There have always been and will always be splits within society. For the most part, they make our lives richer. How dull would it be to live in a world where everyone agreed on everything and shared the same personality traits! Diversity is good. It makes it interesting to be alive. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to navigate. The pandemic came and went and it shone a light on a split most people probably hadn’t thought about all that much before then. Everyone knew there were introverts and extroverts, homebodies and socialites, but it had never really mattered. The two groups complemente ..read more

The Wizard of the Kremlin (Pushkin Press) by Giuliano da Empoli, translated by Willard Wood Giuliano da Empoli’s assured debut novel, winner of the Grand Prix de L’Academie Francaise, dares to get under the skin of Vladimir Putin, offering a compelling portrait of the Russian leader and his inner circle. Originally published in French in 2022, The Wizard of the Kremlin charts Putin’s rise to political power, and the main events that have helped consolidate his position. It is told from the perspective of a fictional political strategist, Vadim Baranov, clearly inspired by Putin’s real-life ad ..read more

It’s familiar cocktail party trivia by now: you have more bacterial cells in your body than human cells. Gross and fascinating, it’s a perfect conversation bomb, a welcome diversion from work chat or the cultural importance of Taylor Swift. What, actually, is a human body, one is left to wonder? Are these microorganisms simply fellow travellers – given that they are separate from the cells carrying our DNA? Or are they, more fundamentally, us? Prepare to peel off another layer of that philosophical onion. Not only do we carry around a veritable Serengeti of bacteria and protozoa and fungi, we ..read more

‘‘Darling, what’s happened? Are you OK?” My friend gently guided me to a chair at her kitchen table and sat me down. “I’m fine,” I chirped. She did not look convinced. I had, after all, just refused a glass of wine. I have been sober now for 94 days. This might not seem like a long time to some people, but for me, it’s something of a miracle. I’m a lifelong drinker. Pretty much every day. Some might call this “alcohol dependency”, most just call it “British”. In our culture it’s perfectly acceptable to have your first pint at four in the morning, provided you’re in an airport, on the way to a ..read more

Chris Packham is holding a page of A4 paper up to the camera. It’s covered in handwriting, detailing 38 tasks. As we speak online on a Monday morning, he tells me, “I’m recovering from this, which was my weekend to-do list.” Most things seem to be ticked off. He’s ferociously productive. He says he doesn’t need much sleep, makes notes on his phone when he goes to bed (“apparently that’s bad for me”) and wakes up thinking about the tasks for the day. Right now, he needs to fix his electric car because the handbrake is jammed. I’m sure he’ll be driving again soon. It’s hard to imagine Packham a ..read more

A black hole is a bottomless pit in the fabric of space-time into which stuff, including light, plummets, never to be seen again. The term paints so vivid an image that it has entered everyday language, and we commonly talk of losing this or that “down a black hole”. Ironically, such a metaphorical black hole has swallowed up the name of the woman who co-discovered these celestial objects: Louise Webster. I write about Webster in my new book, A Crack in Everything. An Australian who grew up in Brisbane, she was the only woman in her physics class at the University of Adelaide in the early 196 ..read more

The sky and the land were once connected, far more than they are today, according to the Gamilaroi people of Eastern Australia. In their creation stories, a traumatic event occurred aeons ago, which ripped humanity apart from the skies above. Other indigenous groups across the country teach similar stories, and many perform ceremonies to rebuild their bonds with Sky Country. As humans become an increasingly space-faring species, we might feel we’re getting closer to our Sun, the planets and stars. But our off-world activities have deposited thousands of man-made objects in our planet’s orbit ..read more

Rough Beast: My Story and the Reality of Sinn Féin (Bloomsbury) by Máiría Cahill Máiría Cahill began her political life as a teenager. She belonged to one of west Belfast’s most venerable republican families, and so was considered Irish republican royalty. The events described in her book Rough Beast – but most of all her personal courage and unwillingness to be silenced – have since turned her into Sinn Féin’s most effective and feared modern-day critic. The book’s title harks back to Yeats’ famous poem “The Second Coming”, conjuring the collapse of civilisation, where the “rough beast” in t ..read more

Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles (Hodder & Stoughton) by Jay Owens It was around three o’clock in the afternoon, on a spring Sunday in the Oklahoma Panhandle in 1935. In the house, Ada Kearns remembered, the radio was on. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. “This is Dodge City,” the announcer said abruptly. “We’re going off the air.” A vast storm cloud was racing south across the Great Plains. The temperature dropped 30 degrees Fahrenheit, the sky turned purple. The storm carried so much static it shorted electrical equipment. “You think, ‘Well that’s the end of time,’” another e ..read more

When Kwame Nkrumah became prime minister of the British colony of the Gold Coast in 1952, you could argue it had been a short time coming. Seven years earlier, in 1945, he had been living in London, organising with other revolutionaries and anti-colonialists, and planning the fifth Pan-African Congress. The driving idea behind pan-Africanism, which dates back to the early 19th century, is the political union of all people of African descent. Yet up to that point, the question of how to achieve such a union remained elusive, lacking as it did any real political means with which to further its ..read more