Deep and lasting connection comes in many forms: we need a new vocabulary to talk about love. | Continue reading
How a campus trans row ended in protests, a police investigation – and a debate over the future of free speech. | Continue reading
Using his YouTube channel to bring old languages back to life, Roper is emerging as a new kind of digital historian. | Continue reading
Kurt Puchinger takes us to his office via a Hapsburg-era “paternoster” cyclical lift. Housed in the vast, neo-Gothic Wiener Rathaus, or Vienna City Hall, | Continue reading
When we tell companies about ourselves, we give away details about others, too. | Continue reading
Britain’s failure to invest in renewables led us into the gas crisis, says Jackson, and a revolution in energy supply and policy is urgently needed. | Continue reading
How a piece of rubber became the world's most popular pocket-money toy. | Continue reading
How our feline companions can teach us to exist in the world. | Continue reading
A century after its publication, the philosopher’s Tractatus remains as radical as ever. | Continue reading
Nearly a decade after David Cameron launched Tech City, Shoreditch has been dramatically transformed. But what is the initiative’s legacy? | Continue reading
Even if you have the space, working from the same place in which you sleep or watch TV or socialise just isn’t very nice. | Continue reading
Bribing electorates pre-dates democracy: after all, those with no hope of expressing their will at the polls can still elect to murder their rulers. Move towards universal suffrage and you lessen the probability of politicians meeting untimely ends, but increase the likelihood of … | Continue reading
Glenn Greenwald has been making new enemies lately. Once feted on the left for his reporting on government surveillance – based on documents leaked to him by the intelligence analyst Edward Snowden – America’s most conspicuous journalist spent much of the last few years taking is … | Continue reading
It was during the grim first working week of the year, on 5 January 2019, when the academic and journalist Anne Helen Petersen published an essay on BuzzFeed: “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation”. Petersen argued that millennials are in an impossible position, one wher … | Continue reading
Introduction by Henry Hardy It is two years since the death, at the age of 89, of Bryan Magee (1930-2019), the celebrated philosopher, politician, journalist, author and broadcaster. His was (and still is) a household name among the chattering classes, especially for his brillian … | Continue reading
A recent scientific paper proposed that, like Big Tobacco in the Seventies, Big Tech thrives on creating uncertainty around the impacts of its products and business model. One of the ways it does this is by cultivating pockets of friendly academics who can be relied on to echo Bi … | Continue reading
The retreat of the West began with the fall of communism in 1989. Our triumphal elites lost their sense of reality, and in a succession of attempts to remake the world in their image went on to vacate some of the planet’s most strategically decisive regions. The end result of the … | Continue reading
It is no coincidence that caffeine and the minute-hand on clocks arrived at around the same historical moment, the acclaimed food and nature writer Michael Pollan argues in his latest book, This is Your Mind on Plants. Both spread across Europe as labourers began leaving the fiel … | Continue reading
I am a New Yorker. I’ve lived in Britain for more than 35 years and in London for a quarter century. But New York is my hometown; New York is my soul. It’s been nearly two years, however, since I’ve sniffed the subway’s distinctive perfume or gazed at the starry roof of Grand Cen … | Continue reading
In his autobiography Into the Wind (1949), Lord Reith, the first director-general of the BBC, describes the corporation’s original mission to connect and inform every corner of the country, and beyond. The public broadcaster, he wrote, was about the amenities of the town being c … | Continue reading
I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war,” wrote Somerset Maugham in the preface to Ashenden, or the British Agent (1928). “The reader will know,” he continued drily, “that my efforts did not meet with success.” In 1915-16, already a successful … | Continue reading
Forty years ago, Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one”. This marked the start of the “War on Drugs”, a global escalation in police and military efforts to crack down on drug users and the illicit drug trade. In the past four decades, three things have become … | Continue reading
Igor Stravinsky was a chronic self-reinventor. A stylistic and cultural shapeshifter, he was declared both the “most modern of modern” and a neoclassicist (he hated the word). He shook the earth with savage pagan dances and went in for intense serialism and religious orthodoxy, a … | Continue reading
Over the next two weeks, the boards of BAE Systems, AstraZeneca, Glencore, Flutter Entertainment and the London Stock Exchange all face the possibility of shareholder revolts over executive pay at their forthcoming annual general meetings (AGMs). As the AGM season begins, there i … | Continue reading
Left environmentalism struggles in the face of a disturbing truth: the global environmental emergency is going to get much worse no matter what happens, as scientists’ warnings about the future increasingly become the destabilising reality of the present. It is still technically … | Continue reading
One of the most vacuous idioms we use about our moral and social debates is the idea of being “on the side of history”. The plain meaning of this is that “history” – the record of human actions – has an inevitable trajectory, and we had better get on board with it or suffer the c … | Continue reading
What’s wrong with a European Super League and why are so many politicians, here and across Europe, falling over themselves to condemn it? For those of you who have missed it: 11 of Europe’s biggest football clubs and Tottenham Hotspur have announced their intention to establish … | Continue reading
