Although merit is an age-old idea, the West’s post-60s culture of narcissism reshaped it in novel ways, spurring the rise of smug meritocrats.
Pop became Sweden’s biggest cultural export in the 1990s when the hit machine went into overdrive. The roots of it lie in the 1970s and the Swedish love of manufacturing.
John Hughes’s films re-established and updated the American dream for a new generation. His complex legacy helps us understand what went so wrong.
Pious puritan Dowsing was committed to destroying all aspects of ‘popery’ in English churches. His radicalism is a warning from history.
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