The Optimist’s Dilemma

Bill Gates’ warning to the world

The optimistic, liberal spirit of the early aughts has given way to darker times.

Letter of the week: Doors of perception

Write to [email protected] to have your thoughts voiced in the New Statesman magazine.

The Twelve Woes of Labour

Your daily dose of gossip from around Westminster.

The contradictions of Team Trump

How Donald Trump will keep his coalition of support together amid his cabinet’s competing ideologies.

Longing for Labour, once again

Also this week: meditations on love and loss, and the bliss of the Berlin Philarmonic.

David Peace: “There aren’t enough working-class stories around”

The great chronicler of England’s traumas on class, national identity and the importance of football novels.

Britain needs a strong economy to be secure

If we want to invest in security, we need to be able to fund it.

Why is Elon Musk obsessed with British politics?

Plus: new White House appointments and more media sales.

Olaf Scholz’s downfall is a warning to centre-left parties everywhere

Electoral pushback will not be the last popular revolt against progressive policies.

Assisted dying is not about individual suffering, but about the value we place on all human life

Compassion leads one to feel with another person. But that does not tell us what is right.

After Kamala Harris’s defeat, progressives must regain the people’s trust

Social democracy is increasingly looking weak and timid, even cowardly.

The return of the boozy, leisurely lunch

There is a particular pleasure in scuttling off to the local dive with its carpeted loos and well-worn chairs.

Angela Merkel’s first principles

The former chancellor’s memoir Freedom reveals how her childhood in East Germany helped forge a doctrine of moral decency…

Bill Clinton reckons with populism

In his memoir, Citizen, the former president struggles to understand why his brand of post-New Deal American liberalism has…

Oliver Sacks’s letters from a beautiful mind

The great neurologist offered a lesson in treating our fellow humans with care and true attention.

James Lee Burke’s garden of good and evil

Over 24 novels, the bruised Louisiana detectives Robicheaux and Purcel have become one of crime writing’s great partnerships.

From Andrew Michael Hurley to Johanna Ekström: new books reviewed in short

Also featuring Collared: How We Made the Modern Dog by Chris Pearson and Untold Lessons by Maddalena Vaglio Tanet.

Mendelssohn’s pinnacle of music-making

The beauty of the composer’s piano trios is renewed in the hands of three virtuosos.

The Renaissance in drawing

Two exhibitions reveal how, for the great Renaissance artists, drawing was both a tool for making paintings and a…

Conclave: this papal power struggle is high entertainment

Ralph Fiennes gives an all-time best performance in this sumptuous, thrilling drama about appointing a new pope.

Forty years ago, Band Aid brought mad excitement to my generation

Watching the BBC’s The Making of Do They Know It’s Christmas?, what was once such a big deal dematerialised…

The Trapped: inside Britain’s social housing scandal

This eight-part series reveals the council homes unfit for human habitation – in horrifying detail.

Red wine is less about colour and more about texture

And the great ones can be as moving as music.

Worried about the world? Time to play the piano

The concentration required for me to fumble through Beethoven leaves no room in my brain for anything else, apart…

The only things still in good repair in my life are my friendships

But everything else is falling to bits.

Why be depressed about the state of football?

The pleasures of the game are everywhere, from its integration into the English language to Ally McCoist.

This England: Modernism in the wild

This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, refers to the whole of Britain…

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Robert Icke Q&A: “Shakespeare is apparently infinite”

The award-winning playwright on the nobility of teachers and the masterpiece that is The Sopranos.