It’s easy to forget that one of the primary appeals of the early internet, beyond endless information, chatrooms and porn, was anonymity: Nineties and early Noughties users were drawn to the idea that they could be anyone, doing anything, shedding each new identity by simply logg … | Continue reading
At midday on 10 November, Margrethe Vestager, the EU's high-profile enforcer of competition law, unveiled the preliminary findings of a landmark investigation into Amazon. The online retailer, the investigation claims, has been using data on products sold through its platform to … | Continue reading
JBS Haldane – “Jack” to his family and friends – was once described as “the last man who might know all there was to be known”. His reputation was built on his work in genetics, but his expertise was extraordinarily wide-ranging. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he studied mathemat … | Continue reading
On one side of the Covid-19 debate are the anti-maskers, self-styled freedom fighters versed in the ideals of free market libertarianism and the defence of personal liberties. On the other, are the militant pro-lockdowners – curtain-twitching vigilantes obsessed with rising case … | Continue reading
Hermione Lee and Tom Stoppard operate on very different sleep schedules. While writing her new biography of the British playwright, Lee would visit and sometimes stay overnight at Stoppard’s 1790s home in rural Dorset. The next morning, Lee “would be sitting there with my noteboo … | Continue reading
It was the autumn of 1992, and Richard Allen, an import-export manager at a luxury wallpaper company, was spending the day at a conference held by Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. He was half-listening to a presentation about how the UK’s ratification of the Maastricht Treaty th … | Continue reading
The second wave of Covid-19 is now truly upon us, and winter will be hard. Yet for all the talk of the pandemic having changed the world, it’s arguably more true to say that it has acted as a lens to bring our global predicament into sharper focus. Important though it is to ask w … | Continue reading
Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, returned to the headlines in August, having been arrested on a yacht and charged with defrauding donors to a private campaign to build a wall along the US-Mexico border. Of the $25m collected by the We Build the Wall organisat … | Continue reading
When Theresa May, in 2017, promised “strong and stable leadership in the national interest”, she cannot have had this in mind. The long, agonised collapse of her premiership has left the Conservative Party in search of its sixth leader since the turn of the century and its third … | Continue reading
Thirty years ago, the philosopher Judith Butler, now 64, published a book that revolutionised popular attitudes on gender. Gender Trouble, the work she is perhaps best known for, introduced ideas of gender as performance. It asked how we define “the category of women” and, as a c … | Continue reading
Noam Chomsky has warned that the world is at the most dangerous moment in human history owing to the climate crisis, the threat of nuclear war and rising authoritarianism. In an exclusive interview with the New Statesman, the 91-year-old US linguist and activist said that the cur … | Continue reading
On a typical day, a long-time user of Goodreads, the world's largest community for reviewing and recommending books, will feel like they're losing their mind. After numerous frustrated attempts to find a major new release, to like, comment on, or reply to messages and reviews, to … | Continue reading
I arrived early to my final audition, scheduled at 9.20am one Friday in December 2018. I sat in the entrance hall of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama for an hour before I was sent to warm up on the piano, my programme of Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Gershwin and Glass whi … | Continue reading
In 2013, the American anthropologist David Graeber began to notice a strange phenomenon. “I kept running into people at parties who didn’t want to tell you what they did [for work],” he recalled when we met. Others would say “we just make up the numbers” or “I can do my job in tw … | Continue reading
In a 1981 essay, Raymond Carver described some of the quotations taped to the wall around his desk. One had “this fragment of a story by Chekhov: ‘… and suddenly everything became clear to him’”. For Carver, these words are “filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple … | Continue reading
Human beings are the only species on Earth that do not know how they are supposed to live. All other species have a natural environment and a natural way to sustain their form of life. While some animals have to build things to make their environment what it ought to be (as in th … | Continue reading
