Toyota Crown Crossover, for the US 2026 model year, in silver, driving on a country road.

Top 10 car manufacturers by sales, 2024—beware the bogus figures

Toyota Crown Crossover, for the US 2026 model year, in silver, driving on a country road.

Having published the top 10 car manufacturers for 2023 in Autocade Year of Cars 2025, I felt our readers deserved the 2024 table, and put it on the Autocade World website. There was only one public source that had them at that time: a website called Focus2move, and they seemed to be credible. The page […]

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A product’s popularity is of no concern to me

2022 Toyota Corolla Sport in blue-grey with a black roof.

Does this still work? Amanda and I were checking out cars last weekend and a sales’ rep tried to interest us in one by saying it was the top selling in its segment in Australasia. My first (unvoiced) reaction to this is: there are a lot of stupid people out there. If you can imagine […]

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Did you know that in the last three decades, media have changed?

Sights on exporting: when we first licensed Lucire to a foreign country, in this case Romania, in 2005. Karen Carreño modelled, photographed by Yann Dandois. Mirella Lapusca and Valentin Lapusca created the Romanian edition.   Over the weekend, one of the Lucire crew had to write to a PR company to be included on something […]

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When referring to ‘a techno-authoritarian surveillance state’ is not alarmist

If you watch one in-depth interview this week, it should be this one: Jon Stewart interviewing Carole Cadwalladr, on broligarchs, “AI”, and a techno-authoritarian surveillance state. And no, not a single component of that title is alarmist. We have been watching the world head to this point right through the 2010s, except now it’s accelerating […]

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The creative sector adds the most value, and we should be proud to say so

After sitting on a panel to approve a bachelor’s programme for one polytechnic, I was dismayed to read right after that some of the courses were being cut. I alluded to a disinterest in learning about design in an earlier post, but I was put right by some young people who said their courses were […]

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Common-sense economics

I haven’t commented on US politics much lately, primarily because there are others who do it far better. If you want excellent insight without being weighed down in detail, read what Richard Murphy in the UK has to say on, say, US tariffs, or the madness of austerity economics. His blog Funding the Future has […]

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License from us, not from US

A Lucire KSA spread with a copy of Lucire KSA underneath it.

Anti-American sentiment harming sales of your licensed fashion magazine? We have a solution for that. We still provide US coverage but without being US-owned. But, importantly, we recognize that there are great fashion, beauty, lifestyle and travel stories the world over.   I have had to think a lot about whether our country-of-origin effect is […]

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If you want a slice of the pie, then compete

A very interesting analysis on Crikey by Bernard Keane on the turmoil the occident finds itself in. In the opening paragraphs we find this zinger about what the right wing believes it was to protect the west from. Protecting from whom? Name your favourite other—the Soviet Union. Islam. China. Declining birth rates. Secularism. Immigrants. Globalism. […]

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Kudos for Lucire; global trade sans the US; and our ads go tracker-free

Nice to see Lucire can still pick up kudos with Feedspot putting it into their top 100 fashion magazines, ranking it at 21st. Not bad after 27 years, and going on 28, with a fraction of the budget of the multinationals. We’re two behind Women’s Wear Daily, and three ahead of British Vogue. We do […]

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History in jeopardy

Benj Edwards wrote a very good post at Vintage Computing and Gaming, which begins: For a while—in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it felt like nerds were making the world a better place. Now, it feels like the most successful tech companies are making it worse. Among there, he notes: And there’s another problem. Very […]

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