It’s another day, and that means another slice of absurdity served up in Trump’s America, guys! Or in this particular case, slices of pizza. And some hamburgers and other assortments of fast [...]

He drew portraits for Italian dukes, sketched for the papacy and died at the court of a French king. If there is any artist who defies nationhood it is surely Leonardo da Vinci. Yet last week, Leonardo’s cosmopolitan legacy was caught up in an extraordinary intergovernmental spat when Rome renewed its threat to [...]

Have you ever thought much about the bones that remain littered in front of you after finishing a plate of chicken wings? New research suggests that Gallus gallus domesticus – the modern factory farmed chicken – might not be just a Sunday lunch staple but instead a marker of a new age in Earth’s [...]

A century ago the eminent Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood to the viceroy of India. The “time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation”, Tagore wrote in outrage as scores of peaceful protesters were massacred in Jallianwala Bagh. He [...]

An anonymous Manhattan lawyer tells us in Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener of a perplexing turning point in the short story, where Bartleby one day stops following orders and instead responds: “I would prefer not to.” The action is unconscionable, both disobeying orders but also having no clear prompt [...]

I was diagnosed HIV positive nearly 20 years ago, and living with the virus has changed a great deal. It’s not a death sentence and we’re living much longer. The panic that once held us in acute fear has thankfully dissipated. Infection rates are reducing and we hear proclamations that “Aids is over” in this [...]

Late in 2018, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey felt the wrath of his own social media platform when he posted a series of fulsome tweets about his experience of a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in Myanmar, a country that has recently been plagued by brutal ethnic [...]

Many agree that one of the most pressing problems the world faces today is climate change. The question of what to do about it, however, has become highly politicised. Scepticism about climate change is typically a conservative position and trust in the conclusions of the scientific community a more progressive one. [...]

Disagreements over the terms of Britain’s departure from the EU are obscuring the daunting international challenges that await the country once it supposedly shakes off Europe’s shackles. It’s a tough, unforgiving world out there, and 2019 is shaping up to be an even bigger rough-house than usual. By jettisoning [...]

I must have been four or five the first time I was told to “sit like a lady” – that is, with knees together. After that, no one needed to spell it out for me. A lady, I understood, was in full command of her body at all [...]