Culture Archives

New Yorkers don’t get DC

I was in New York all summer, making a big fuss about DC to all those sophisticated cosmopolitans. They think it’s boring. They assume it’s full of squares and policy nerds and they’re right, but that characterization doesn’t do the capital justice. It’s my job as a Washington ambassador to accurately portray the city to the snobbish coastal elites, even to sex it up a bit (though it really doesn’t need my help in this respect). Regardless, it’s a job I take seriously. The obvious hook is, of course, espionage. Espionage is chock-full of charge and my choice motifs are all borrowed from the weighty catalogs of 007 and Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal – wiretapping, martinis, guns, honeypots.

September 3, 2026

John-Paul Heil

Wendell Berry’s homecoming

Wendell Berry, who died Monday aged 92, was a man who loved the soil and the soul. Writing from Kentucky, where his family has lived and farmed for generations, Berry built up, over more than sixty years, a corpus of fiction, non-fiction and poetry – all genres in which he distinguished himself – which, when taken as whole, reveals a profound and coherent philosophy of the earth and how it relates to human community. Unfortunately, the average person probably doesn’t know who Berry is. Even those who have heard of him might only know his incendiary 1987 Harper’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” or his watershed 1977 takedown of maximalist agricultural practices, The Unsettling of America.

September 2, 2026

Nate Hanrahan

Why Wendell Berry mattered

Like most adults who write their thoughts down regularly, I was raised in a home by a mother who maintained piles of books strewn around the house. There were more books than anyone in our home could read combined, but you could find our favorites open on tabletops and dressers with a pencil, or another book, pinned in them to hold a page. Most of these books that were propped open were my mother’s and they included dozens of Wendell Berry’s works. I slowly absorbed a version of Berry’s way of thinking: through reading, through my mom’s infatuation with his work, through osmosis as I watched Cartoon Network next to open copies of Hannah Coulter and What are People For? Berry has begun to suffer the same literary fate as C.S.

Robert Jackman

‘Clean cocaine’ isn’t worth it

Cocaine has a tendency to get the press all aflutter. So it's probably no surprise that the Daily Mail had a splash earlier this summer with a feature about a legal energy supplement compared – at least in the headline – to “clean cocaine.” What on earth is this product, I wondered. It turns out that the reality is slightly less dramatic than the tabloids might suggest: Wildkraut – also known as Energy Sniff – is a powdered supplement from Austria which combines the dosage of caffeine you might otherwise get from a Red Bull with some esoteric alpine herbs. The one thing that it does have in common with cocaine is that it is intended to be snorted. As someone more than partial to energy drinks, I was immediately curious.

Gary Dexter

Why the Japanese don’t need fat jabs

“You can never be too rich or too thin”: so said Wallis Simpson, would-be consort to Edward VIII. Or perhaps Dorothy Parker. Or perhaps Joan Rivers. No one really knows. But whoever said it, Japan appears to have had it engraved on its national escutcheon. Japan is officially the world’s thinnest rich country, with an obesity rate of just 4.3 percent of the population. By comparison, it’s 40 percent in the US. A close comparison to Japan is Bangladesh, where the rate is 4.5 percent – but where one in ten people is dangerously undernourished. These are extraordinary statistics. What on earth is going on? The most reached-for reason is diet. Japanese food, so it is thought, is healthy and lean.

September 1, 2026

Julie Burchill

Real men don’t look like Clavicular

One of my favorite one-I-made-earlier aphorisms is “Men are the sum of their parts; women are some of their parts.” But now I’m wondering if it’s a bit out of date. When I thought it up, women were the only ones who bothered with “tweakments” and cosmetic surgery and generally turning themselves into living dolls, hoping to hook what in the common parlance is known as “a live one.” But now, with transplants for receding hairlines and male film stars no longer looking like their passport photos, I don’t think this is true anymore. Becoming a “lad” once meant swerving Sports Day, drinking beer and generally letting oneself go Where there is still a gap in male and female attitudes to looks is in dieting.

August 26, 2026

Matthew Bowles

Gen Z are falling in love with Morrissey

There is a Smiths lyric for almost every moment. Whether it’s telling a friend that their jokes just aren’t funny anymore or being herded into the corner of a club and contemplating hanging the DJ, every song that contains Morrissey’s melodramatic teenage misery becomes useful vocabulary for the most mundane scenarios. Including visiting troops in Ukraine, as the British Prime Minister proved earlier this week. Gen Z is proving rather less doctrinaire about culture than previous generations Perhaps that is just one reason that helps explain why, more than 40 years after The Smiths first appeared, they are finding a new audience among those who were not even alive when the band split up, let alone released their first album.

