Escapism

A farce, for heaven’s sake! Everyone knows farce is dead.” When a character says these lines on page eight of Janice Hallett’s latest whodunnit, The Christmas Appeal, we can practically see the author tipping us an outsized wink. Hallett, after all, is one of today’s foremost exponents of cerebral, knowing crime. A swift 180 pages later, Hallett has slain another victim and shown that farce was never really dead in the first place. Literary murder – especially the cosy sort – has always been comic. The real mystery is:…

More people plan to escape into books than go to the cinema this summer, new polling from the Publishers Association has found.The survey by the trade body showed that a third (33%) of people think that books offer them the best form of escapism when they’re having a bad day, coming second only to watching television (54%).Streaming services, looking at social media, listening to the radio and going to the pub or cinema were all less popular methods of escapism than reading, found the survey of more than 2,200 adults…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Though the finale of "Succession" aired on May 28, the conversation about our collective cultural obsession with the show still has fans rapt. What is it about this Emmy Award-winning Max series that fascinates people so intensely? And why is the psychological chatter about the narrative gripping the minds of millions of viewers? …

Photo: Jens Schlueter (Getty Images)It’s been roughly a year since Mark Zuckerberg laid out his ambitious plans to found a futuristic new world existing purely in a digital space. Acknowledging this new construct did not yet “fully exist,” the CEO — whose origins lie in far less noble pursuits — encouraged viewers of this announcement to experience the “the successor of the mobile internet” for themselves. Many were, justifiably, skeptical. It seemed all too convenient, after all, the re-branding of Facebook after years…