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The Spring 2014 issue of New Humanist is on sale from Thursday 20 February in High St branches of WH Smith and selected independent newsagents around the UK. Highlights include:

  • Daniel Trilling takes the the film-maker Adam Curtis on a walk around the Thamesmead estate in south-east London to talk about utopian thinking, politics and the media:

He’s right that cynicism about politicians is widespread: just look at the response to the comedian Russell Brand’s excoriation of the UK’s political class in the New Statesman and on Newsnight in October 2013 – a clip that’s since had nearly 10 million views on YouTube. Yet Curtis is suspicious of Brand’s disdain for voting. “Who benefits from that? The unelected powerful, because you’re emotionally and psychologically disempowering politicians. The only power politicians have is the collective confidence we have in them. The most radical thing is to recapture the idea you can change the world.”

  • Is the conflict in the Central African Republic a war without an end? And what's religion got to do with it? Samira Shackle reports
  • Mark Fisher on What Channel 4's Benefits Street tells us about the state of television in 2014
  • Niki Seth-Smith investigates politicians' attempts to measure our general well-being, while a mental health professional raises questions about the NHS's new focus on "mindfulness"
  • Douglas Murphy asks if the visionary architects of the 1960s and 1970s could teach us how to solve the UK's housing crisis
  • Putin, Pussy Riot and protest: author Marc Bennetts on Russia's new dissidents
  • Can atheists appreciate Dante? Kenan Malik on the history of sacred art in the West
  • Professor David Sedley on why Epicurus wasn't the food-loving bon viveur he's made out to be
  • Fatema Ahmed unpicks the work of US novelist Jonathan Lethem
  • Ariane Sherine sells half of everything she owns for charity
  • Andrew Mueller dissects Reza Aslan's Zealot
  • Sally Feldman on what a generation of feminist writers have to say about ageing

PLUS: Book reviews, new poetry and columns by Julian Baggini, Laurie Taylor, Juliet Jacques, Marcus Chown, Alom Shaha and Reni Eddo-Lodge