The severity of the conflict in Gaza – the Strip’s deadliest ever encounter with Israel – has propelled discussions about the possible recognition of Palestinian statehood at the UN. Palestine was recognised as a non-member observer state 12 years ago, which means it can participate in UN sessions but cannot vote on resolutions. Full recognition has long been off the cards, however, because it would have to first be approved by the UN Security Council, three members of which – the US, Britain and France – have previously refused to back it. But the current conflict is tipping the balance of s ..read more

You have a struggling mammal in your mouth. You clamp your teeth into his wriggling furry warmness. Not good, oh no. All that squealing as the warm blood trickles down your chin. The terrified eye. You chew into silence. No, no, we don’t like to eat like this. Our predatory nature is supported by the structure of our gut, 20 feet of small intestine to break down a (cooked) meat feast, in comparison to an ape’s intestines with a larger colon, which deals with a primarily fibrous vegetarian diet. Weapons gave us strength, from club to spear to bow to gun. Pulling a trigger distances us, as do b ..read more

“Imagine this is the Sun,” I say, holding up an orange. I am at the foot of Primrose Hill in London with 20-odd people. They have followed me from Cecil Sharp House, the venue for “Sunday Papers Live”, an event that aims to bring every section of the Sunday papers to life. We have been sitting about on sofas, listening to talks on politics, sport, travel – and now I intend to enliven something from the world of science by walking the 800 metres to the summit of the hill, pacing out a scale model of the Solar System. Four metres up the path, I hold up a peppercorn to represent Mercury; four mo ..read more

On 9 February last year, the then-deputy chair of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, called for the return of capital punishment to the UK. “Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? 100 per cent success rate.” Six months later, the former nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of seven counts of murder and six of attempted murder for babies in her care. A poll taken soon after suggested that two thirds of the British public supported the return of the death penalty in cases such as Letby’s. Not for the first time, the idea of capital punishment w ..read more

The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God (Tyndale Elevate) by Justin Brierley Justin Brierley’s new book is a strange thing indeed. The ex-host of the hugely popular Christian radio show Unbelievable? is on a mission to convince us that belief in God (within any religion, though he admits his interest is Christianity) is on the rise. The problem is, he doesn’t offer any evidence that this is true. Why? Because the very opposite is happening. In every meaningful sense, the data tells us that the world is becoming less and less religious. Even as some countries become more faithful, they are out ..read more

If science has a native tongue, it is mathematics. Equations capture, precisely, the relationships among the elements of a system; they allow us to pose questions and calculate answers. Numerically, these answers are precise and unambiguous – but what happens when we want to know what our calculations mean? Well, that is when we revert to our own native tongue: metaphor. Why metaphor? Because that is how we think, how learn, how we parse the world. Metaphor comes from the Greek metaphora, a “transfer”; literally a “carrying over”. The very act of understanding (from the Old English: to stand ..read more

My Blue Peninsula (Linen Press) by Maureen Freely As Israel escalated its assault on Gaza in October, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan posted on social media describing the Jewish state’s campaign in the strip as “bordering on genocide”. The same week, Turkey contributed troops, aviation equipment and artillery to a joint military exercise with Azerbaijan dubbed “Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 2023” near its border with Armenia – a nation whose ethnic forebears were massacred inside Turkish territory in the prelude to the foundation of the Republic. More than a million died. Erdoğan still refuse ..read more

Gen Z are given a great deal of credit these days. Born between 1997 and 2012, they’re the generation with their heads screwed on, trusted to sort out the mess the rest of us have made of the world. This generation, now aged 12 to 27, were the first full “digital natives”, having never known life without the internet. If you have a Gen Z person in your life, you will know that each one is an IT Support Department for their entire family. I was able to keep the wolf from the door during lockdown because my children were on hand to get me onto Zoom calls and set me up for online gigs. There are ..read more

"I’ve done quite a lot of work in various media, from making videos, to writing live science shows, to writing books,” Alom Shaha tells me, over the phone from his home in Kent. “And I would put it all down to the fact that I kind of fucked up my physics degree.” There are direct routes from studying physics to a career in teaching physics. Shaha took the long way around. Born in Bangladesh in the early 1970s, Shaha moved to south London as a child. In The Young Atheist’s Handbook (Biteback, 2012), he describes a troubled home life: his father was cruel and violent; his mother suffered badly ..read more

The rise of China is one of the most remarkable stories of our times, and perhaps one which will define the 21st century. The country, with the second-largest population in the world, often features in the western imagination as a financial and political antagonist, a communist-capitalist ideological chimera – and, to some, a possible roadmap to the future. But in 2024, China is facing a number of problems. Its economy is entering troubled waters, with a real estate bubble close to bursting and demographic collapse all but inevitable (a direct result of the now abandoned “one child policy ..read more