Will Self
27 October 2022
Multicultural Man: On Charleston
The co-option of queerness by capitalism is perhaps the most sterile union imaginable: giving birth only to merch rather than masterpieces
Read the full article20 October 2022
Multicultural Man: On Easter Island
It is surpassing ironic that the tragedy of the Rapanui and their extraordinary statues should now be farcically repeated
Read the full article13 October 2022
Multicultural Man: On Alcoholics Anonymous
A self-help organisation based firmly on the principle and practice of its members not being publicly identified by name has come to embody the exact opposite
Read the full article06 October 2022
Multicultural Man: On the fourth plinth
The dismal artworks which have sat atop the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square bear ample evidence of how little contemporary conceptual art has to offer civic society
Read the full article29 September 2022
Multicultural Man: On free speech
Like so many passionate contemporary ethical conflicts, a row in the publishing world is really about a narcissism of extremely small differences indeed
Read the full article22 September 2022
Multicultural Man: On removals
A recent experience with removal men helped me understand something. The mark of relatively free society is that the personal trumps the political
Read the full article15 September 2022
Multicultural Man: On diversity
Liz Truss's cabinet isn't as diverse as it seems, despite what the prime minister says
Read the full article08 September 2022
Multicultural Man: On diminutives
Is it the small size of Scotland’s population that gives them a linguistic kink: a desire to reduce everything to the compass of a cosy domesticity?
Read the full article01 September 2022
Multicultural Man: On autocomplete
Microsoft's new software wants to stop us writing anything that’s unacceptable or offensive. But unacceptable and offensive to whom?
Read the full article25 August 2022
Multicultural Man: On free speech
Following the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie the term chautauqua may well undergo a semantic shift, becoming synonymous not with the exercise of free speech, but with crazed attempts to repress it
Read the full article18 August 2022
Multicultural Man: On trainers
In fetishising the trainer, the devotee makes of it a transitional object: something that eases the troubling developmental stage between childhood and adulthood
Read the full article11 August 2022
Multicultural Man: On Game of Thrones
Its creators may plead otherwise, but the world's biggest TV show rendered sex as grotesque and alienating as any puritanical religiosity
Read the full article04 August 2022
Multicultural Man: On markets
Are markets ever a place's real cultural centre, asks our columnist
Read the full article28 July 2022
Multicultural Man: On jeans
The time has come for Europeans to take back control of the world’s most popular juvenescent fashion statement
Read the full article28 July 2022
Opera’s great awokening
Will Self on the new, colour-conscious Madama Butterfly
Read the full article14 July 2022
Multicultural Man: On Bob Dylon (sic)
A new recording of a Bob Dylan classic takes our columnist back to a bathetic night in Wisconsin
Read the full article07 July 2022
Multicultural Man: On surveillance
In an ever-vigilant society it’s often worth keeping your wits about you. But, has this practice gone too far?
Read the full article30 June 2022
Multicultural Man: On Damien Hirst
Far more than the Britpop bands, it was the Young British Artists who best personified the Blair era
Read the full article23 June 2022
Multicultural Man: On Glastonbury
Summer is here and white liberal Britons, having been hypocrites inside for months, take their bad faith al fresco and on tour
Read the full article16 June 2022
Multicultural Man: On Sri Lanka
A pause on the telephone causes our columnist to ruminate on a meltdown in a relatively faraway country
Read the full article09 June 2022
Multicultural Man: On Lionel Shriver
Over the past decade Lionel Shriver has made a name for herself as a one-woman corrective to what she perceives as an excessively “woke” culture in this country
Read the full article04 June 2022
Found in translation
Could understanding contemporary Russian literature have given the west an insight into Putin’s intentions?
Read the full article02 June 2022
Multicultural Man: On gentrification
How an attempt at upstream cultural change on the banks of New York City's East River failed spectacularly
Read the full article26 May 2022
Multicultural Man: On dual heritage
It's hard to find a culture you feel at home in when you belong to two cultures. It's a movement between the two that creates a sensation people call patriotism
Read the full article19 May 2022
Multicultural Man: On the n-word
To render any word unspeakable and un-writable is to impose totalitarian double-think rather than advance the cause of racial justice
Read the full article12 May 2022
Multicultural Man: On nature
Does the individual human move through some of the same stages as we have, collectively, as a society, in our attitudes to the rest of the animal world?
Read the full article05 May 2022
Multicultural Man: On the Kardashians
There’s been a significant semiotic shift on planet Kardashian - the name of the show has changed!
Read the full article28 April 2022
Multicultural Man: On stop and search
The white majority needs to ask itself what it can do to effect the necessary change to a policy which has done more than anything else to alienate black and brown Britons from civil society
Read the full article21 April 2022
Multicultural Man: On protests
In both opposition to war in Russia, and British attitudes to climate change, mass dissent will probably come too late to make any difference
Read the full article07 April 2022
Multicultural Man: On accents
Accents, like any other cultural signifier, matter – and when they’re deployed in dramatic contexts they matter more
Read the full article31 March 2022
Multicultural Man: On secrets
An email about an old family friend stirs ruminations on mysteries and memories
Read the full article24 March 2022
Multicultural Man: On Nazanin
Why Woman's Hour's airing of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's sobbing was manipulative
Read the full article