From time to time, there are the old siren voices: let us shake up government, and remove the impediments to getting things done by getting things gone. Many politicians on the journey of their ...

Three days after the president of the United States threatened, via social media, the destruction of an entire civilisation, Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, its crew having travelled ...

I am officially unemployed. Jobless. Redundant. At time of writing, I have been out of the job that pays my bills for less than 24 hours. Dear reader, I am not a full-time writer, much as I would love ...

When the writer David Foster Wallace died in 2008, he left behind a manuscript for an unfinished novel, The Pale King, as well as an oeuvre that has come to define him as the voice of a generation: ...

The sun hasn’t yet risen in Los Angeles when Michael Connelly first joins our call; a murky half-light is all that’s visible through the window in the background. If I’m worried I’ve forced him to ...

Instagram and YouTube now have a serious problem in respect of lawsuits for harm caused by social media addiction. But that problem is less about the result of the Kaley GM jury trial in California ...

Alan and Lionel discuss the Observer after investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, the paper’s former features writer, suggests that some of its new funders may not be who they seem. And as Scott ...

I was listening to queer icon TS Madison’s podcast last week. She spoke about how, as a sex worker, she saw men stripped of the pretensions and performance they put on for other women. “I don’t meet ...

The UK has chosen not to follow Trump into the war on Iran. Has Keir Starmer damaged the “special relationship”—or was it the right call? This week Philip and Ellen are joined by Kim Darroch, former ...

We are passing through a storm that is shattering the markers of the world we thought we knew. That storm, an illiberal authoritarian counter-revolution against the liberal state and its postwar ...

When you get to 93 years old, the number of springs you have left to enjoy is diminishing. But here I am again. I have made it. Having survived the incessant rain and freezing cold, I am relishing the ...

There is only one road into the Nuba Mountains: a thin ribbon of sand and rock leading towards shrubby foothills. The sky here is bleached white by heat; the air so thick with dust it smells of ...