consumerism
Is China riding for a fall?
Dan Wang contrasts the dynamism of China’s physical engineering programme with the madness of its social engineering – the one-child policy threatening to prove a demographic disaster
Selling out
Stuart Jeffries on the artists ensnared by the capitalist system they affect to despise
Designer fatigue
Different concepts of luxury may be inferred from a comparison of the wedding feast of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault…
Fashion statement
Clothes with slogans on them are a sure sign of a bore
Everything is merde
Graham Robb on the book currently taking France by storm
The mystery of festivals
I wouldn’t describe myself as a veteran of the summer festival circuit, but I’ve been to enough to have a…
Modern-day Leviathans
If a time traveller were to arrive in our world from, say, 1514 — a neat half-millennium away — what…