August 25, 2026

Philip Patrick

Why climate skeptics are winning

Travis Cook is a man on a mission. Armed with just a sandwich board (“There is no Climate Crisis”), an array of literature and formidable scientific knowledge, the 32-year-old former mechanical engineer is on a 1000-mile walk around the UK to talk to people and try to dispel the climate gloom that we are customarily bombarded with. His is a message of climate realism (what the BBC might call “climate denialism”) and of hope. Far from being the lost cause this might once have seemed, he believes his message is beginning to be accepted. Fight the battles you can win “I love it,” he tells me of his daily interactions (he was at Hayling Island in Hampshire when we spoke). “It’s a good news message, so it’s easy to deliver, and it brings me joy.

August 21, 2026

Dot Wordsworth

Does Yogi Bear have a connection to yoga?

“Well, we all have areas of ignorance,” said my husband with a little too much relish, I thought. He was responding to my admission that I had reached a ripe old age without realizing that the words yoga and yoke had the same origin. Yoke has been used in English for more than 1,000 years and yoga only since about 1785, but it had been in use in Sanskrit since the first millennium BC. The meaning of yoga was held to be either the yoking and reining in of the senses, or the yoking and joining oneself to the Prana (life force), the Om (absolute) and the Universe.

Sophia Money-Coutts

If we allow dogs at weddings, why not a python?

Three women in my Tuesday weights class are getting married. While we squat and thrust and fling our kettlebells around, there’s nonstop talk of veils, decorations, modes of transport to the venue and whether anyone eats wedding cake these days. Men are allowed in this weights class but, oddly, none ever shows up. The major update from one of the brides this week was that the local register office had given permission for her dog to attend the ceremony. She duly bought “a little tux” for Badger, so he could look the part. How do we feel about dogs at weddings?

Richard Bratby

A much-deserved revival of John McCabe, a formidable British composer

Grade: B+ “Cheltenham Symphonies”, they used to call them – a catch-all term for the kind of large-scale, traditionally inclined postwar works that found a natural home at the Cheltenham Music Festival. But it was also a sneer: a dig at the supposedly parochial nature of British music in the 1960s and 1970s. Over in Europe, the avant-garde was doing whizzy things with Marxism and electronics. British music, went the narrative, was suburban, outdated and drab. Now listen to John McCabe’s Third Symphony of 1978. McCabe’s orchestration is as gorgeous as a bird of paradise; it shimmers like the colors on the surface of a bubble. Not that there’s anything fragile about McCabe’s musical engineering.

Dennis Duncan

How a young inventor with no printing experience revolutionized the newspaper world

Here’s a quiz for you. On the third floor of the New York Public Library is a vast mural painted by Edward Laning in the 1930s. It’s called “The Story of the Recorded Word” and it’s divided into four scenes, each one a pivotal stage in the development of writing. Can you guess what they are? I daresay you managed to picture something resembling the third scene: a bearded Johannes Gutenberg showing off a page of type from his new invention, the printing press. I think you might have got the second one, too: a medieval monk, with quills and inkpot, copying out a manuscript in his scriptorium. Perhaps, if you’re religiously inclined, you even guessed the first: Moses receiving the Ten Commandments carved into stone. But what about the fourth scene?

August 20, 2026

Damian Thompson

Apple Music has redeemed itself

Just two weeks ago I was ready to cancel my subscription to Apple Music. I’d stumbled across its “Composer Essentials” – a list of 100 composers so significant that they merit their own curated playlists. It includes Bonds, Boyle, Caccini, Dawson, Dett, Perry, Poldowski, Sohy, Strohl and Walker. If those names don’t ring a bell, how about the composers who are missing? Albéniz, C.P.E. Bach, Bellini, Berg, Bizet, Borodin, Chabrier, Kodály, Martinu, Messiaen, Mussorgsky, Nielsen, Poulenc, Schoenberg, Walton, Weber and Webern. See what I mean? The “Essentials” list is stuffed with DEI hires. Which – an analogy to Cambridge University comes to mind – does no favors to the black and female composers who deservedly feature in it, such as Joplin and Beach.

August 19, 2026

Alexander Larman

What happened to Will Self?

It is usually taken as a given, for better or worse, that the Grand Old Men of English letters tend to move, if not necessarily to the right, to an accommodation with conservatism and the status quo as they grow older. It is, after all, harder to rail against the establishment when you have been weighed down with CBEs, honorary doctorates and the adulation that comes from being a much-loved writer. However, nobody seems to have told this to the novelist, polemicist and one-time enfant terrible Will Self, and the results have been, depending on your perspective, either disappointing or bleakly amusing. Self has published an extraordinary 7,000-odd word open letter to Andy Burnham on his X account, as part of what he calls his “Sitreps.

