I've teamed up with one of the headmasters at Eton College, and we're spearheading a kind of 'slow education movement in Britain'. It's based on this idea of moving away from the fast-food approach to learning and going to something deeper, more woolly, harder to measure.

Slow down, everyone. You're moving too fast.

It's like we were moving fast, but here it's like everything is slow.

We're moving away from a credentialed society to a merit society.

We look at distant exploding stars called supernovae, and we've developed techniques to measure how far away they are and how fast they're moving away from us.

'In Praise of Slowness' chronicles the global trend towards deceleration that has come to be known as the Slow Movement. Don't worry, though: it is not a Luddite rant. I love speed. Going fast can be fun, liberating and productive. The problem is that our hunger for speed, for cramming more and more into less and less time, has gone too far.