How we are fooled by pretentious titles on art

By Tom Whipple

Damien Hirst called his breakthrough work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. If he had just called it “Shark in Formaldehyde” would he have gone on to have such a stellar career — or to have sold it for at least $8 million?

Probably not, according to a study that suggests people consider artwork to be more meaningful when it is accompanied by a “pseudo profound” title.

The research was conducted, the scientists said, to deal with a problem with which many visitors to Tate Modern might sympathise. “An experience that may be familiar READ ON

“Gravity biking,” a wild sport in which teenage boys hurtle down steep streets on bicycles at 70 m.p.h., is taking over Colombia

By Joe Parkin Daniels

As the cable cars that connect downtown Medellín – Colombia’s second city – to the hillside slums pass overhead, a band of teenage cyclists have gathered at the side of the road. Vallejuelos is a downtrodden neighbourhood, rife with crime and unemployment, but “gravity biking” is helping some kids escape their troubles.

As the name suggests, gravity biking involves steep descents. Enthusiasts strip a typical bike to its frame and build it back up from scratch. To improve descending speed (which can reportedly reach up to 77 mph), riders weld weights to their contraptions. Pedals are superfluous: to climb the hills riders hang on to passing trucks, sometimes using homemade hooks on a line. READ ON

For Gen Z: the hottest college trend? “Adulting” classes, where kids learn skills Mommy and Daddy forgot to teach them

By Lucy Holden

It’s hard to make the right decision about what to study at university. Politics or politicising Beyoncé? Computer science or the sociology of Miley Cyrus? But in the US — where these pop-starry modules were once the most-booked on campus — there’s a sexy new subject slinking on to student timetables, and it’s possibly more helpful in later life.

“Adulting” — a term for learning how to be a grown-up when you’re part of the ineptly unpractical generations Y or Z — has become one of the most oversubscribed at the University of California, Berkeley. Launched by fellow students READ ON

Brits are battling over which is better: a department store’s costly Christmas ad or a modest one for a small family-owned shop. Vote here to settle the dispute

By Stuart Heritage

Without the benefit of a Thanksgiving, Brits are forced to look elsewhere for confirmation that the holiday season is approaching. And for the last decade or so, our waypoint has been something very specific indeed: the John Lewis & Partners Christmas commercial.

It’s a strange tradition, but a tradition nonetheless. Every year the 155-year-old department store throws financial caution to the wind, offering up a sumptuous and sad Christmas delight with a budget that runs into the millions. One was about a snowman seeking out the perfect gift. Another was about a very lonely penguin. Bizarrely, one was about lonely old man who has apparently been banished to the surface of the moon READ ON

All she wants for Christmas is for you to stop sharing. Now

By Cazzie David

The holidays are upon us, and as the millennial Ebenezer Scrooge, I have some thoughts on our collective online commemorative behavior. It’s hard to know these days if Instagram is for the holidays or if the holidays are for Instagram. Either way, 2019 has felt like the most festive year yet, despite the fact that we have less to celebrate than ever before. Is that the reason? Are we trying to distract ourselves from the looming reality of our planet burning? Or is it what I fear it must be: that we’re all just dumb narcissists.

Every holiday is celebrated on Instagram, no matter how big or small. Whether it’s Siblings Day, the Fourth of July, or F READ ON

In London, obsessive fans of the show can now live in Hawkins, Indiana—and follow in the steps of Mike, Dustin, and the gang

By Simon Jablonski

Have you ever become so obsessed with a television show that you wish you could be transported to its fictional world, walk along its streets and hang out with the characters? If, like so much of the TV-watching planet, the show is Stranger Things, then Secret Cinema has made this fantasy come true.

Launched in 2007 by Fabien Riggall, Secret Cinema has created extravagant immersive experiences for a bundle of popular films, including Blade Runner, The Third Man and Casino Royale. Its outlandish productions blur the line between film and theatre: elaborate sets and mingling actors draw you into READ ON

The author of Moneyball and Liar’s Poker wants to take on climate change, but cannot find the right antihero to champion

By Danny Fortson

Sawdust and eucalyptus scent the air. Old men and young women in spandex cycle, jog and walk along a dirt track that cuts through the dried-out hills above Berkeley, California.