Daniel Seifert

How corporate twaddle makes us less productive

Bandwidth is troubling, because it’s just one of many phrases that assume we are mere cogs in the machine Allow me to totter onto my rickety soapbox for a second, and say: business jargon has gone too far. Buzzwords have become so entrenched into working life that they have, in effect, become a second language. One that, like a much-needed laxative, we are forced to digest to keep daily operations running smoothly. If you don’t use (or at least nod energetically along with) phrases like “low-hanging fruit” or suggest that someone “circle back” so that you can “create synergy,” and instead choose to communicate like an unlobotomized person, you’ll find yourself a virtual pariah.

Mark Nayler

The car crash appeal of Charles Bukowski

My reading experiences with the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski (1920-94), once described by Time magazine as the “laureate of American lowlife,” have taught me an important truth about literature: that characters you hate can be at least as compelling as those you admire. Take Henry Chinaski, the depressive, alcoholic protagonist of Bukowski’s five semi-autobiographical novels (he wrote six in total, as well as hundreds of poems and short stories). One of these in particular I have read so many times that the jacket is falling off: Women (1978), in which Bukowski’s alter-ego Chinaski enjoys – if that’s the right word – the rewards of literary fame after decades of obscurity.

August 10, 2026

James Delingpole

I suspect a lot of TV is AI-generated

AI slop is not a new phenomenon. But it is becoming more prevalent as the lazy, the modish and the subliterate take advantage of an apparently beneficial and cost-free leap in technology that will save them the time and effort formerly required to construct a speech, résumé, article or image. I only started picking up on it myself quite recently. But now, when I get the feeling I’m being fed AI-generated pictures, I react like those dogs in the movies that are trained to spot Terminators. Thanks to the proliferation of sites such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, etc., there’s an awful lot of cable-TV slop about these days, as there has to be with all that space to fill, all those subscription costs to justify.

August 9, 2026

Emily Rhodes

Reveling in the music of words

There’s a chapter in this mostly illuminating and occasionally irritating book in which the author – the award-winning writer of The Hours and other acclaimed novels – explains why he no longer reads reviews of his work. The decision was prompted first by an “excoriating” hatchet job by Michiko Kakutani, erstwhile lead literary critic of the New York Times. “A worse review is difficult to imagine,” Cunningham notes, claiming that he has “mostly repressed the memory” of its contents, though he does share his rather macabre plan for revenge: to slip a copy of the book into her coffin so that “extra-terrestrial archaeologists” will assume she wanted to be buried with it.

August 8, 2026

James Walton

The new Spider-Man is a triumph of Hollywood professionalism

Remember Peter Parker? By the end of the last installment of the Spider-Man movies, No Way Home, we were the only ones who could. Following a complicated but deft collision of multiverses, young Peter (Tom Holland) had realized that the only way to save the world (again) was by getting Doctor Strange to cast a spell that made everybody – including his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) – forget that he’d ever been Spider-Man. He therefore began his Brand New Day alone in his apartment with only a highly evolved piece of AI for company. Sure, he’d returned to his roots of capturing local crooks by the dozen. But while this restored the hero status that J.

Catriona Olding

Tears and terror on the front line of the French wildfires

Provence As soon as I opened my front door I could smell it. Along the path, flakes of white ash landed on my arms. Looking north beyond the cliff, I saw a rapidly increasing plume of brown-black smoke. Before long it filled a third of the sky. Not again. Ten years ago, almost to the day, the concrete shack I was renting in the woods a few miles from the village was almost engulfed. Jeremy was having a break and staying with me when a wildfire broke out in the valley below. The smoke and flames looked about a quarter of a mile away and firefighting Canadairs flew low overhead. Friends told us to leave but I refused. I’d left everything behind in Scotland 18 months before and couldn’t face doing so again. Jeremy asked if he’d have to knock me out and throw me over his shoulder.

Ella Veakins

There’s no excuse for a plastic plant

Monstera deliciosa, otherwise known as the Swiss cheese plant, is perhaps the most popular houseplant of them all, probably because it’s so easy to care for. In normal circumstances, you almost have to try to mess it up. A heatwave, however, can put a monstera under stress. Subject one to warm weather for too long and you’ll find its poor leaves scorched, its roots damaged and its stems desperately dehydrated. For this reason, you might feel the temptation to turn to a shockingly popular alternative: the plastic plant. It should be resisted at all costs. A potted history takes us back to the 1950s, when a postwar manufacturing boom saw the mass production of cheap polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene.

August 7, 2026

Andrew Wilson

Why Marilyn Monroe is still as big a celebrity as ever

Marilyn Monroe would have celebrated her 100th birthday this year. My new biography of her begins with this story: she’s walking with a friend down Park Avenue dressed in a raincoat and sunglasses and without make-up. As the crowds stream past her, nobody gives her a second glance. Then she turns to her friend and asks, “Do you want to see me be her?” Without changing her hair or dress, the transformation begins and, after making some kind of inner psychological adjustment, she morphs from an ordinary woman into Marilyn Monroe, superstar. As her friend, the actress Susan Strasberg, recalled: “There she was – not the simple girl I’d been strolling with, but ‘Marilyn Monroe,’ resplendent, ready for her public. Now heads turned. People crowded around her.

