Serene

In a world coping with inflation, war and bank runs, it seems counterintuitive that demand for luxury is still running hot.   Yet in recent days, two big designer brands reported bumper first-quarter sales. Paris-listed Hermès said its revenue grew 23% from a year earlier in the three months through March, ahead of the 13% analysts were expecting. At LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton—owned by Bernard Arnault, the world’s wealthiest person—sales grew 17% in the same period. This was also much higher…

Build it up and tear it all down Most city-builders are about expanding and growing. The goal is to take a natural, untamed world and bend it to your benefit, turning the realm into a humming machine for resources and production. Terra Nil, however, does the inverse. Rather than creating a monument to your designs, Terra Nil is a reverse city-builder from BroForce studio Free Lives. It asks you to take the barren, scorched earth and fill it with life. You restore the grasslands, let water flow down canals, and crack the…

Fifty-odd years ago, Bob Dylan was provoking his fans into furiously taking sides and berating him with a shout of “Judas!” while their political representatives snoozed through the day’s business. How times change. On the night the Houses of Parliament resounded to accusations of treachery, Dylan opens his latest UK tour with a show so serene and benevolent that it barely rattled the Palladium’s chandeliers.Not bland, though. At 81, Dylan retains his creative energy and still insists on doing exactly what he wants. The…

Dr. Aspen and Mr. Spock get their timbers shivered.Image: ParamountAfter last week’s attempts at more moral complexity didn’t quite hit the mark, this week Star Trek: Strange New Worlds re-centered on what’s worked for it in the past: a camp, tropey bit of action hung around a central member of the Enterprise crew. This time, Ethan Peck’s Spock took the limelight again—and although this was a little more self-serious on the surface than the last time that happened, we still had a lot of fun along the way.Rainn Wilson’s…