A portrait photograph of Rania Abouzeid
Rania Abouzeid, interviewed in our summer 2018 issue.

The problem with identity politics

Asad Haider on his book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, which argues that identity politics in its modern sense is not synonymous with anti-racism, but instead amounts to the neutralisation of these movements.

"The modern faith in democracy is sometimes perverse"

James Miller, author of Can Democracy Work? on the history of democracy and its inherent tensions and contradictions.

Who has the right to remember?

Samira Ahmed argues that the Windrush scandal demonstrates the ethical case for libraries and archivists.

"To understand magnetism is to understand how the universe and Earth came to be"

Science writer Alanna Mitchell on the fascinating history of one of the most powerful forces in the universe: electro-magnetism.

"Humankind is unique in its incapacity to learn from experience"

Political philosopher John Gray talks to JP O'Malley about the problem with humanism.

The madness of the quantum universe

The fundamental building blocks of matter have a strange dual nature, writes Marcus Chown.

"The women of the past have traditionally been caricatured"

February 2018 marked the centenary of women in the UK being given the right to vote for the first time. Author Jane Robinson discusses her book Hearts and Minds: The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote.

What makes a good lecture?

As the value of the university lecture is debated, in his regular Endgame column, Laurie Taylor recalls his own student days.

"People cannot say they did not know what was happening"

Journalist and author Rania Abouzeid on the complexity of the Syrian conflict and the inadequacy of international responses.

"Computers aren’t capable of using common sense"

In our quest to do everything digitally, have we stopped demanding that technology actually works? Journalist and software developer Meredith Broussard discusses.

Read our top 10 long reads

Read our top 10 culture pieces