August 6, 2026

Rory Sutherland

My top tips for Andy Burnham

I am cautiously optimistic about Britain’s new leader. For one thing, the fact that Andy Burnham went to Cambridge not Oxford, did not study PPE, is not a lawyer and did not grow up in Surrey makes him something of a diversity-hire among our more recent prime ministers. This gives us hope. It is a near-universal law of problem-solving that you cannot think your way out of problems using the same mindset that created them in the first place. One tip: government needs a marketing function. Rather than explaining itself to the public, it has endlessly sought to cadge publicity by ingratiating itself with the news media. As all journalists since Watergate are largely motivated by discrediting those in power, this is hopeless.

Nicholas Shakespeare

‘A selfish, ignoble person’ – the dark side of the Nobel prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa

In October 2010, when Gabriel García Márquez, by then suffering from dementia, was told that his former friend and rival had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he inquired: “Who is Mario Vargas Llosa?” This tottering, always compulsive biography of the writer who died last year, which has taken 15 years to write (“I completely miscalculated its complications”) is Gerald Martin’s valiant answer. “Is there a life quite like this one anywhere in the western world in the second half of the 20th century?” In Martin’s breathless judgment, “this literary adventurer, politician, diplomat and warrior all rolled into one” was a single-minded workhorse whose sheer intensity, quality and variety of life was “almost literally incredible.

August 5, 2026

Graeme Thomson

Is Music, Fashion, Film really the best Charli xcx can do?

Of the three creative pursuits that give Charli xcx’s eighth album its title, the English pop star seems least interested in the first. She admits as much on “Camera,” the best song on Music, Fashion, Film, which makes clear her obsession with acting and a desire to pursue it more fully. “Do I want to make music?” she asks herself. “Am I being fucking stupid if I try to be a girl on the screen and I’m turning 34?” Even without this clue – which, like much of the album, is presented via the singer throwing out rhetorical spiel more or less unexpurgated – it is no great stretch to surmise that the pursuit of making music is struggling to fully hold her attention.

August 3, 2026

William Cash

Why I need literary Viagra

“No man is a success to himself” wrote Graham Greene. I am feeling this acutely, as I turn 60 on September 1st and enter the Decade of Reckoning for uncomfortable life truths. As somebody whose literary ambition was only wanting to be a bestselling English social novelist, it’s been creeping up on me that if one hasn't written that Big Novel by one's sixth decade, then perhaps throwing in the quill is the only dignified thing to do. In a desk drawer in my study, there is a cream envelope, postmarked September 1987. That August, I found myself sitting two tables from the Graham Greene in Chez Feliz, a fish restaurant just inside the walls of the old Antibes port.  He was 82, and lunching with his mistress Yvonne Cloetta.

July 25, 2026

Alexander Larman

The greatness of Sam Neill

The recent death of the actor Sam Neill, at the age of 78, was greeted with a mixture of surprise, sorrow and, in many quarters, unexpected grief. It is likely that Neill would have regarded the lavish tributes paid to him by actors, filmmakers and politicians with a mixture of embarrassment and quiet pride, because although he was a brilliantly versatile actor who managed to make a deep impression in virtually every role that he undertook over his five-decade-long career, he was also someone instinctively uncomfortable with the limelight.

July 24, 2026

Ian Sansom

The appeal of asymmetry: Contrapposto, by Dave Eggers, reviewed

There are novelists who seem to spend their entire careers either apologizing for being themselves or trying to become someone else entirely. And then there’s Dave Eggers, who has spent much of the last quarter century trying – and, it has to be said, as far as one can tell, very happily succeeding – to become Dave Eggers. Ever since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius appeared in 2000, fulfilling almost entirely the audacious promise of its title, Eggers has occupied that peculiarly American position of being not simply Yet Another Novelist, but the Guy, the Man, the yardstick by which all others might be judged and found wanting. He’s a publisher, campaigner, literacy activist, editor, artist, children’s author, philanthropist and impresario.

Sean Thomas

British men should lean into their evil reputation

I was about 19 years old and threatening to kill myself with a Bic disposable razor (not easy: I was bluffing) when I realized that Women Love Bastards. The revelation arrived like this. I was a heartbroken student, having been dumped by, ah, let's call her Emilia. For months I mooned about, bereft, wondering why Emilia had chucked me when I was so NICE – attentive, gift-giving, loyal. Then a good female friend – bless her wicked heart – took me aside and said: "Sean, girls don't like nice. They like a guy with swagger. Stubble. Slightly mean." She sighed. "I think we prefer bastards, if I'm honest." Putting down the razor, I picked up her advice, and I have used it ever since. I’m happy to say it works.