As the afternoon sun drops, its rays turn everything the colour of turmeric. Michael Lewis, traipsing up a hill, panting slightly, is expounding on the state of the world.

“Being pessimistic is stupid,” says the bestselling author of The Big Short and Moneyball. “I don’t feel hopeless, and part of it is because I still wouldn’t really swap places with any other time in history. You gotta remember that. If you’re pessimistic, you live the bad thing twice: once when you’re worried about it and once when it happens.” READ ON

A letter from Hong Kong

By Pico Iyer

The morning I arrived in Hong Kong four weeks ago, a 30-year-old man greeted a local district councillor with a bouquet and a grin. Then, asking if they could pose for a selfie together, he pulled out a knife and buried it just below the politician’s heart. The victim, Junius Ho, one of the most prominent pro-Beijing candidates to be thrashed in last month’s elections, had already seen his office vandalized and his parents’ grave desecrated after he’d been caught on camera laughing and shaking hands with men believed to have violently attacked the city’s ubiquitous pro-democracy demonstrators. When READ ON

General Shiba Goro did not fight in World War II, but he chose to die for it

By John Strausbaugh

In December 1945, four years after Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, an 86-year-old man, riddled by the disgrace of the emperor’s defeat, succeeded in killing himself. It was a terrible ending to a courageous life. He was by some accounts the last remaining samurai, a link to the country’s imperial past—and to a code of conduct that had endured for hundreds of years.

* * *

On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito went on Japanese radio, announcing the end of the war in the Pacific. An 86-year-old retired general, Shiba Goro, decided to commit seppuku, ritual suicide.

That in itself isn’t particularly noteworthy. Hundreds of Japanese officers at the time were deciding to follow the old samurai way of choosing honorable suicide over living in disgrace and defeat. READ ON

A dot-com entrepreneur is reviled as he tries to restore his ancestral village in Devon in the style of Silicon Valley

By Stuart Heritage

Not much happens in the tiny village of Woolsery. Home to just over a thousand residents, the parish sits on the North Devon coast in southwestern England, nine miles southwest of the seaport of Bideford (a “Little White Town,” according to its welcome signs).

It’s a quaint but unremarkable place, where life has a tendency to simply trundle along. The Young Farmers’ Club meets on the first Tuesday of every month; the Good Companions group the first Monday afternoon. If you’re quick, the parish council is handing out black trash bags this morning in the community-hall car park. Plu READ ON

Why are young British women volunteering to fight and die alongside the Kurds?

By Janine di Giovanni

Long before President Trump abandoned the Kurds in northeastern Syria earlier this autumn, leaving them vulnerable to a Turkish Army onslaught, some young British women like Tanja (her nom de guerre) had made their way to one of the most remote parts of the Middle East to fight and serve alongside Kurdish nationals.

In London, Tanja was a bike mechanic. Now the 30-year-old is a Kurdish-speaking medic who evacuates wounded civilians from the front lines, ferrying them to a hospital in Tal Tamr. Four years ago, ISIS invaded the town—a mix of Kurds and Assyrian Christians. Now it is in the path of the Turks. READ ON

Why go to the trouble of decorating when these enterprising entrepreneurs will handle the heavy lifting?

By Hattie Crisell

There’s a laid table, and then there’s a tablescape. The former might involve place mats, cutlery, napkins, salt and pepper, a candle in an old wine bottle if you’re feeling retro and a bunch of flowers if you’re pushing the boat out. The latter is more of an experience than a table. It must be visually arresting, unexpected, as beautiful as a landscape — and it has to have a theme.

