31 May 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
Another fake
Shareholders wanted the Mirror editor out long before the allegedly bogus photos. Does anyone care that the BBC and other papers fall for the hoaxes of US and UK rulers?
Features
Facts that should change the world
Cars kill two people every minute and most of those who die or suffer injury are not drivers or passengers, but cyclists or pedestrians
Why you don't hear about our brave boys
Our rulers want us to believe that southern Iraq is stable. In fact, Britain is fighting a very secret war. Stephen Grey reports from Basra
That was the vote. Now for the real election
In India, the world's largest democracy, democracy has been prohibited. The owners of property have reasserted their right to rule, as they always do anywhere in the world
The rise of the ethical woman
When consumers demand products that don't damage the planet, business jumps to attention
The rape of the wilderness
If Europe venerated old cathedrals and Roman ruins, America's great monuments were its mountains and forests. But Bush follows another strain in the US tradition which sees nature as a resource to be exploited
A housing boom with no buyers
Mark Almond finds that brand new homes in Kosovo lack water pipes and power points. Why?
Essay
NS Essay - 'Everywhere, even in Africa, the world is running out of children'
Urbanisation, TV and the growing employment of women have led to steeply falling birth rates, even in developing countries. Phillip Longman on the startling implications of a global baby famine
Regulars
John Kampfner meets the man in charge of prisons
"I read the other day," said Martin Narey, "that Finland has three children in prison; that's three. We have 2,900." The prison service chief thinks our incarceration rate is "scary"
Darcus Howe tells a chief constable his job
It is the duty of a chief constable to keep order, not to stop TV programmes
Competition
Win vouchers to spend at any Tesco store
Culture
Hell on earth
From the latest US high-security "facility" to Iraq's Abu Ghraib, modern jails are clinical and brutal creations. Designed to disorient and diminish inmates, the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland embodies this architectural inhumanity
Been and gone
Music - Richard Cook gets the blues watching Scorsese's requiem for a lost musical form
The beautiful and the damned
Art - Richard Cork follows the queen of art deco's descent into empty sentimentality
Theatre
Michael Portillo
Theatre - Tennessee Williams's deeply personal play about sex and guilt is scintillating, writes Michael Portillo Suddenly Last Summer Albery Theatre, London WC2
Film
Mark Kermode - Feeling the heat
Film - Despite all the pomp and show, there were many reasons to be cheerful at Cannes this year
Television
Andrew Billen - The long goodbye
Television - The end of a sitcom that did as much for hairstyles, coffee and comedy writing as friendship. By Andrew Billen Friends and How Friends Changed the World (Channel 4)
Books
Beyond reasonable doubt. Nostalgia for Enlightenment values such as rationality and progress has become a rallying cry for sections of both right and left. But it was in the name of these principles that some of the worst crimes of the 20th century were committed
The Seduction of Unreason: the intellectual romance with fascism from Nietzsche to postmodernism Richard Wolin Princeton University Press, 375pp, £19.95 ISBN 0691114641
Like mother, like daughter
Baggage: my childhood Janet Street-Porter Headline, 288pp, £16.99 ISBN 0755312651
Hostile climate
High Tide: news from a warming world Mark Lynas Flamingo, 341pp, £16.99 ISBN 086319009X
Dangerous liaisons
Diana: death of a goddess David Cohen Century, 263pp, £16.99 ISBN 184413590X
Power mad
Colossus: the rise and fall of the American empire Niall Ferguson Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 384pp, £20 ISBN 0713997702
Sweet nothing
Vanilla: travels in search of the luscious substance Tim Ecott Michael Joseph, 278pp, £16.99 ISBN 0718145895
Global struggle
1759: the year Britain became master of the world Frank McLynn Jonathan Cape, 436pp, £20 ISBN 022406245X
Fiction - Relevant intensity
Transmission Hari Kunzru Hamish Hamilton, 281pp, £12.99 ISBN 0241141702
