04 December 2000
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From the Editor…
Welcome to the New Statesman website. Whether you are a new reader or an existing one - online or via the magazine - I hope you'll enjoy the great writing, fresh ideas and provocative debate that make the New Statesman Britain's award-winning current affairs weekly
Cover story
Goodbye to the dirty mac image
Pornography, once a seedy, marginal industry, has become a respectable, multimillion-pound business, bigger than Hollywood
Features
Arms sales: will Labour act?
Until now, there has been no ethical dimension to British exports. But the Queen's Speech may show that things are changing
They may listen, but they won't tell
Freedom of information? Ministers will go to any lengths even to avoid answering MPs' questions, reports Nick Cohen
Here's a real threat to sovereignty
Stop fretting about Brussels and watch out for Gats 2000, advises Barbara Gunnell
Climate talks collapse: rejoice, rejoice!
The deal on offer at the global warming conference in The Hague was so useless that we are better off with a clean slate, argues Zac Goldsmith
Conviction journalists
John Lloyd on the right-wing commentators who have brought Tony Blair to boiling point
The New Statesman Special Report - Why justice isn't working
The legal system now favours the prosecution so strongly that we must expect more and more wrongful convictions, argues Bob Woffinden
At least they could polish their shoes
You can spot British politicians by their drab and shapeless clothing, writes Annalisa Barbieri
Cut class sizes to 20 in poor areas
NS/Fabian Society Second-Term Agenda - Cut class sizes to 20 in poor areas. By Joe Hallgarten and Gavin Kelly of the IPPR
Sledge ride to seven heavens of Nenets
In a remote corner of Siberia, Oliver Ready meets a woman who is conducting an experiment in social engineering. Her targets: the children of herdsmen
Forget cool: it's greedy Britannia now
From Asian Babes to Zeta Jones, ours is an unashamedly decadent society
Culture
Playing away
What do opera and adultery have in common? Richard Sennetton how music keeps up with illicit love
Sold short
Art - Michael Glover talks to Leon Golub
It's got to be perfect
Music - Wendy Holden on the purge of weirdos in the contemporary pop world
Television
Pumping up the sex
Television - Andrew Billen wonders if Kingsley Amis provides enough substance for a BBC drama
Books
How the dead live. More and more novelists are appropriating real-life characters and the events of history for fictional ends. Why? Jason Cowley on the art of literary grave-robbing
On Histories and Stories: selected essays A S Byatt Chatto & Windus, 196pp, £16.99 ISBN 070116946X
The drugs don't work
Opium: a portrait of the heavenly demon Barbara Hodgson Souvenir Press, 152pp, £16.99 ISBN 081182411X Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the 19th Century Mike Jay Dedalus, 277pp, £9.99
Ugly duckling
Hans Christian Andersen: the life of a storyteller Jackie Wullschlager Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 506pp, £20 ISBN 0713993251
Action man
The Ashdown Diaries: volume one - 1988-1997 Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 638pp, £20 ISBN 0713995106
Novel of the week
Too Far Afield Gunter Grass Faber & Faber, 672pp, £25 ISBN 0571190162
What the butler saw
Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American boom Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster, 270pp, £17.99 ISBN 0743204123
Commentary - Towards a paperless future
Christopher Gassonanalyses the changes taking place in the world of e-books
