23 February 2004
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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
End of the sex war
Women no longer blame men for their low pay; men no longer blame women for boys' low scores at school. Peace has come to the gender battlefield. By Jack O'Sullivan
Features
Is this how to end public service failure?
Suppose you had to pay for medical treatment - not in money, but through helping other patients. David Boyle on the next big idea for the NHS, schools and welfare
Great sushi, shame about the election
John Kampfner in Moscow finds mega malls on the horizon and some of Europe's most fashionable bars and clubs. But voting? Why bother?
Leader with the iron fist and the big heart
Colombia's neoliberal president has used the military to take control of large areas. But the guerrillas, with money from coca and kidnapping, can sit him out, reports Isabel Hilton
Lost in translation
They lower academic standards, jump the queue for benefits, spread TB: these are the charges flung at immigrants. Alice O'Keeffe tries to find the truth
The judge fails to stay bought
The corrupt president is backed only by the old and poor. In Lithuania, that's a lot of people
Essay
NS Essay - The biomass of human bodies now exceeds by a hundred times that of any large animal species that ever existed on land
The century's big issue is not equality in the conventional sense. It is whether we can share with other species and with future human generations. Neither left nor right understands
Regulars
John Pilger reports from Syndey on the race riots
Epidemics of disease ravage Aboriginal communities in Australia as they did the slums of 19th-century England. No wonder there are riots in Sydney, writes
Darcus Howe on why blacks don't get to be Labour MPs
It is not race, but lack of party loyalty that keeps blacks and Asians off Labour shortlists
Competition
Win vouchers to spend at any Tesco store
Culture
Comfortable in hell
Far from being the opium-smoking dilettante of legend, Jean Cocteau was one of the 20th century's most significant artists. Yet his unacknowledged homosexuality and Nazi leanings made him a profoundly tormented figure, writes Gilbert Adair
Everybody hurts
Exhibition - Susie Orbach wonders why we waste so much time trying to avoid pain
Box of delights
Art - Richard Cork follows Donald Judd's quest to purge sculpture of elaboration
Theatre
Missing links
Theatre - Michael Portillo is left unexcited by a fantasy-filled journey into cyberspace
The Fan
The fan - Hunter Davies suffers deeply conflicting emotions
Treat triumph and disaster just the same? Spurs fans can't follow Kipling
Books
The highway of despair. Oprah Winfrey and J K Rowling are the villains; Radiohead are the cultural revolutionaries. The latest howl of rage against capitalist culture and American mediocrity exemplifies the sentimental, self-indulgent non-thinking it sets out to attack
The Middle Mind: why Americans don't think for themselves Curtis White Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 205pp, £12.99 ISBN 071399763X
The spice of life
The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the fight for medical freedom Benjamin Woolley HarperCollins, 402pp, £16.99 ISBN 0007126573
A moral stain
Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February, 1945 Frederick Taylor Bloomsbury, 544pp, £20 ISBN 0060006765
A lone voice
The Dust Diaries Owen Sheers Faber & Faber, 310pp, £16.99 ISBN 0571210163
Living doll
Growing Up With Lucy: how to build an android in twenty easy steps Steve Grand Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 229pp, £16.99 ISBN 0753818051
Stand and deliver
Dick Turpin: the myth of the English highwayman James Sharpe Profile Books, 258pp, £15.99 ISBN 0573064946
Fiction - Southern comfort
The Last Juror John Grisham Century, 355pp, £17.99 ISBN 1844131610
