Almost every summer for the past 150 years, says Rosa Lyster in the London Review of Books, the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth has been swarmed by “Wagner fanatics”. At the world-famous Wagner festival, these opera lovers swan about in formal attire, “many with scores under their arms”. The German composer’s face is everywhere, from busts and billboards to flyers for hair salons and adverts for Pilates studios. Hotels, bars and pharmacies are named after his works, and his silhouette is even on the traffic lights near the festival theatre, “a little green man with a baton and a beret”. It’s as though Disneyland had been built by Mickey Mouse himself, “as a monument to his own maniacal, epoch-defining genius”.

From its 1876 inception, the festival has cultivated a mystique that suggests it’s not for the “casual Wagner listener”. Until recently, getting a ticket required applicants to submit a written request, accompanied by evidence of their interest in the composer – membership of a Wagner society, say – just to get on the decade-long waiting list. Once the insanely expensive tickets (€459 for central stalls) are in hand, the next set of hardships includes a lack of surtitles, seats known for being “uniquely hostile to the human spine”, and the competitively attentive nature of Wagner fanatics “ready to reprimand the daylights out of anyone caught squirming or chatting”. At least three people fainted during the performance I went to – one letting out a sharp yelp before going “scarily limp” – but everyone else’s eyes remained “pinned to the stage”. And the few who did doze off did so in a suitably “awe-inspiring” way – with “no adjustment of posture whatsoever”, hands on knees, as if challenged to “emulate a stone lion”.

When I was 14, says August Lamm in The Telegraph, I was given what felt like a “dozen gifts in one”: my first iPhone. Within hours, I was addicted, and I spent the following decade building up a career as an art influencer. With my hundreds of thousands of followers, I shared not only drawings and tutorials but also my personal life, from infatuations to heartbreaks. Over time, my behaviour got increasingly “insane”. I live-blogged my emotional shifts through crying selfies, and cancelled plans so I could keep scrolling. There was always a reason to check my phone. Is it going to rain later? Did I reply to that email? How much money do I have? I couldn’t even make it through a bath without drying my hands on a towel and picking it up.

Then, aged 27, “I decided to ditch it all”. I started by leaving my phone at home while I went out for errands or walks. Realising it was possible to fetch a pint of milk without updating my social media followers, I got rid of my iPhone altogether and bought a Nokia brick. Having always listened to things while I worked, cooked, commuted, exercised and even fell asleep, I was suddenly faced with the cold, unfurnished cavern of my mind. But slowly “my thoughts grew back”. Today, I while away train journeys and hack through my chores with a continual stream of my own ideas, observations and debates, and “I’ve never been happier”. To all those who say life is impossible without a phone, remember that we built cities and composed symphonies without them, maintained records and relationships, and even went to the moon. Being offline is a “lost privilege”.

Oxford Street’s rather shoddy overnight pedestrianisation last month caused an enormous, entirely silly fuss on both sides, says Edwin Heathcote in the FT. The best way to understand it is through its “strange and shady” history. Oxford Street is a dead-straight Roman road that once linked the City with the west of England, and the rookeries and slums of St Giles – the scene of alcohol-fuelled chaos immortalised in Hogarth’s Gin Lane, near where Centre Point stands today – with Tyburn, the main site of the capital’s public executions. It was “London’s Via Dolorosa”: the last journey for the condemned, who would be handed a final drink then paraded its length, “whipped and abused along the way by jeering, drunken crowds” until they were hanged, burnt or eviscerated to death around Marble Arch.

Thomas De Quincey, who first bought opium from a chemist here, called Oxford Street a “stony-hearted stepmother”. It first became a shopper’s paradise in the 1780s: a strip of brightly gaslit windows stuffed with desirable goods, “rammed with department stores of unimaginable luxury”. Virginia Woolf described it as a “gaudy, bustling, vulgar street [which] reminds us that life is a struggle; that all building is perishable; that all display is vanity”. This spirit was rekindled in 2001, when anti-globalisation protests were subject to the Metropolitan Police’s first use of “kettling” – the encircling and containing of agitated crowds. In the long run-up to Christmas, “this is exactly how it still feels”.