How AI could kill off democracy
Are we willing to give up our freedom in exchange for efficient, data-driven public services owned and run by…
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The inside story of Mossad
Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is like watching a Wes Anderson film through a telescope
Clues, maps and unlikely disguises: all narrated in majestic Ondaatjean style.
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Mitski’s Be the Cowboy is a record of big, existential, open plain longing
The album features 14 dense, precise, tightly constructed songs – most refuse a traditional verse/chorus structure for shorter, stranger vignettes.
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Anna Burns’s Booker-longlisted Milkman: a work of timely universality
Milkman is both universal and a distinctly Irish novel, a dark satire with a twist of Beckett.
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The post-crash world: how the 2008 crisis led to our current age of extremes
Ten years on, the aftershocks of the crash threaten the very notion of the nation state.
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The secret history of Mossad, Israel’s feared and respected intelligence agency
Israeli intelligence from the outset occupied a shadow realm, separate from the country’s democratic institutions. A deep state.
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Esi Edugyan’s Booker-longlisted Washington Black is a gripping tale of slavery, loyalty and freedom
Edugyan shows there is more to bondage than physical captivity.
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There’s no point in the BBC’s Today programme blaming Brexit for a loss of listeners
We need a return to John Birt’s news strategy of the Eighties, which prioritised expertise and analysis and discarded…
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Alan Garner’s memoir is one of the best things he’s ever written
The prose is so clear that it feels less like writing and more like a surrendering to memory itself.
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Andrew Adonis’s Diary: Standing in for Theresa May, Rees-Mogg’s pretences and my holiday plans
The Prime Minister refused to do a Northern Irish BBC interview, so I took the slot instead.
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Orphans: how we continue to fail children who lose their parents
All would agree that when children lose their parents it is tragic, yet orphans have so often been neglected…
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After the bullets, the brushes: how the First World War transformed art
When the war finally came to an end, artists on both sides had to face the problem of how…
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How Mike Ashley became the new emperor of the high street
From one sports shop in Maidenhead to a £2.8bn net-worth and a £90m deal to buy House of Fraser.
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How good fortune is self-generated: the personal and social benefits to feeling lucky
Luck is usually a matter of perspective – yet those who think they have it often end up attracting more…
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BBC documentaries on John Minton and Sylvia Plath reveal the people behind the works
Between BBC Two’s portrait of Sylvia Plath and Mark Gatiss’s film about the artist John Minton, there was no…
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Spike Lee’s grotesque comic thriller BlacKkKlansman is unique and electrifying
BlacKkKlansman is inspired by actual events – or, as the opening titles put it, “Dis joint is based on some…
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The best of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2018
Moral debate and questions of the right to offend dominate this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
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Why you should sink your teeth into the 1974 novel Jaws
Overshadowed by the 1975 film, this time-passing beach read is late-summer perfection on the radio.
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Commons Confidential: David Davis’s ex-aide Wacko Jacko is back. And it’s bad news for May
Your weekly dose of gossip from Westminster.
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Nixon helped save the bald eagle – but what will Trump do for America’s patriotic emblem?
Republicans must protect their national bird, and its homeland, against the dishonour and greed of Trump.
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The alt-right’s long march
In the last year the Unite the Right movement has splintered and its organisational capacity dwindled, but the Overton window is still shifting.
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“George Carman here,” says my voicemail. “There’s a fire and we need to put it out”
I nervously leave a message, before reflecting on the fact that Carman died in 2001.
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Letter of the Week: The crisis of liberalism
A selection of the best letters received from our readers this week. Email letters@newstatesman.co.uk to have your thoughts voiced…
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The key to understanding Jeremy Corbyn is that he’d rather be foreign secretary
There are calls for “Corbynism without Corbyn”: keeping his domestic agenda but discarding his foreign policy baggage.
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From Sixties hippies to anarchist drag queens, I discovered one cultural treasure after another
From Joshua Gamson’s The Fabulous Sylvester, I learnt of the birth of the San Francisco gay scene and the counterculture of…
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Leader: VS Naipaul and the hardness of the world
Not since Conrad had a novelist so completely absorbed himself in the shifting complexities of his age.
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Leader: Britain’s great train robbery
Rail fares – already the highest in Europe – are expected to rise again next year.
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