Stuart Jeffries

Post-Modernity is the creative destruction that has shattered our present times into fragments. It dynamited modernism, which had dominated the western world for most of the 20th century. Post-modernism stood for everything modernism rejected: fun, exuberance, irresponsibility. But beneath its glitzy surface, post-modernism had a dirty secret: it was the fig leaf for a rapacious new kind of capitalism. It...

We are living, it is often said, in a golden age of stupidity, in which boneheaded, mendacious politicians get elected by voters who’ve become too mindless to realise their interests are ill-served by narcissists. Meanwhile, vapid social media influencers corrupt their no less witless followers with groundless conspiracy theories and eye-wateringly foolish takedowns of scientific expertise. Our time, one might...