20 October 2008
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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
A year with Obama
The journey from college kid to presidential candidate was short. Yet it is the audacity of that choice, his faith in himself, that could see Barack Obama succeed. Alec MacGillis travelled with him on his year-long attempt to win over America
Features
If you want to get ahead, hug a Tory
David Cameron and I go back to the sinking of the Belgrano, both being “new bugs” at Eton
The mad world of shadow bankers
Gordon Brown has still to deal with the toughest problem of all - how to clean out a contaminated system
Guided by an invisible hand
The bank meltdown marks a turning point in our thinking about how the world works writes the Nobel Laureate. In some ways this is the biggest crisis in 80 years
What's eating Campbell
Alastair Campbell is back as Labour's most feared communicator and strategic adviser. He talks to James Macintyre about what motivated his return
Grass-roots banking
While Wall Street was in meltdown, Sigrid Rausing found an alternative model of lending thriving in Queens, New York
Fear and the city
These are alarming times, but what are we all most afraid of? From London to Cairo to Beijing, a new geography of global anxiety is emerging
The geography of anxiety . . .
Which are the world’s most – and least – fearful cities
Empires of the sun
Brazil is celebrating 100 years of Japanese immigration. Just don't mention the war
Shakespeare's Globe
If this were an Oscar Wilde story, our future would be foretold in Robert Peston’s follicles
Regulars
The Politics Column
The rise of economic nationalism
The ingredients are in place, in the UK and elsewhere, for a return to atavistic "politics of the soil": the politics of identity, and old-fashioned economic nationalism
The Politics Column
We were warned
It's turning into a golden autumn for Gordon Brown - but it would have been a better one for the country if he had listened to the fears voiced by the International Monetary Fund more than a year ago
Commons Confidential
Inside Westminster
Mr Paper Clips and “Thumbscrews” Watson - all the gossip from Britain's favourite village...
Bit slow on the uptake. No 4048
Set by Brendan O'Byrne We asked for suggested answers to rhetorical questions
Culture
The past is a foreign country
Today we congratulate ourselves on our multicultural society - yet British architecture was more open to influences from abroad two centuries ago
These values we hold dear
An exhibition on Britain's fight for civil liberties is a humbling reminder of how precious those rights are
Performance
Prophecy and prejudice
Stereotypes mar a beautiful production about life in the Louisiana projects In the Red and Brown Water Young Vic, London SE1
Film
That superior feeling
The Coen brothers' espionage comedy is an exercise in smugness Burn After Reading (15) dir: Joel and Ethan Coen
Television
On the road to nowhere
If nothing else, Fry's ramble proves that class is alive and kicking in the US Stephen Fry in America BBC1
Books
The eye of the beholder
A coffee-table book for aesthetes: every painting referred to in Marcel Proust's epic In Search of Lost Time, in a single volume. It reveals the novelist's acute sensitivity to art
Embrace of strangers
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of "The Great Railway Bazaar" Paul Theroux Hamish Hamilton, 496pp, £20
Along the curry mile
Balti Britain: a Journey Through the British Asian Experience Ziauddin Sardar Granta Books, 380pp, £20
Chinese whisperer
Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China Simon Winchester Viking, 336pp, £20
Reality cheque
Jade: Catch a Falling Star Jade Goody John Blake, 288pp, £18.99