When a blood-splattered job applicant tumbled into Michael Kovich’s office, covered in dirt, grass and jet fuel, he knew he had to hire him. The candidate, who was seven months late to his interview, had been kidnapped for ransom, after getting into an unlicensed taxi in Brazil. … | Continue reading
We are used to thinking of idleness as a vice, something to be ashamed of. But when the British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote “In Praise of Idleness” in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, idleness was an unavoidable reality for the millions who had lost their jobs. … | Continue reading
The Mystery of Charles Dickens is a biography ready to take risks. Wading away from the shore – where the crowd laughs at comic turns and weeps at the pathos of orphans – AN Wilson takes six deep-sea dives in search of the monsters of the lower waters. He is after the darker thin … | Continue reading
Over the weekend, the Sunday Times reported that Denis Avey, the author of the memoir The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz, had changed important elements of his story before his bestselling book was published.According to the article, Avey's account of how he had bravely swapped pla … | Continue reading
Kevin Systrom, a 26-year-old Stanford graduate who had recently left Google to launch his own tech start-up, was walking along a Mexican beach with his girlfriend in 2010 when she delivered some difficult news. She just couldn’t see herself ever using “Codename”, the photo-shari … | Continue reading
The old adage about online anonymity goes: “On the internet no one knows if you’re a dog.” It hasn’t stood the test of time, not least because it has proved possible, and often easy, to work out not just the species, but the full identity of someone who tries to hide online. Tha … | Continue reading
There are plenty of English-language commentators who see every German twitch as proof that the country’s long period of prosperity and stability is finally coming to an end. The sort of commentators who have predicted all 17 of Angela Merkel’s last zero political downfalls. I am … | Continue reading
On 7 October 2002, an Anglican priest, William Campbell-Taylor, and an English-Jewish academic, Maurice Glasman, came to the law lords to challenge a parliamentary bill. It was the start of an episode that anyone worried about tax avoidance - or, for that matter, about the fate o … | Continue reading
At their peak during the reign of Trajan, around the start of the second century AD, the Romans had governed distant regions of the globe for longer than any other pre-modern state. The empire’s borders stretched across the Rhine, the Danube, the Euphrates, the edge of the Sahara … | Continue reading
We still use the word “medieval” as a term of opprobrium: all sorts of things, from Islamist terrorism to faulty plumbing, are described as such when we want to signal a range of negative aspects. Something “medieval” is archaic, life-denying, sub-rational, obstinately ill-inform … | Continue reading
Kim Stanley Robinson is, uncharacteristically, at a loss. As a science fiction writer, he is famed for dreaming up utopian futures. But when we meet for lunch in his Californian hometown, at times he struggles to maintain his cool. “What the hell do we write at this point in hist … | Continue reading
Is language a pestilence? Are bad ideas contagious? Is there safety in numbers? Are emotions dangerous? Or will they keep us going? Is the species frail? Is the species resilient and brave? Are we driven by prejudice and suspicion? Or can we put aside our grievances? Is love a di … | Continue reading
The local supermarket is out of lentils and kitchen roll, but in Nook’s Cranny, the fictional shop in Nintendo’s new videogame Animal Crossing: New Horizons, shelves overflow with seeds and spades, oranges and rice cookers, exercise balls and bright yellow rain boots – everything … | Continue reading
According to Isaiah Berlin, it is not Machiavelli’s supposed immorality that has made him a perennially scandalous thinker: “There is evidently something peculiarly disturbing about what Machiavelli said or implied,” Berlin wrote, “something that has caused profound and lasting u … | Continue reading
In 2004, before he reached the age of 20, Andrey Alimetov created what has become one of the most viewed websites of the coronavirus pandemic, Worldometer. The site has shot into the top 100 Alexa rankings. Coronavirus data collated by Worldometer has gone on to be cited by the G … | Continue reading
Governments across the world are hunting for an exit strategy. Denmark and France plan to test every citizen with coronavirus symptoms. Australia has hired an army of contact tracers. Germany has begun antibody testing across the population. Pandemic resilience is a better descri … | Continue reading
