John Grant – Sublime

Making Lemonade

John Grant — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 16:32:05 +0000

It is starting to sink in. The housing market, or retail spending, or affordable commodities … these may never return. A cushy retirement may never come. The Western economies may never recover.

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Greener Marketing

John Grant — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are in a climate and ecological emergency. Don’t just take my word for it. 11,000 scientists signed a declaration in November 2019 saying as follows: Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to “tell it like it is.” On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators...

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What Can Chefs Do? (A Manifesto)

John Grant — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 12:54:53 +0000

Approximate reading time: 10 minutes Chefs care. It’s a profession marked out by passion. By love of food. By kitchen teams forged in challenging conditions. By quests to redefine what and how we eat. With new fine dining dishes often taking six months or more to develop. Recently this care has extended beyond the restaurant...

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It’s What’s Inside That Counts

John Grant — Sat, 05 May 2012 17:24:56 +0000

If we could only persuade people to be more dutiful, more moral, more ethical. The trouble is – on the evidence of numerous past attempts – we can’t. And the irony may be that we don’t have to. Armed with the right information and understanding, most people will do the decent thing, most of the...

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What’s Your Problem?

John Grant — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:58:08 +0000

What is the problem with Western culture? How is it we have become so stuck? I’d like to suggest that, gasp, our core issue as a culture is actually our obsession with solving problems. We are a self-help society, and not just in the New Age section of the bookshop, but in the entire Western...

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Coca-Cola World

John Grant — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:12:14 +0000

Ever since we passed through that confusing fug called postmodernism, at the end of the last century, authenticity appears to have been something of a watchword. The postmodern view – if I understood it, and there’s a good chance I didn’t – seemed to be that we live in a world of fakery; that there...

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Go With The Flow

John Grant — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:04:22 +0000

Over the years that I’ve been writing a column for Sublime, I have been quietly beavering away in the background on a social venture called Ecoinomy. (Not so quietly now; there is an article elsewhere in this issue that explains how Ecoinomy aims to make the most of using less).

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Too Much Information?

John Grant — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Imagine, by some future quirk of human evolution, that telepathy is a reality. But there is a twist. Rather than hearing others’ thoughts in proximity as if they were auditory, and hence limited by the same physics, we could filter out large parts of what everyone else was thinking and only hear those thoughts – from...

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The Ultimate Remix

John Grant — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Imagine if all of human culture was represented by a single book, and the maximum size of this book was more or less fixed. Each generation would create their own version, but expanding the book would not be an option. If you wanted to add new knowledge, ideas, beliefs and practices, you would have to...

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Shaken Together

John Grant — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Exactly 255 years ago as I write, on All Saints Day in 1755 at 9.30 in the morning, an earthquake struck the city of Lisbon. It was the biggest ever recorded in Europe, measuring nine on the Richter Scale. A devout Catholic population was gathered in churches. Fourteen out of fifteen of these were destroyed.

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