02 November 2009
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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
Trial by fury
We live in an age when everyone is encouraged to have their say on Twitter or blogs. But, in our anger over MPs’ expenses or Nick Griffin, we are nearer to the baying, blood-hungry mob of ancient Rome or 18th-century Tyburn than we would like to admit
Features
Alpha mail
Until he surfaced recently Royal Mail boss Adam Crozier had stayed strangely quiet
We are killing in the light of God
More than five million people have died in the war that has been raging in eastern Congo. And now, yet another rebel group is at large in the country, slaughtering hundreds of civilians. It is led by Joseph Kony, a ruthless yet charismatic killer who claims he is fighting a holy war
Home is where the heartbreak is
Asylum-seeking women are especially vulnerable to persecution, but the British immigration system does little to help
The Returning Officer
Buckingham
Essay
The battlefield of ideas
In earlier decades, the atmosphere in the universities was optimistic, heady even, stimulated by close ties with Westminster and Whitehall. Now that close relationship seems to have gone. What went wrong, and who is to blame?
Interview
“I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn’t afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it”
The eminent thinker Slavoj Žižek tells Jonathan Derbyshire why he rejects mainstream political theory, why he supports Barack Obama, and why we need Marx more than ever
Campaign spotlight: Grey pride
Kylie Murray, student and ambassador for Help the Aged and Age Concern's Big Q Campaign
Regulars
New Statesman Leader
Leader: George Osborne: what is your plan B?
The complacency of the political classes may yet send Britain into the depression we have so far avoided
First Thoughts
Rory Stewart, Who’s Who and clubs
Stewart is a man of action and a man of letters of a kind you no longer find in British politics
The Politics Column
“We must move on from New Labour”
The Westminster village would do well to listen to an emboldened Peter Hain
Culture
She’s lost control
When Sophie Calle’s lover dumped her by email, she turned life into art. Fisun Güner on a woman who binds the helpless and confessional to the coolly conceptual
Graphic images
Ed Ruscha's paintings play with the typography of the US
Books
The Humbling
Sex, death, loneliness, old age: yes, it’s another Roth novel. But this time, is the great American author merely repeating himself?