Reflecting on almost 50 years as an editor at the Economist, Barbara Smith, in a valedictory column of 2003, offered a revealing anecdote. “How do you write like the Economist?”, a new recruit asked a senior editor when composing their first leader for the title. Simple, came the … | Continue reading
After recounting his childhood years, from his birth in Alexandria in 1917 until his arrival in Cambridge as an undergraduate in 1936, Eric Hobsbawm ended the first part of his autobiography, Interesting Times (2002), with a volley of self-abuse: Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, a tal … | Continue reading
With Spain suffering one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the developed world (152,446 cases and 15,238 deaths at time of writing), its socialist/radical left coalition government has been at the forefront of calls within the eurozone for greater fiscal support. The administ … | Continue reading
If you’d walked past the W San Francisco in the autumn of 2018, you might have seen an unusual sight. Along with several other Marriott-owned hotels across the US, the high-end establishment in San Francisco’s South of Market district was the site of a persistent picket line – th … | Continue reading
The deserted streets will fill again, and we will leave our screen-lit burrows blinking with relief. But the world will be different from how we imagined it in what we thought were normal times. This is not a temporary rupture in an otherwise stable equilibrium: the crisis throug … | Continue reading
The deserted streets will fill again, and we will leave our screen-lit burrows blinking with relief. But the world will be different from how we imagined it in what we thought were normal times. This is not a temporary rupture in an otherwise stable equilibrium: the crisis throug … | Continue reading
There are certain writers who, once you’ve read them, forever take possession of some part of your experience of the world. If you’re enduring sustained exposure to a confoundingly complex bureaucracy? That’s Kafka. Going anywhere or doing anything or talking to anyone in Dublin? … | Continue reading
Mitigation is the new suppression. Where weeks ago many Western governments deemed it enough to isolate those with Covid-19, now they are closing down societies and producing scenes that few in the BC (Before Coronavirus) era imagined would ever be seen outside of films. Factorie … | Continue reading
At 7pm on Wednesday 11 March, Dominic Cummings welcomed more than two dozen tech executives into Downing Street. It was the eve of the government’s decision to move from the “contain” to the “delay” phase of its coronavirus strategy, and Cummings – Boris Johnson’s chief adviser – … | Continue reading
Mark Twain devotes several chapters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to mocking the sham pretentions of the antebellum South in the form of a pair of Arkansas swindlers claiming to be European aristocrats. Posing as the Shakespearean actors David Garrick and Edmund Kean, the … | Continue reading
Science fiction writers are made to seem prescient by confirmation bias: with time, almost any imagined future can be said to have come true. Take the pulp space opera Agent of Chaos by Norman Spinrad, in which an inept, “babbling” protagonist called Boris Johnson goes to war aga … | Continue reading
Poor old plutocrats. Yes, according to a new report by Oxfam the world’s billionaires have more wealth than 60 per cent of the global population combined. But this inequality is becoming a problem for them. It is prompting a backlash as voters turn to populists of the right and l … | Continue reading
As readers of 1066 and All That will recall, Oliver Cromwell and his supporters were “Right but Repulsive”. But both adjectives may be questioned by readers of Paul Lay’s Providence Lost, a spirited and vivid survey of the brief period in which Cromwell held the dangerously ill-d … | Continue reading
Randolph Bourne lived a short life that began as cruelly as it ended. At his birth in 1886, a traumatic delivery deformed his face; at the age of four a battle with tuberculosis affected his growth and left his back permanently hunched. Raised in Bloomfield, New Jersey, in a fami … | Continue reading
It was described as dirtier than Watergate, and involved US government dealings with Iraq, Libya, Korea and even the late British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell. The story is deep, dark and complex; a web of strange dealings and dubious characters, it implicates wealthy arms de … | Continue reading
There are some people who find the prospect of death so abhorrent they arrange for their corpses to be frozen, in the hope that one day they can be resurrected. Others, such as the director of engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil, think they might achieve immortality by having the … | Continue reading