Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

Friday

Catriona Olding

Make mine a Moka pot

It’s strange the things that can trigger amity or affection. At the beginning of the capsule/pod coffee-maker craze, when George Clooney, with his come-to-bed eyes, was seducing the world with Nespresso machines, I bonded with my eldest daughter’s Italian boyfriend over the Bialetti Moka pot. Notwithstanding the expense and waste of the capsule coffee makers, I need at least three pods to get the lights on in my head in the morning. I’ve never had a good coffee from any of them. Contrast that with the cute, economical, environmentally friendly little Moka, the smallest of which – one cup – costs about $30 and, depending on the quality and freshness

Thursday

Sean Thomas

AI porn will spawn a nation of addicts

If there is one safe prediction we can make about 2026, it is this: public debate and global news will be dominated by artificial intelligence and the anxieties that surround it. And near the top of that swelling list of worries will be “AI porn” – the fateful collision between ever more accomplished image-making machines and humanity’s eternal appetite for audiovisual sexual stimulation. The year has barely begun and already two loud tsunami sirens have sounded. The first is the latest Grok incident. For the uninitiated, Grok is Elon Musk’s AI, conceived a couple of years ago in a fit of pique after Musk’s spectacular falling-out with OpenAI. Despite its

Jennifer Bilek

The gender hydra is about technology, not ideology

I hope this is the year people fighting the gender hydra, with its proliferation of harms across society, finally recognize that this is not a culture war. It is a war against a rapidly expanding industry built on the deconstruction of sex and, like any profitable industry, it will continue growing until it is stopped. Calling it a medical scandal, misogyny, or social contagion will not create a sustainable resistance unless people understand it as an industry. At the heart of the matter is the fact that industries in capitalist systems must expand to survive. And once they do, once a market forms, they’re near-impossible to erase. They begin to

Tuesday

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Does Spielberg’s new movie have real UFOs?

Steven Spielberg might be the most beloved and popular American director of the 20th century, but it is also unavoidably the case that, since 2005’s Munich, he has been on something of a disappointing run. While many of his films, not least The Fabelmans and West Side Story, have been critically acclaimed and Oscar-nominated, there is a growing sense that he has not made a really interesting or worthwhile picture in 20 years, with the partial exception of the enjoyable, quirky, Coen Brothers-scripted Bridge of Spies. Anyone who suffered through Ready Player One will know that Spielberg’s abilities to direct large-scale action-adventure films – once peerless – seem to have

Wednesday

Sarah Perry

Slipshod: a short story by Sarah Perry

It was months before the difficulty with Marnie and Addison was talked about, or even alluded to. The sight of their names in emails circulated around the department was enough to cause a pall to settle on everything, like ash from fires only just put out. Besides, the nature of the difficulty (that was the word we all used) was both so opaque and so distressing we’d have had trouble talking about it, even if we’d wanted to. It fell to me to piece things together. My brief from Helen was simply to satisfy the university that nobody in the department was to blame. It fell to me because I

slipshod
Katherine Dee

The terrible logic of looksmaxxing

For years, I’ve had a fantasy of destroying my own life by following every piece of extreme self-improvement advice the internet offers. Not the wholesome stuff. I mean the industrial-strength protocols: starvation diets, rhinoplasty, Invisalign followed by double-jaw surgery, chemical peels that promise an entirely new layer of skin. Whatever surfaces in the algorithmic swamp. The appeal is the same as another, more respectable fantasy: the one where a doctor scans your chart, finds The Problem and hands you a pill. You swallow it and everything clicks. Your suffering had a single, nameable, diagnosable cause. The cure might give you rashes or IBS, but who cares? You finally know what’s

looksmaxxing
David Mamet

The myth of human sacrifice

Most of us indulge in mild fortune-telling. We think “If the light changes before I count to five, I’ll get the job” or “If the solitaire hand comes out my tests will be negative’, and so on. We understand prophecy as the ability to foretell the future. But biblically, prophecy was not prediction but castigation. And prophets were those who were inspired by God to describe the present. Dr. King, Malcolm X and Charlie Kirk were modern prophets. Their lives and speech forced the populace to confront the unacceptable and obvious, which is why they were killed. Mass murderers and political assassins are incapable of facing the truth that their

david mamet
The Spectator

Portrait of the year

January For three weeks wildfires raged around Los Angeles. Perhaps 30 people were killed but 200,000 were evacuated, 18,000 homes and structures destroyed and 57,529 acres burnt. Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President. On his first day he issued about 1,500 pardons for people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol in 2021; he created the Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE), led by Elon Musk; he signed executive orders on gender and immigration and withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. The state funeral of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, was held in Washington, DC. Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire and the

Damian Thompson

The Sherlockians’ game

There is no better time to read a Sherlock Holmes story than a winter evening. As the rain lashes against the windows and the fog descends, we can imagine ourselves sitting companionably with the great detective and the good doctor around the Baker Street hearth, waiting for the step of a visitor upon the stair. Unfortunately, our 21st-century climate rarely cooperates. The rainstorm arrives when we’re far from a hearth, fighting with an umbrella that turns inside-out at the first breath of wind. And when were you last enveloped in a London fog? The savagery of the elements beating down on 221b seems to belong to another world. “It was

Revd Steve Morris

Are angels real?

