Let’s talk money

Tilly Lawless

Screen time

Tom Martin

Room for regret

Sheila Hancock

Bishop to…

Alice Goodman

The worst age

Alice Garnett

Taking a break

Michael Brearley

Nazis in the cellar

Unlike many refugees who fled fascism in Austria, Hella Pick has never worried about returning to her native country. But with antisemitism on the rise, she asked its past and present leaders whether there’s anything to fear

Ruling the waves

The royal family has made millions from the exploitation of the seabed—a resource that belongs to us all. Now is the time, writes Guy Standing, for the Crown to put people and planet ahead of profit

Imagining armageddon

In the 1960s, an American strategist theorised that nuclear war need not be catastrophic. Now back in vogue, are the ideas of Herman Kahn mad, bad and dangerous—or a guide to avoiding annihilation?

Can it think?

In the breathless response to the rise of powerful new artificial intelligence, we may be overlooking the most fundamental issue of all: what it actually means to have a mind

Worst chancellor ever?

One man’s small-state mania drove the country to the brink of ruin. Years on, the architect of austerity has departed the political scene— but the human impact of his choices is all around us

Throwing away the keys

Bill Keller, former editor of the New York Times, has documented the appalling dysfunction of the US criminal justice system. Now he watches on as UK prisons head the same way

The last escape

Archive Books in central London, with its toppling book towers and rubble bags full of sheet music, offers serendipity and a refuge from cloned high streets. But for how much longer?

Is green growth the future?

We asked Sam Fankhauser, professor of climate change economics at the University of Oxford, and Kate Raworth, author of ‘Doughnut Economics’, how to build an economy that supports rather than damages nature and the climate

Talk the talk:

A glossary of terms

The promise of freedom

Human existence is laced with tragedy. We can find hope in the work of Isaiah Berlin, who thought we should never stop striving to be free

Prozac or Presocratics?

Let’s see whether the ancient Greeks can make us feel better this summer…

Feeling through the dark

A new book about the Irish killer Malcolm Macarthur is about as good as true crime gets—in part because it recognises the genre’s limitations

The man who would be Keir

Wes Streeting could be Labour’s next leader. His new memoir tells us much about what he is—but not why

The age of the hack

A new book tells the history of computer hacking, from Hillary Clinton’s emails to remote-operated dildos. Can our safeguards ever be strong enough?

Politics behind the veil

John Rawls is the philosophers’ philosopher, but a dubious guide to sorting out the messy real world

Books for the beach

Recommended summer reading

Screen: The fallout

Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ is the latest film to consider the atomic bomb— but the bomb detonated itself across our culture decades ago

Classical: Echoes of war

Our new columnist, Ian Bostridge, has sung Britten’s ‘War Requiem’ almost 100 times. Its resonances are different—but clear—wherever it is performed

TV: Stop this Carrie on

The women from ‘Sex and the City’ are back: older, not necessarily wiser, and struggling to escape from their own pasts

Stage: Theatre is sacred

Audiences shouldn’t profane it with their noisy babble, ebullient picnics—and wandering hands

Film: The boundary in the frame

Films about cricket grapple with the cultural and social implications of this imperial sport

Contributors

The writers in this month's issue

The Grid

Our monthly cut-out-and-keep guide to who falls where on the taste hierarchy

Kate Ashbrook

Lots in common

Katie Carr

Picking up the paddle

Ellie Wilson

Call for justice

John Gummer

True blue green

Diana Fleischman

Punishing work

Brief encounter

Sadiq Khan, mayor of London

Inheriting a crisis

Sam Freedman

The joy of lex: Family words

Sarah Ogilvie

Russia’s evil is being turned back on itself

Alexander Etkind

Diary

Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion

Stephen Collins

Tory Wilderness Tours

Harmful tech? Just say no

Ethan Zuckerman

Letters

Words from our readers...

Surrogacy, unethical? It’s complicated

Julian Baggini

Crossword

Plus Bobby Seagull's brain teaser