Welcome to our digital magazine archive – you can read through past print editions of Bad Idea below. 

BAD IDEA SEVEN: ENTER THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

Despite signs that the UK economy was heading towards a crippling recession, it was important to remember that we were living through a period of tantalising and unprecedented opportunity. The availability of cheap, digital technology and fast Internet access has empowered the innovative and enterprising like never before, and nowhere was this more evident than in Britain’s creative industries, where the level of upheaval in the face of digitisation over the past few years has been, and continues to be, seismic. 

In issue seven, we investigated how these changes were being manifested in an industry sector that employs close to two million people and accounts for a whopping 7.3% of the UK’s GDP. We looked at how the London-based web publication WGSN dominates the global fashion industry, interviewed seven of the most groundbreaking young creative minds from around Britain, and learned how aspiring film directors are rendering gatekeeper film distributors obsolete through their use of crowdsourcing, online alternative reality gaming and Google maps. 

Alistair Harper profiled Alex Evans, the genius behind one of the biggest UK indie computer game launches of recent years; and perhaps most controversial of all, we reported the inside story of how brands are abandoning the traditional ad-funded culture model to become direct patrons of culture, or even create it themselves. Is this the future of advertising, and if so, does popular culture now exist in an ethical universe where absolutely anything goes and everything is up for sale?

BAD IDEA SIX: IT’S THE ECONOMY STUPID!

Bad Idea six, our credit crunch special, featured more great new writing and photojournalism:

– Oliver Harris went to Christie’s west London auction house to find out about the science of emerging art markets

– France’s Eurovision entrant Sebastien Tellier told us why he fantasises about eating women’s sports shorts

– Chris Baraniuk reported on the new breed of student entrepreneurs, and the venture capitalists chasing after their ideas

– In Bucharest, Alyssa McDonald reported on Romania’s property boom and the foreigners cashing in

– 50 Cent’s business guru Robert Greene filled us in on the new trend for cowboy capitalism and the laws of hustling

– Jean Hannah Edelstein went inside the British property search engine Nestoria, searching for the human face of the UK’s Information Revolution

– Alastair Harper looked at the rather brutal economics of hipsters in New York, and found out how to survive on beer, peanuts, and cocaine.

Plus Sam Jordison charted the decline of the British public toilet; novelist Joe Stretch enjoyed sex and debt; Edward Hogan attacked industrial gardening; Sebastian Meyer and Jack Roberts charted British Pig Farming’s doomsday moment; Alastair Harper slummed it with New York hipsters; and in a special report, Bad Idea dissected the world credit crunch.

BAD IDEA FIVE: DEATH ISSUE

Life. So many roads, so many choices… all of them ending in Death. But there’s life after death, after ours, after our friends’, after our family’s: the grievers, the embalmers, the carers, the cemetery managers and the wounded soldiers. 

In Bad Idea five, we went to the source to look for contemporary British attitudes towards death; at an international funeral directors we found undertakers arranging to have their clients buried at sea on top of the Titanic; at the coroner’s courts personal grief and cold administrative machinery locked arms in a daily dance, as the stories of troubled endings and tortured families slowly unravelled; and in Staffordshire, a memorial was erected for every soldier who has died since the Second World War. Do stress related suicides count?

– Guardian writer Laura Barton opened the death files at Southwark Coroner’s Court

– Funeral workers told Jack Roberts how death in Britain is changing, and why they have come to think ‘inside the box’

– The Honeytrapper: From Edinburgh to San Francisco, the cautionary inside story of an international love spy, by Lauren Gard

– John Williams went in search of Michael X, Britain’s forgotten black British revolutionary, executed in Trinidad

– Leading Ivorian comics artist Mendozza y Caramba led us through the terror of an African carjacking

– Shopping for weapons at the London DSEi Arms Fair: an exclusive photostory by Times photographer Sebastian Meyer

– Arabian vice: journalist Sachi Cunningham exposed Dubai’s thriving sex industry

– Plus, Ann Widdecombe told us why she decided to quit frontline politics to write romance novels; ex-Ukrainian finance minister Igor Mitukov offered investment tips for the post-Soviet art market; Jean Hannah Edelstein addressed the strange decline of Britney Spears; and our man in Afghanistan set up the country’s first ever skateboarding school

(Issues 1-4 coming soon)