Letter of the week: The crisis we helped create
A selection of the best letters received from our readers this week. Email [email protected] to have your thoughts voiced in the New…
ByThe Magazine
In this week’s issue
The Retreat
The cruel history of rum – and why we drink to forget it
Rum’s colonial past is proof that even the sweetest of hard liquors has a bitter backstory.
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A promised parcel has yet to arrive. It gets me thinking about what else is missing in my life
There is so much lacking. Financial security, happiness, pictures on the walls, space, love. Not to mention trousers.
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Why Bette Davis is the best person to teach us how to live now
Now, Voyager tells the story of a woman emerging from a kind of imprisonment and taking her place in the…
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This England: Milk snatcher
This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s Richard II, refers to the whole of Britain…
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In the age of global heating, our longing for some summer sun has become a dangerous yearning
The health impacts of climate change are stark; heatwaves in 2003 and 2006 each caused more than 2,000 deaths in…
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Andrew O’Hagan Q&A: “Joan Didion once told me not to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel“
The author discusses the Smiths, Billy Connolly and the Home Secretary’s poor decision making.
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Fran Lebowitz: “A dumb woman is the preferred woman in the USA”
The essayist and speaker on her Manhattan lockdown, 9/11 and disappointing Americans – from Andy Warhol to Joe Biden.
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Livia Drusilla’s feast for the eyes
The wife of Emperor Augustus treated her guests to a visual delight with her painted “Garden Room”.
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Candyman is a definitive Black Lives Matter horror
That the great reviser of horror, Jordan Peele, might want to revisit Candyman must have occurred to anybody who…
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Nine Perfect Strangers is too over the top to make great satire
This ironic take on a “wellness” retreat, starring Nicole Kidman, is so improbable it doesn’t work.
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BBC Radio 6 Music’s The Happiness Map is pure escapism disguised as a chat show
Listening to musicians discuss their best travel experiences is both magical and otherworldly.
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How Raymond Williams redefined culture
Raymond Williams made it his mission to reclaim culture from the literary elite. A century after his birth, he…
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What Raymond Williams taught me
Attending his lectures at Cambridge in the 1970s, it was clear this was a time of radical change.
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The future of postliberalism
According to a new book by Adrian Pabst, we are waiting for a new social theory to form a…
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The MP who came back from the dead
The disappearance – and discovery – of John Stonehouse was a scandal of its time. But did the tabloids…
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Reviewed in short: New books by Ronald Hutton, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Pat Barker and Maia Szalavitz
The Making of Oliver Cromwell by Hutton, The Daughters of Kobani by Tzemach Lemmon, The Women of Troy by Barker and…
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Jacob Zuma and South Africa’s moment of reckoning
Decades of corruption and misrule have exhausted South Africa. Hope for the future remains, but it is slighter than…
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Last of the forever wars: Afghanistan and the limits of liberal intervention
Until the campaigns launched under the “war on terror”, interventionism had some notable successes. But the Afghan conflict has…
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Personal story: I am Hazara – and I fear for my persecuted people
In 1998 the Taliban massacred 2,000 Hazara people, long the victims of sectarian violence. In my mountains and in…
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Labour has the same strategy on foreign policy and Brexit: avoid the subject at all costs
What connects the Labour Party’s response to the withdrawal from Afghanistan and a McDonald’s milkshake?
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Why the world is becoming more French
From industrial policy and nuclear power to “strategic autonomy” and the 35-hour week, the 2020s are popularising many French instincts about world…
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Elif Shafak’s Diary: Publishing heroes, Afghanistan’s forsaken women, and the lessons of Turkey’s autocratic turn
Feminists from Turkey are especially alert to what is happening in Afghanistan. For us, the rise of fundamentalism is an…
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Lyse Doucet’s Kabul notebook: A dystopian airfield, and the Afghans leaving everything behind
As thousands depart with their life in a piece of hand luggage, Afghanistan feels like a nation emptying of some of…
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Solutions to the UK housing shortage must go beyond identikit suburban new builds
There needn’t be any contradiction between the preservation of beauty and the necessity to provide housing.
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How the Hundred has changed cricket
English cricket’s latest short-form revolution has brought glitzy marketing, compulsory fun, and a ruthless power grab.
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How the US and the UK accept far fewer Afghan refugees than other countries
The UK took in 9,351 Afghan refugees in 2020, while Germany accommodated 148,000.
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“The Democrats risk being out of power for the next decade”: David Shor on how his party must change
The star US strategist on the case for reforming Congress.
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First Thoughts: History repeating, the Taliban’s populism, and Rupert Murdoch’s sensitive side
In 1842, in a similarly chaotic fashion as today, the British evacuated 16,000 troops and civilians from Afghanistan.
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Why we have to change the way we talk about incels
Mocking angry young men may feel cathartic, but it won’t stop radicalisation.
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