Paul Owen The first lunar mission since 1972 is about to lift off. It may not be as groundbreaking as the Apollo flights, but don’t write off the fascination the moon still exerts On 21 July 1969, Neil Armstrong swung open the hatch of his spacecraft and clambered down a short ladder towards the surface…
Martin GelinSweden’s V-Dem Institute warns that the US is no longer a liberal democracy. And autocracy is creeping across Europe tooThe US is no longer a democracy. One of the most credible global sources on the health of democratic nations now says this outright. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University reaches the…
Nasrin Parvaz Calls for a popular uprising and empty promises of help are reckless in the extreme – and no answer to my country’s plight Ihave been watching the news from inside Iran, unable to hold in my sorrow. As an Iranian who was imprisoned and tortured by the regime, I have been pleading with the world’s…
In a park overlooking the city, I ran into a group of young people chatting and joking. As the bombs fall, fragments of life remain Anonymous Iwas at work last Saturday when I heard the blast. Since that moment, the world has been turned on its head. The school called asking me to come and…
George Monbiot Shabana Mahmood’s new rights clampdown looks outlandish until we remember that this kind of hardline action is part of our country’s fabric Our political memory fails us. We treat government policies as if we’re seeing them for the very first time. But much of what appears to be novel has deep historical roots….
Charlotte Higgins Encounters with great art can be absorbing, unsettling and even painful. How has this been tamed into mere ‘reading for pleasure’? It is the UK’s National Year of Reading. Specifically, this government-led scheme is about “reading for pleasure” and “the joy of reading”. This is not a matter of whimsy. Research has linked reading for pleasure in…
Emma Brockes The sex offender could exploit these masters of the universe because, despite their privilege, they still felt short-changed by life One of the things that has been frequently puzzled over as the effluent of the Epstein story flows on, is how a college dropout who thought it was cool to do typos managed to persuade…
We could never have imagined such tolerance of Putin’s criminal war. We normalise the horror just to survive Sasha Dovzhyk On a bright February day, over cups of coffee, my team gathers for a strategy meeting at our office in Lviv, 80km from the border with the EU. Our cultural and research institution – an…
Objectification, hate, rape threats: the politicians debating online abuse mean well, but to truly understand, they need to see what I see Anonymous If you’re anything like my parents, you probably wouldn’t even understand most of the content that floods my social media, no matter how hard I try to avoid it. Here’s a recent example…
Simon Tisdall As the war enters its fifth year, it’s time for Europe to take the fight to Putin on its own terms and tell Trump to get lost Viewed from Europe, the US’s failure to defend the people of Ukraine against Russian aggression is the greatest and most consequential of a host of recent…