Jihad jokes
Who dares make fun of Islam? Canadian television, apparently. Roger Davidson tunes in
Culture
First As Tragedy, Then As Farce by Slavoj Žižek
Owen Hatherley finds Žižek actually making sense
Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich
Keith Kahn-Harris enjoys Barbara Ehrenreich's antidote to positive thinking
The Arabs: A History by Eugene Rogan
Stephen Howe on a new history of the Arabs
Crying out loud
Laurie Taylor meets national treasure Barry Cryer
Déjà vu, only worse
Michail Ryklin sits in on a Russian censorship trial
Praise Jshua
Surely Easter is the time of year when we should spare a thought for the Messiah's less successful competitors? Here's Richard Herring, from the November issue, on one who never…
Poem: The Playboy Calendar and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
How poet Martín Espada became a humanist
Back from the dead? Facilitated communication and the strange case of Rom Houben
In February the BBC reported that the Belgian man who appeared to be communicating after a 23-year coma wasn't. Sceptic Nicholas Pearson was on it for us back in November
Outside story
A new exhibition space, The Museum of Everything, features hundreds of works by ‘the untrained, unintentional and unseen creators of our modern world’. New Humanist goes inside