The British heartthrob is not the only musician travelling less. Many of the biggest pop acts have started to expect their fans to come to them. Beyoncé spent half of her “Cowboy Carter” tour in just three venues. Coldplay performed extensively in certain cities; Olivia Rodrigo will do the same when she heads out on the road in September. Ariana Grande is appearing in just three countries on her tour. Longer runs in fewer places mean a less gruelling experience for the artist— and a more lucrative one. Touring is more expensive than it has ever been, thanks to a combination of red tape and rising labour and fuel costs. (Fans expect elaborate sets: transporting them across the world is not cheap.) Staying in one place for longer is a way of keeping outlays down and profits up. For the chosen cities, this means huge windfalls. Mr Styles’s fans are expected to spend £1bn ($1.34bn) on tickets, accommodation and other expenses in London alone, according to Barclays, a bank. For the smaller regional cities bumped from the schedule, such as Manchester and Coventry, it means losing access to megastars and fans’ spending power. Still, fans do not seem to mind going on the road themselves. Around 25% of the fans watching Mr Styles at Wembley are travelling from outside
London, and 28% are turning the occasion into a mini-break. Today’s concert-goers have become cultural tourists. In an age where music is cheap and easy to access, live shows have acquired a new social value. Concerts have become a kind of modern pilgrimage—journeys made out of devotion to an idol. ■ For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/06/15/harry-styles-and-other-megastars-now- expect-you-to-come-to-them
Harlan Coben, Netflix’s new darling, has a mystery you can solve Why are sometimes cheesy thrillers set in Britain so utterly gripping? June 18th 2026 The first mystery—that of a missing daughter—appeared in 2018. The second—a vanished wife—in 2020. These two were followed by a mysteriously missing husband (2021), a mysteriously revived dead husband (2024) and another mysteriously missing daughter (2026). However, as so often, the deeper mystery was less the crimes than the mysterious figure spotted hanging around them. He could be seen in the very first mystery which, viewers learned, was “Harlan Coben’s Safe”. He was spotted in the next one, titled—with equal mystery—“Harlan Coben’s The Stranger”. He was there in the next ones, too, which were variously titled “Harlan Coben’s Stay Close”, “Harlan
Coben’s Fool Me Once” and “Harlan Coben’s Run Away”. These lead to the deepest mystery of all: who is Mr Coben, and why is Netflix so obsessed by him? The question of his identity is perhaps the easiest. Mr Coben is an American thriller writer. His spread has been viral in extent (he has sold over 100m books) and in its style (like covid-19, most did not notice him spreading until it was too late). Since last year alone, he has been behind seven series and two novels. “Harlan Coben” thus became one of those baffling word combinations, like “vibe coding” or “tokenmaxxing”, that went from meaningless to ubiquitous seemingly overnight. He may become more so. On June 18th Netflix is releasing a series about a man imprisoned for killing his son, titled “I Will Find You”, which feels less like a promise than a threat—or perhaps a prediction, for his series have been as successful as the books. Having signed an initial deal in 2018 to develop 14 titles, Netflix has expanded it to add 12 more; Amazon and CBS have now also made Harlan Coben series. Mr Coben’s shows offer other mysteries, too, such as: why does his name have such prominent billing, when another author called Jane Austen often has a far smaller font? Why are such quintessential American thrillers being filmed, as these are, in places such as Manchester? And above all, how do characters who have such humdrum jobs afford such astonishingly swish kitchens? His shows have also elicited some critical bafflement, too. Though some of them, including “Stay Close”, about a cold case that suddenly heats up, received decent reviews, others have been less lauded. His recent Amazon series received a 44% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, a review-aggregator site. They have been called “twisty” and “confusing”— not without cause. Their plots are what might politely be called “eventful” and less delicately be called soap operas. Open the episode menu for Netflix’s 2021 series “The Innocent”, for example, and over the course of four swift episodes you find yourself offered: an accidental murder (episode one); an alleged suicide (episode two) and a “mysterious nun” (episode three) who is rapidly a mysteriously
