Category: Excess

Here’s an article I wrote with my colleague Tim Hill for The Conversation about John Lewis’ 2016 Christmas advertising campaign. How John Lewis Owns Christmas

The performativity of medicine. I’ve had a few blood tests recently. I got an email from my brother, who happens to be a doctor, suggesting that we (me and my other brother) get our bloods done. He listed a few symptoms and one resonated with me. You see, for a while, I’d been feeling wiped… Read more »

Will the sugar tax work? Unless the Chancellor, George Osborne, changes his mind or his plans are deemed too crazy by Parliament, as seems so often with his Budgets, then the UK Government is to introduce a sugar tax. But will it work? It really depends on what they mean by work? Will it improve… Read more »

It’s commonplace, at least in some sections of the tabloid press, and the outer reaches of satellite TV, to see young people portrayed as drunken delinquents, only interested in binge-drinking, sex or preferably both, one after the other. However, the story that’s obscured by these media constructions of moral panic is more complicated. Let’s be clear… Read more »