Playboy’s comeback is not sexy. It’s depressing

Playboy has relaunched. Apparently it did so last month, but I didn’t know about it until a few days ago when I saw a copy of the new – quarterly, I’m told – magazine, with Cara Delevingne in a latex corset with a hand covering her lower frontage, on a male friend’s coffee table. I greeted this news with a mixture of weary resignation and utter bafflement. The former element derives from the fact that at this particular time and place in my life and in our dismal history, I have largely given up on the very concept of good news. Of hearing anything that suggests progress, enlightenment, intelligent and/or joined-up thinking (particularly of the governmental kind). And I feel this especially whenever it comes to women and their rights. Why am I mystified by the decision to relaunch a jazz m