dead nun. This is followed by episode four in which, as the episode summary explains, “The nun’s body is squirrelled away by federal agents, which infuriates Lorena.” Nun-corpse theft can be so annoying. Mr Coben’s plots, then, are not Pinteresque. Yet they are not meant to be. His books are archetypal thrillers. They have dark, ominous covers (fog is a feature) and ominous straplines in the “A MISSING GIRL. A DEADLY GAME” vein. Their characters have names that sound as though they might be medical procedures (“Griffin Scope”) or possibly Cockney rhyming slang (“Larry Gandle”). Either way, they sound bad. But they really do thrill. Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, once said there is “only one recipe for a bestseller and it is a very simple one”: you have “to get the reader to turn over the page”. Mr Coben has that gift. He tells The Economist that he likes each first sentence “to almost be a short story in and of itself”—and his are zingers. “I Will Find You”, opens with the words “I am serving the fifth year of a life sentence for murdering my own child.” That is why people watch them. Subscribers spent about 250m hours watching “Fool Me Once” in the week it was released. It became one of Netflix’s most-viewed shows in 2024. Which leads to another of the mysteries surrounding Mr Coben, namely: why do people find stories about family tragedy so jolly? Mr Coben’s books are rich in lines like “Her jaw had been ripped out of its hinges, snapping all the tendons.” Yet his stories are widely seen as not merely compelling but even comforting (in the way bingeing on biscuits often is). One answer is that murder can be scrumptious. In Agatha Christie’s “The ABC Murders” Hercule Poirot and a character wonder “If you could order a crime as one orders a dinner, what would you choose?” They toy with picking robbery or forgery from the menu, then discard the idea (“too vegetarian”) before concluding that it “must be murder—red-blooded murder—with trimmings, of course”. Family tragedy is—as Sophocles could have told you—similarly compelling. Mr Coben, who has four children, thinks that what appeals is less the tragedy than the family. He sees his stories, despite the splatter, as being about “love and family and redemption”. “If I asked you, ‘Would you
kill somebody?’ you would say ‘No’,” he says. “If I ask you: ‘Will you kill someone to save your child?’ well the answer is ‘Yes’.” The setting matters, too. Just as Greek tragedy was removed from an alarming immediacy by being set in the similar-but-different Thebes, so Mr Coben’s tragedies are set in the similar-but-different world of murder-series chic: characters have luxurious coats, cars and, of course, kitchens. It is, he thinks, “part of the fun”. (The reason they are set in Britain is more complicated: partly, suggests one industry insider, it is cost, with lower wages and tax breaks making shoots there more economical. Mr Coben has also said he likes the British sensibility and the “Downton Abbey-ish” houses.) And as for the mystery of his name it is, in his telling, not such an enigma. The title of an early show sounded too much like the name of another series so, to differentiate, “they put my name above the title,” he says. That was somewhat to the bafflement of audiences: at the time someone tweeted that “They keep talking about Harlan Coben, but I don’t know who the hell Harlan Coben is.” They probably do now. ■ For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//culture/2026/06/18/harlan-coben-netflixs-new-darling- has-a-mystery-you-can-solve
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Economic & financial indicators | Indicators Economic data, commodities and markets June 18th 2026
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David Hockney believed in working from the heart Britain’s boldest and most innovative painter died on June 11th, aged 88 June 18th 2026 The painting, ten feet wide, is a window onto a world. The slim man in the peachy-pink jacket stands by the edge of the pool, looking down, uncertain. Someone is swimming underwater towards him; a young man, clad in modest white trunks. The hills beyond the pool make overlapping triangles of cerulean blue, of olive, sage and lime. They could be those of California or Provence—or even biblical Galilee. Ever since the Renaissance, artists have painted bathers washing off stains and sin amid the peace of nature. David Hockney, who created this scene, knew that. He studied them all. The swimmer’s arms are outstretched. In the blue amniotic water he could be an angel. Or a new lover. It is a double portrait, one of many that made him famous in the 1960s and 1970s on both sides of the Atlantic. The last time “Portrait of an Artist (Pool