Hiring the Help

There’s clearly an untapped market for this kind of thing — a mass of people who want to entertain more gorgeously, but don’t know how READ ON

German businessman who posed as an anti-Nazi martyr was actually a Hitler loyalist and wartime profiteer

By Philip Oltermann

It was an inspirational tale: after watching the horror of the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, a German man tore up his Nazi party membership card in protest and turned against the regime.

His Christian-based principles led to him being hounded by the Gestapo, sent off briefly to Dachau concentration camp and eventually dispatched to the eastern front.

In speeches, interviews and articles Germany’s most famous management consultant, Roland Berger, has cited the story of his father, Georg, as the inspiration that led the successful entrepreneur to set up a foundation and an annual €1m prize in 2008, dedicated to honouring “human dignity”. READ ON

Ferly, the digital platform that tells you everything you wanted to know about libido and “self-pleasure”

By Anna Maxted

When Billie Quinlan and Anna Hushlak were described by Forbes as “the entrepreneurs who want to bring mindfulness to your sex life”, some readers of the business magazine may have been puzzled. A sexual wellness app? What would be the point?

Yet the pair firmly believed that there was a need for a myth-busting, educational and sensual guide to sex and intimacy that aimed to do for sex what Headspace did for mindfulness — and they were right. Since they launched the digital platform Ferly this year, after securing more than £1 million from leading venture-capital firms and investors, it has acquired users in 53 countries. READ ON

In his new venture, Exit Here, Oliver Peyton brings his velvet-rope, nightlife-impresario approach to the funeral business

By Damian Whitworth

When Oliver Peyton eventually departs for the queue behind the red velvet rope at the great Atlantic Bar in the sky, the restaurateur wants his family and friends to see him off in the carefully choreographed, hedonism-laced and somewhat idiosyncratic style that has been his hallmark.

He will be buried in a biodegradable coffin in a wood in Berkshire after a small service, which will be mostly secular but involve a priest — “I’ve got a bit of Catholic in me” — and feature Jerusalem, a solo rendition of Ave Maria and Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon READ ON

A week before he was busted for petty larceny at Kmart, a man had paid $8 million for an island in the Florida Keys

By Rene Chun

On 6 April 2019, a man was arrested at the Kmart in Key West, Florida, after returning purchases for refunds. There was just one problem: the packaging he returned didn’t contain the original products.

According to the police report, his bait-and-switch scam included two coffee makers – a Keurig ($153.99) and a Hamilton Beach ($54.99). But inside the returned Keurig box was a deflated basketball, and a heavily used coffee machine was stuffed into the other box.

Reached by phone, the man denied the charge he was booked on – first-degree petit larceny, a misdemeanor that covers a theft READ ON

The night they drove old Deutschland down

By Henry Porter

The turboprop plane made a bumpy landing at Berlin Tempelhof late in the evening on Thursday, November 9, 1989. West Berlin’s airport was deserted. At the cab stand, I climbed into a Mercedes driven by an economics student named Rolfe, who spoke good English. He was listening to the car radio intently: something really big was happening. The Ossis—the East Germans—were massing at the crossing points in the Berlin Wall and walking into West Berlin. Incredibly, the Berlin Wall was open.

We headed north, to Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse, with Rolfe translating the radio news. It was clear READ ON

Rich Russian family advertises for a butler who can shimmer like Jeeves

By Stuart Heritage

Butlering doesn’t exactly look like fun. When Buckingham Palace posted a recruitment advert for a butler last week, it made the job sound absolutely gruelling. Not only was it a seven-day, 45-hours-a-week position, but the salary paid almost £1.60 an hour less than the London living wage. You would have thought that the literal queen of England might have had deeper pockets.

Much better, at least at first, is the butler vacancy recently posted to Jobs in Childcare by a wealthy Russian family, which pays three times more than the Buckingham Palace gig. However, it does come with a READ ON

Are you smart enough to compete in the European Quizzing Championships?