In 1520 Albrecht Dürer travelled to Zeeland to see a whale stranded on the sands. A storm drove back his boat and by the following morning it had also blown the fabulous creature back out to sea. The artist never saw his whale, so instead he drew sea monsters, putting them togeth … | Continue reading
When the lifestyle influencer Jessie Lethaby – better known as SunbeamsJess – announced she was pregnant in December, her engagement on Instagram and YouTube soared, with fans shocked at the sudden announcement. “I wish you could’ve seen my face when you said you were pregnant. I … | Continue reading
Patsy Hage began hearing voices when she was eight years old. She was playing with her brother in the attic when her scarf caught alight on a candle. She would always remember running downstairs to her mother, her clothing on fire, convinced she was going to die. She was rushed t … | Continue reading
The Covid-19 virus, like many others, is unstable and mutates frequently. All vaccines target the “spike”: the sugary protein that allows it to bind to and enter our cells. The vaccines induce neutralising antibodies that block the spike and therefore infection. If the virus has … | Continue reading
In an interview in the Guardian in 2017, the celebrated rationalist Daniel Dennett declared: “I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts.” If Dennett’s anathema was … | Continue reading
When the pandemic struck and the UK entered lockdown for the first time, the BBC’s nightly news audiences surged to 15 million. Traffic to the BBC’s website in March 2020 almost doubled year on year. Boris Johnson’s No 10, which had briefed consistently against the corporation an … | Continue reading
A philosopher once assured me, many years ago, that he had converted his cat to veganism. Believing he was joking, I asked how he had achieved this feat. Had he supplied the cat with mouse-flavoured vegan food? Had he presented his cat with other cats, already practising veganism … | Continue reading
When last spring Covid-19 struck Manaus, an industrial city of two million on the Rio Negro in Brazil’s Amazon, the outbreak supplied an illustration of just how bad the pandemic could get. Appalling scenes of mass graves and hospitals in collapse were beamed around the world. As … | Continue reading
In May 1929 Yevgeny Zamyatin was the target of hostile verses composed by the poet Aleksandr Bezymensky, a member of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. Appearing in the Leningrad edition of the prestigious Literary Gazette under the title “Certificate concerning soci … | Continue reading
The World of Yesterday, the 1942 memoir by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, resonates powerfully in an age of closed-down cities and rising borders: I feel that the world in which I grew up and the world of today, not to mention the world in between them, are drawing further and … | Continue reading
When the cultural critic and theorist Mark Fisher took his own life on 13 January 2017 at the age of 48, he was a third of a way through delivering a lecture series titled “Postcapitalist Desire”, which he had devised as part of an MA course in contemporary art theory at Goldsmit … | Continue reading
China was the only major economy to experience growth last year, as its industrial sector continued to expand. Following a year-on-year contraction of 6.8 per cent in the first three months of 2020 – the first fall in output in more than 40 years – the Chinese economy avoided a r … | Continue reading
If you could fly two billion miles in the direction of the Pegasus constellation, and knew where to look, you would find a thin, flat object, about the size of a football field and up to ten times more reflective than the average comet. If you watched it for a while, you would no … | Continue reading
Elon Musk became the world’s richest man on 7 January, when a further increase in Tesla’s galloping stock price increased his net worth to $195bn (£141bn). “How strange,” he tweeted. He’s not the only person who finds this odd. In 2020, Tesla delivered fewer than 500,000 cars, bu … | Continue reading
Forty years have passed since the Chilean president Salvador Allende died in La Moneda Palace in Santiago, attempting to defend himself with an AK-47 he had been given by Fidel Castro. Here, in a piece from the New Statesman published in March 1974, the Nobel Prize-winning noveli … | Continue reading
A woman and two men are seated at the bar in a diner. We can see from the lights outside and inside that it is night. Each one has a cup of coffee. The woman and one of the men sit close together, though, looking at them, it’s impossible to say whether they know each other or whe … | Continue reading
In 1933 Mussolini Speaks, a “cine-biography of Il Duce,” received its Broadway premiere on 10 March, only five days after the Nazi Party seized control of the Reichstag, and six days after the inauguration of Franklin D Roosevelt as US president. “Who is this modern Caesar?” ask … | Continue reading
Suppose you walk into a shop and the guard at the entrance records your name. Cameras on the ceiling track your every step in the store, log which items you looked at and which ones you ignored. After a while you notice that an employee is following you around, recording on a cli … | Continue reading
In the early summer of last year, I found myself on the Cote d’Azur – in Antibes, to be precise – with a couple of hours to spare. Spontaneously, I decided to try to find the apartment block in the town where Graham Greene had lived for the last decades of his life – the Résiden … | Continue reading
Many strange things happened in 2020, but one of the strangest was the romance between Britain’s Covid-sceptics and Sweden. It turned out to be an ill-fated one, ending in tragedy, but it was intense while it lasted. For much of this year, those who object to measures to control … | Continue reading
It takes the world's best structural biologists several years to determine the precise shape of a protein molecule. The work requires patience and deep pockets, but it also affords scientists a far better understanding of cells, the diseases that afflict them, and the medicines t … | Continue reading