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It’s hard work having fun: Wives Like Us, by Plum Sykes, reviewed

18 May 2024 9:00 am

A ride with friends involves dressing to the nines and stopping at a Marie Antoinette-style ‘hameau’ for sloe-gin cocktails – served by uniformed staff and filmed for Instagram

Are smartphones making us care less about humanity?

11 November 2023 9:00 am

Generation Z were the first to grow up attached to smartphones. They spent their adolescence bathed in screen-light and now…

Alienatingly sweet and warm: BBC2's The Newsreader reviewed

30 July 2022 9:00 am

When TV makes shows about TV, it rarely has a good word to say for itself. In the likes of…

The Facebook empire is beginning to crumble

6 October 2021 6:43 pm

When empires crumble they slide slowly at first, then the temple walls come crashing down. Facebook is not quite at…

The artists ensnared by the capitalist system they affect to despise

24 April 2021 9:00 am

Stuart Jeffries on the artists ensnared by the capitalist system they affect to despise

The most important book on black Britishness has one flaw: its author was white

3 October 2020 9:00 am

Can people of one race really understand the experience of another? asks Colin Grant

Takes us deep into an unknown world: Channel 4’s Inside Missguided reviewed

15 August 2020 9:00 am

If it’s a test of a good documentary series that it takes us deep into an unknown, even unimaginable world,…

Debra Messing

Biden’s half-baked celebrity world

7 July 2020 4:18 am

Remember how all those celebrity endorsements worked out for Hillary Clinton in 2016? In the end, it seems, even a…

The new trend for ‘gender reveal’ parties sums up the mood of the past decade

21 December 2019 9:00 am

OMG, the end of the decade is almost here, which means it’s time to start reflecting on what on earth…

‘Instapoetry’ may be popular, but most of it is terrible

23 November 2019 9:00 am

Poetry is on a hot streak. Last year, sales in the UK topped £12 million for the first time —…

Be more carthorse: why we would all benefit from a little self-loathing

16 November 2019 9:00 am

Leaving the auditorium of the Royal Opera House last week after The Sleeping Beauty, I passed a woman taking selfie…

The truth about food photography

2 November 2019 9:00 am

While looking at the photographs of food in this humorous exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, I thought of how hopelessly…

Cast off: how knitters turned nasty

28 September 2019 9:00 am

At first glance, Nathan Taylor might seem the very definition of a ‘right on’ hipster. He goes by the name…

Snog a Tory: Why you should learn to step outside your comfort zone

18 May 2019 9:00 am

Ew! Are you squeamish? Are you grossed out by meat, by fish, by eggs, by scales and suckers and shells…

Everything is now an Instagram photo op

10 November 2018 9:00 am

On Sunday morning, in Puy-en-Velay, I climbed the 275 volcanic steps to the tiny chapel of Rocher Saint-Michel d’Aiguilhe. There,…

Fantastic beasts and where to find them: ‘Wild Woman with Unicorn’, 1500–10

A brief history of unicorns

22 September 2018 9:00 am

After the England football team beat Tunisia at this summer’s World Cup, they celebrated with a swimming-pool race on inflatable…

A choice of first novels

5 August 2017 9:00 am

Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your…

Dear Mary

22 July 2017 9:00 am

Q. Last summer a friend of my brother-in-law’s house-sat for us while we were in Greece for a week. We…

The sad decline of the teenage snog

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Sometimes I sit my nieces down and treat them to tales of dating in the dark ages, before iPhones arrived…

Dear Mary: How can we make our dinner guests go?

29 October 2015 9:00 am

Q. Many of our best and oldest friends have done so well they have stopped work. Meanwhile my husband still…

I found the future of privacy among the treasures of Venice

5 September 2015 9:00 am

Almost all of Venice’s greatest treasures are on public view. Anyone who visits can look across from the Doge’s Palace…

Why I joined the smiley-face cult

6 June 2015 9:00 am

Why my generation has fallen for the smiley-face cult

‘Modern Family’, 2014, byEd Fornieles,at Chisenhale Gallery

‘Likes’, lacquered cherry pies and Anselm Kiefer: the weird world of post-internet art

27 September 2014 8:00 am

In the mid-1990s the art world got excited about internet art (or ‘net.art’, as those involved styled it). This new…