Culture

Competition

Design an Economist cover

Test your design skills

Into the woods

Sex and Snow White: how Grimm should children’s books be?

The German authors suggest very, but today trends run the opposite way

Thinking outside the God complex

Are mystics kooks or valuable disrupters?

A realist’s refreshing take on mysticism

No crime, plenty of punishment

Jimmy Lai’s trial is a headline-worthy example of injustice

A new biography aims to keep the public’s attention on the pro-democracy tycoon

Back Story

Ovation inflation has spread from Broadway to London’s West End

Why do dud plays get standing ovations?

Going soft

Millennials and Gen Z are falling hard for stuffed animals

Plushies are cute, cuddly and costly

Free speech in France

Ten years after the Charlie Hebdo attack, satire is under siege

Public support is waning for the right to offend

Sympathy for the devil

Why do rebels and revolutionaries love “Paradise Lost”?

John Milton’s epic poem has galvanised rabble-rousers for centuries

Luces, cámara, acción!

The Colombian powerhouse behind some of streaming’s biggest hits

If you enjoyed “Narcos” or “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, you have Dynamo to thank

Strange and familiar places

What Haruki Murakami’s fans get wrong about him

He is not so much a surrealist as a dogged observer of solitude

Salt of the earth

The British take their crisps more seriously than any other nation

No other snack bridges the class divide in the same way

Festival of lights, stars and stripes

There is more to Hanukkah gifts than meets the eye

How American Jews reshaped an ancient, minor holiday