Culture

Electioneering

How podcasts came to rule America’s campaign conversation

Cosy chats have replaced hard-hitting interviews

The queen of kawaii

Hello Kitty, still cute at 50

The face that launched a thousand products

The Economist watches

The best film and TV featuring fictional American elections

Escape from the real-life drama of November 5th by watching these titles

Back to black

Goth culture has returned from the dead

Gen Z is embracing the doom and gloom

The theory of evolution

Darwin and Dawkins: a tale of two biologists

One public intellectual has spent his career defending the ideas of the other

A Mexican wave

Made in Mexico: why the new Hollywood is south of the border

Streamers and audiences can’t get enough Mexican drama

You look so familiar

Can there ever be another great le Carré novel?

John le Carré’s son has written a bold new thriller in the vein of the great spy writer’s chronicles

Sexy time

Is the idea of sexual identity relatively new?

A new history of American sexuality argues that it is

The setting Son?

Softbank’s gambling founder, Masayoshi Son, is catnip for authors

But readers will remember him as much for his missteps as for his successes

Opposing Putin’s tyranny

In a posthumous memoir, Alexei Navalny chronicles his martyrdom

“Patriot”, by the murdered Russian opposition leader, will be seen as a historic text

Why do you Tok like that?

TikTok is changing how Gen Z speaks

On social media new words spread far and fast

Back Story

What the row over Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book reveals about free speech

The deep message of “The Message” is about narrow-mindedness, not Israel