Why today’s youth is so anxious and judgmental
In a well-evidenced diatribe, Jonathan Haidt accuses the creators of smartphone culture of rewiring childhood and changing human development on an unimaginable scale
The beauty of medieval bestiaries
Spiders, owls, elephants and dragons appear alongside dog-headed men and tusked women in a wealth of texts explaining the world in the most vivid terms then available
An absolute earful
Singing sands, the dawn chorus and the crackle of the Northern Lights are among the many natural wonders explored in Caspar Henderson’s paean to the act of listening
Vivid, gripping and surreal: a new slice of Ellroy madness
A labyrinthine plot involving Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedy clan form the basis of the latest in James Ellroy’s planned new ‘LA Quintet’
‘We cannot turn back’ from the League of Nations, said Woodrow Wilson – but did just that
His fateful intransigence over the negotiations has been variously ascribed to a Christ-complex, an unhappy childhood and even latent homosexuality
Tribal loyalties
In his ‘journey into the psychology of belonging’, Michael Bond focuses on the positive side of tribalism, leaving its darker aspects mostly unexplored
A surreal account of lockdown
A complex novel explores the ways we try to understand a world that isn’t good or fair or causal or even comprehensible
The musical note that can trigger cold sweats and sightings of the dead
Imagine that all the frequencies nature affords were laid out on an extended piano keyboard. Never mind that some waves…
All successful spies need to be good actors
On 2 October last year, when he became chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, if you prefer), Richard…
The great disrupter: how William of Occam overturned medieval thought
Astonishing where an idea can lead you. You start with something that 800 years hence will sound like it’s being…
Waiting for Gödel is over: the reclusive genius emerges from the shadows
The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried…
Stephen Hawking: the myth and the reality
I could never muster much enthusiasm for the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. His work, on the early universe and the…
Christiaan Huygens – hero of time and space
This book, soaked like the Dutch Republic itself ‘in ink and paint’, is enchanting to the point of escapism. The…
Things mankind was not supposed to know — the dark side of science
One day someone is going to have to write the definitive study of Wikipedia’s influence on letters. What, after all,…
How time vanishes: the more we study it, the more protean it seems
Some books elucidate their subject, mapping and sharpening its boundaries. The Clock Mirage, by the mathematician Joseph Mazur, is not…
Taxonomy reaches celebrity heights
Heteropoda davidbowie is a species of huntsman spider. Though rare, it has been found in parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia…
The trade in cadavers is rife with scandal
John Troyer, the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, has moves. You can…
Master of disguise: the British genius who concealed whole Allied battle lines
Early one morning in October 1874 a barge carrying three barrels of benzoline and five tons of gunpowder blew up…
The history, power and beauty of infographics
on the history, power and beauty of infographics
Believing in big data is equivalent to believing in the stars
Look up at the sky on a clear night. This is not an astrological game. (Indeed, the experiment’s more impressive…
Who knew that chemistry could be so entertaining?
Here’s how the element antimony got its name. Once upon a time (according to the 17th-century apothecary Pierre Pomet), a…
Can computers compose?
In 1871, the polymath and computer pioneer Charles Babbage died at his home in Marylebone. The encyclopaedias have it that…
Full of wonders: Takis at Tate Modern reviewed
Steel flowers bend in a ‘breeze’ generated by magnetic pendulums. This is the first thing you see as you enter…
How plastic saved the elephant and tortoise
Plastics — even venerable, historically eloquent plastics — hardly draw the eye. As this show’s insightful accompanying publication (a snip…
The only thing that baffled Einstein was his own popularity
On 6 November 1919, at a joint meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society, held at London’s…