One day while out walking, William Blake saw angels sitting in the trees: “bright angelic wings bespangled every bough like stars.” He was eight years old. His fascination – some have called it an obsession – with angels lasted for the rest of his life. When he sat to have his portrait painted by Thomas Phillips, the two men began to argue about who painted a better angel, Michelangelo or Raphael. Phillips, not unreasonably, suggested that since Blake had never seen even an engraving by Michelangelo, he was not qualified to give an opinion on the matter. “But I speak from the opinion of a friend who could not be

Rob Henderson and Theodore Dalrymple

What’s wrong with the West?

It is 25 years since Theodore Dalrymple published Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass. In this now famous set of essays, Dalrymple, who worked as a psychiatrist in British prisons, describes the damage done to the poorest in society by the West’s progressive middle-classes, who encourage criminals to see themselves as victims and cheer on the destruction of the traditions and norms that once guided working-class life. On the other side of the Atlantic – and the other side of the middle-class divide – the writer Rob Henderson came to the same conclusions as Dalrymple. Henderson grew up in foster care in working-class California and, as

Bridget Phetasy

I want 1989 for Christmas

Here is my list of things I’ve been fantasizing about getting for Christmas, in no particular order: encyclopedia set, piano, record player, landline. In other words, I want 1989 for Christmas. I’m yearning for an analog world. For tactile experiences. Cool piano keys I can stumble over. Encyclopedias I can flip through, getting lost in whatever the pages land on when I open the book. I yearn for the stereo sound of a record when an entire side has played, uninterrupted. I want people to have to reach me on my terms, when I’m home or available, not at any and all times. Growing up in the 1980s and 90s,

Virginia Blackburn

The joy of crossing people off your Christmas card list

It’s that time of the year again, the time when 12 months’ worth of pent-up malevolence comes flooding out, mixing malice, schadenfreude, one-upmanship and virtual punishment beatings. Yup: it’s time to start writing our Christmas cards. Has there ever been an activity better designed to bring out the worst in people than that dedicated to the season of goodwill? We all know that Christmas is a time to celebrate bitter familial enmity, but the Christmas card tradition goes one better and gets the rest of the world in on the act. This came to me as I was efficiently consulting the list of my Christmas card recipients from last year:

Garrison Keillor

How Garrison Keillor is living at 83

I’ve been having a wonderful year since I turned 83 and decided to lighten up on world affairs and let other people agonize over corruption in high places and the fate of American democracy, which concern me too. But at this age one can only take on so much. Time is running out. Time to leave the problems to the young and energetic and devote myself to writing limericks. Better to do one thing well than wave your hands and yell at a brick wall. One day an old man in ManhattanSaid at the library he sat in,“Enough politics,I’ll write limericks.So light up your pipe and put that in.” A

Sean Thomas

A West Coast World Cup road trip

I am standing inside perhaps the most sophisticated stadium ever built: a magnificent, latticed half-dome of white steel and trillion-pixel megascreens, bent over a football pitch so green it looks iced. And I am watching my least favorite sport on Earth: American football. As I guzzle citrus beer, the players take their 683rd strategic break in the ninth quarter to bring on the seventh specialist kicker for the XY-red-zone-whatever, while the crowd, unconcerned, shovels $18 hot dogs into their faces because no one has yet told them when, precisely, to cheer. So why am I here? Because next year this same stadium will throb with a very different crowd. Real

Her Majesty The Queen

Queen Camilla’s recommended reading list

As Christmas approaches and we wrack our brains to find something that suits everyone, there is no present quite like a book. Whether it’s an unputdownable novel, a heart-stopping crime series, a thought-provoking biography or a collection of beautiful poetry, a book provides an escape, the perfect antidote to the hurly-burly of everyday life and, above all, hours and hours of pleasure. Here are half a dozen of my favorites, previously recommended on my Queen’s Reading Room, which you might like to add to your Christmas present list… or (if preferred) keep for yourself! The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard This is a series of books that I return

Tuesday

Mary Wakefield

What England’s old folk songs can teach us

I grew up in the 1980s but in many ways it was more like the 1880s. We lived with my grandmother on the Northumbrian coast and the routine of our days echoed the routines of her youth, perhaps her mother’s and grandmother’s, too. We were like an elephant family in an African game park, following our matriarch around ancient migratory routes, oblivious to the rise and fall of regimes outside. Lunch (no elbows on the table), a walk to the sea, sherry time (Amontillado dry); then my grandmother and my clever younger brother would play Piquet while the children of lesser focus played with the open fire. And we sang

Monday