By Lynn Q. Yu

For most Americans, trivia as a pastime does not extend beyond maybe participating in a weekly quiz night at their local bar, where a “tough question” might require knowledge about Cliff from Cheers. But for those who live to call to mind seemingly random bits of information faster than someone else, there exists an intensely competitive world of high-level trivia tournaments, such as the European Quizzing Championships (E.Q.C.), where participants vie for domination in subjects as varied as ancient Roman history and pop music. Every year, nearly 200 people from around 25 countries participate in the E.Q.C., with the tournament culminating in the prestigious Nations Cup, a weekend-long competition in which the top four quizzers of each country face off against one another. READ ON

Thanks to the tech crowd, San Francisco is now home to more dogs than children—and the city is forever changed

By Jason Sheeler

Winnie Kenney, who moved to San Francisco from Nashville earlier this year, works at Google’s campus in downtown San Francisco. That’s nice for two reasons: she doesn’t have to commute 90 minutes each way to Mountain View on a Taylor-Swift-tour-size bus, and the Embarcadero is just across the street, offering sublime views and a two-acre park.

After lunch, Googlers like Winnie escape from the glass-enclosed conference rooms and are reminded of why they live here. They hit the salty 70-degree air clad in what’s known as Pata-Gucci: puffy base layers, stretchy cargoes, and shoes made from recycled plastic bottles, READ ON

In The Problem with Everything, Meghan Daum finds herself caught in the middle of the culture wars

By Casey Schwartz

“People told me not to write this book,” Meghan Daum said recently in a dark hotel bar in downtown Manhattan. The author and cultural critic was referring to her sixth book, The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, which was published earlier this week. Friends told her not to touch the “woke wars”—that it wasn’t worth it, that she’d be “annihilated.”

Nevertheless, she has. Daum takes on many of the most familiar battle tactics of contemporary feminism, from cancel culture’s mission to permanently mute all manner of alleged offenders to the pink pussy hats first worn at the 2017 Women’s March. (She admits they made her “cringe a little.” Maybe “smart-looking blazers” would be better?) READ ON

The Swiss school that charges around $130,000 a year to raise the future global elite

By Joseph Bullmore

You can tell a lot about a school from its most famous sons. Eton will always be defined by the flagrant smoothy and the born-to-rule—Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Anthony Eden, et al. Le Rosey is the spiritual home of the Euro gadabout and the family curse–baiter—Rothschilds, Radziwills, Rockefellers. The Dragon, meanwhile, is a petri dish for peppy actors and self-confessed attention seekers—Emma Watson, Hugh Laurie, Tom Hiddleston.

Institut auf dem Rosenberg boasts no notable alumni. That’s not because nobody went there, of course—but because almost everybody did. “Our former students are some of the most successful people in the READ ON

A trove of Hitler artifacts in Argentina shows just how many Nazis escaped justice after the war

By Lucinda Elliott

In an upmarket suburb of Buenos Aires, 6,000 miles from the racially supremacist Nazi ideology from which it derived, lay a device used to measure head size. Contained in a velvet-lined box, it will soon go on public display in Argentina as part of an exhibition of dozens of Nazi relics seized by police from an art collector’s home.

The case has ignited speculation over who has cashed in by selling such items to obviously eager buyers. All were claimed by the collector to be mere reproductions, but have since been confirmed as original Nazi-era memorabilia, valued at £20 READ ON

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once his nation’s richest man, spent a decade in a Siberian prison. Still, he has a great laugh

By Kevin Maher

I’m only 15 minutes into a conversation with Mikhail Khodorkovsky when I stutter out what is perhaps the stupidest question I’ve ever asked. So dumb, in fact, that Khodorkovsky, upon hearing it, bursts out laughing.

The 56-year-old Khodorkovsky is, in the nicest way, intimidating. A former oligarch who was once the richest man in Russia (he was valued at $15 billion), Khodorkovsky survived the murderous Wild West years of Russian gangster capitalism and served nearly a decade in a Siberian prison (on trumped-up tax-evasion charges).

He is built like a rugby player, has a vice-like handshake, is seemingly impervious to physical threats and, as revealed in the new and gripping documentary READ ON