For the past 15 years I have been an environmentalist and campaigner for social justice. I have been a road protester and an anti-globalisation activist. I have worked for revolutionaries in Mexico, been tear-gassed in Genoa, joined protesters against the World Trade Organisation in South Africa and watched armies of the landless poor invade private estates in Brazil.

All of this means that those who want to categorise me politically [...]

A young, idealistic American aid worker is sent to Africa to establish clean water supplies in a remote village. There follow any number of cross-cultural misunderstandings, encounters with beautiful women and observations on the otherness of African culture. The writer is a 30-year-old American who has based this, his first novel, on his experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Côte d'Ivoire.

If the above makes Whiteman sound like sub-Alex [...]

Nearly two years ago I was fighting my way through a vast conference hall in London, in a very bad mood. It was the European Social Forum 2004, and it seemed as if everything was going wrong. The build-up to the event had not been promising, with internecine battles about organisation and widespread complaints about the involvement of the notoriously anti-democratic Socialist Workers Party. In the event at least some [...]

I'll bet that, as a New Statesman reader, you have at some stage used the word "empire" to refer to the world dominance of the United States. You may have used it in connection with the war on Iraq, or the US-led project of economic globalisation. It is also quite likely that you have been scoffed at by someone for using the term, been painted as a naive old lefty [...]

Is Karl Rove the Antichrist? Normally such a question would seem absurd, but reading the dark truth about Rove's exploits in Al Franken's new work of comic vitriol, I began to wonder. Could any mortal man be this evil? I even went to the Book of Revelation to see if there was anything there to confirm my suspicions. "Men worshipped the dragon because he had given authority to the Beast," [...]

It is a bitterly cold night in the depths of Suffolk. Anyone with any sense is inside, in front of the fire with their feet up. I, however, am standing in a deserted car park watching a man dressed as a monk calling down the wrath of God on a department store.

The monk, holding a wooden cross in front of him, is not alone. Behind him stand four other [...]

Paul Kingsnorth on pubs

Farewell, then, to the smoky old pub. As a ban on smoking in most pubs looks set to become law, it seems that the hazy, convivial, unpredictable atmosphere of the traditional local is on the way out. The edgy, boozy, glamorously grimy institutions that inspired Samuel Johnson, G K Chesterton, George Orwell and Patrick Hamilton are to be legislated into history, in the name of public [...]

We live in turbulent times. Tens of millions are rising up against neoliberalism. Here in the UK, more than a million took to the streets to oppose the Iraq war, and schoolchildren played truant to defy Tony Blair. Voters may be deserting the polling stations, but politics is alive and kicking.

So where is its literature? Why is so much contemporary fiction still depressingly postmodern and narcissistic? Is Ian McEwan's [...]

I'm an environmentalist, and I'm all right. For over a decade, I have been working for what we all now call "sustainability" on both a personal and political level. It stands to reason, then, that my everyday life must be energy efficient; that I must be leaving a small and barely noticeable footprint on the planet's resources. I am, after all, supposed to be setting an example.

Needless to say, [...]

So, it's agreed: we're all patriots now. From the New Statesman to the Daily Telegraph, we concur - a revived sense of national pride is the best response to an attack on the country from a new Enemy Within. The London bombings have lent patriotism a cross-political lease of life that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago.

What do we have to be proud of? Take your [...]