someone is telling me what to do, they’d better know a little bit more than me.’ In September, Kennedy’s Jimi Hendrix tribute at the Royal Albert Hall was cancelled after organisers Classic FM deemed it ‘unsuitable for our audience’. It still rankles: ‘I reckon I know more about my particular art form than some guy sitting behind his desk,’ says Kennedy, ‘and so I can’t quite take it when people start saying what is classical music and what isn’t. To me, Hendrix’s “Little Wing” is a kind of Celtic-sounding melody. I do it in a Vaughan Williams-esque type of way so it’s very classical. In fact, my rendition of The Four Seasons would have been much more raunchy and less classical than the Jimi Hendrix stuff.

Plain packaging of cigarettes is based on pseudoscience and speculation

It has been a bad week for smokers. In yet another skirmish in the war against the vice, it was announced late last night that the British government is pressing ahead with Soviet-style plain packaging of cigarettes, despite Cameron’s decision to shelve the policy in July. Australia is the only country currently with plain packaging, after enacting it in December 2012. The results have been less than impressive. Indeed, as I wrote about earlier this month for the Telegraph , the accountancy firm KPMG released a report on 4 November, which highlighted how the Australian government has lost $1 billion Australian dollars in the 12 months ended in June, as a consequence of the vast jump in black market sales of cigarettes.

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