The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

In this week’s magazine, we published an open letter, signed by over 150 leading authors, artists and public figures, titled “Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist”.

https://www.newstatesman.com/cover-story/2026/10/sally-rooney-is-a-writer-not-a-terrorist

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Megan Gibson to discuss why the New Statesman published this open letter in support of Sally Rooney.

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Carlo Rovelli is a physicist. But he’s also so much more than that. Perennially on lists of the world’s top thinkers, Rovelli likes to think and think hard, about the big questions, where physics meets philosophy and art and literature.

Can we ever truly know what it feels like to be someone, or something, else? Is the mind separate from the body? What even is life? Where could it possibly come from? Where could the universe come from?

These are the questions Rovelli has a stab at answering in his new book On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy. In particular he draws on quantum mechanics and ancient Eastern thought to argue that the world is not made of separate categories but is one interconnected web of relations, where things are defined by how they interact with everything else.

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Carlo Rovelli.

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You know what you know, and I know what I know, but only when we know what the other knows do we have common knowledge.

That’s the crux of cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s latest work, focusing on the shift from private to public knowledge, and how this can suddenly change behaviours or even start revolutions.

Steven Pinker joins Tanjil Rashid to discuss.

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Every story, they say, needs a beginning, a middle and an end; every story needs a setting.

What if that isn’t true? Can you write when everything is in flux, when you are unmoored from places, and when the time is out of joint?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Amit Chaudhuri, a singer, composer, poet, critic and novelist, to discuss how a story is less important – and less interesting – than the movement of life.

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"We live in a world that deserves unicorns," says Katherine Rundell.

If you haven't come across Rundell's work yet, you will soon. She's written over a dozen books, including an award-winning biography of John Donne and the children's fantasy series Impossible Creatures - a copy of which every Year 6 child in the country will receive this Christmas. Disney has just signed a seven-figure deal for the screen adaptation.. Rundell is being touted as the next JK Rowling.

When she's not writing Rundell works on Renaissance literature as a fellow of Oxford University.

Two themes recur throughout her work: fantasy and animals. And as you might guess from her feelings about unicorns, the two are rarely far apart.

On this episode she joins Tanjil Rashid, following the publication of her new essay collection Napolean's Orangutang to talk about what humans should learn from animals, the connection between religion and fantasy, and - in her words - why wonder is political.

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A third of British adults who used to read for pleasure don't anymore.

And according to the OECD, literacy itself, not just the habit of it, is declining or stagnating across most of the developed world.

In a new book, The New Dark Ages, James Marriott argues that we're living through a great unwinding: a retreat from the written word and the kind of rational, analytical mind that print culture built over five centuries, back towards something closer to the pre-literate world: one dominated not by books, but by images, screens, and short-form video.

In this episode, Tanjil Rashid is joined by James Marriott to ask: are we really heading back into the dark?

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Terror has sought Salman Rushdie out time and time again for the past 40 years, ever since the controversial publication of his novel The Satanic Verses and the furious response to it from much of the Muslim world.

He believed that his life of extreme measures and isolation was a closed chapter in 1998, after Iran stepped back from the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. But four summers ago, in a quiet lake town in New York, death came knocking again. Rushdie was about to give a public lecture when a man ran on stage and attacked him with a knife.

He first revisited this attempt on his life in his 2024 book Knife. Now, with his wife, the poet and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and director Alex Gibney, Rushdie has retold this life-changing moment through film. 

He spoke with Tanjil Rashid on the eve of the 25th anniversary of  9/11, with which he feels a “line of connection” - between the attack on himself and the attack on his adopted home in New York, and reflected on what it means to live in this age of terror.

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Historical fantasy, campus satire, industry exposé; five books in, and no one's quite worked out what a "RF Kuang novel" is supposed to look like. That's rather the point.

This September she publishes her sixth: Taipei Story, a semi-autobiographical account of a summer spent learning Mandarin in Taiwan - her most personal book yet.

She joins Tanjil Rashid in this episode of the podcast.

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From the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the current escalation of the war between Israel, Palestine and their neighbouring countries, the Middle East has been besieged by almost constant conflict.

Is it history? Politics? Resources? Or religion driving these tensions?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose new book The Cauldron tells the story of the making of the modern Middle East.

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Charlotte Higgins has spent most of her career interviewing and critiquing artists, authors and poets as the Guardian's chief culture writer. It was unlikely that her work would ever take her to a warzone.

But following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she found herself drawn to this country under siege. She wanted to ask, what happens to art under war? And could Ukrainian culture not just survive, but flourish?

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In the summer of 2024, riots tore through British towns, and since then old questions have continued to resurface about who belongs in the country.

Taj Ali has spent years digging into a history that’s rarely told in full: the long tradition of South Asian political activism in Britain.

His debut book, Come What May, We’re Here to Stay, traces that tradition and asks what it means for Britain now.

Taj Ali joins Tanjil Rashid.

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Every year, more libraries across Britain close their doors.

As councils have their funding slashed, these are often the first spaces to go.

What do we lose when we stop reading and collecting? What is a library to a community, beyond its books?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by the University of Oxford's Bodley's Librarian, Richard Ovenden.

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To hear more conversations like this search "The Exchange" wherever you get your podcasts.

When Amia Srinivasan published The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century in 2021, it sparked widespread debate about the politics of desire, consent, and sexual justice.

In this episode of The Exchange, the Oxford academic joins Tanjil Rashid to discuss how philosophy can illuminate some of the most contentious questions in contemporary culture: from incels and pornography to whether our desires are shaped by society.

Find more from Amia Srinivasanhere

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Throughout history, art, and artists, have caused moral outrage.

For a long time we had the liberal notion that we could separate great art from bad artists, but we do seem to live in a time of heightened moralisation around works of art and their creators. Why is that?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Daisy Dixon, who has written the book Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art.

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Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic poem is one of the most anticipated films in recent cinema history.

But what is it about this story, first told maybe 3000 years ago, that so fascinates us?

Who really wrote it and why does it represent, with Homer’s other great work The Iliad, the foundation of western literature?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by The Odyssey’s latest translator, classical scholar and literary critic Daniel Mendelsohn

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Hot dogs, fireworks, old glory, it’s the 4th July. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the USA’s Declaration of Independence.

What led up to these crucial events in 1776? Was the revolution truly American? And what does this anniversary represent today?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Sarah Pearsall, historian and author of Freedom Round the Globe: How the World Made the American Revolution.

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Tayari Jones is one of America's most celebrated novelists, twice chosen by Oprah, shortlisted for prizes on both sides of the Atlantic, and read by presidents.

Her newest book was meant to be a tale of gentrification in the American South, she found herself an entirely different story. Kin follows two motherless girls coming of age in 1950s Louisiana, the Jim Crow South.It's a novel about female friendship, class, race, and motherhood.

Jones discusses her latest book, about growing up "bourgeois and segregated" in Atlanta as the daughter of civil rights activists, and what it's like to watch America try to turn the clock back on progress as it approaches its 250th birthday.

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Andrew Marr and the New Statesman's art critic Michael Prodger join Tanjil Rashid to discuss the life and legacy of David Hockney, who passed away last week.

A Bradford boy who became one of the most famous artists in the world. A gay man who made desire visible decades before it was safe to do so. A painter who took on the iPhone and the iPad and bent new technology to the oldest of artistic impulses. What do the pools, hedgerows and iPad drawings add up to?

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“The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”

Andrea Wulf joins us to discuss her new book The Traveller, about George Forster - the forgotten naturalist who sailed with Captain James Cook at seventeen and came back convinced of something radical: that all human beings are equal.

We ask why that idea was so scandalous in the Enlightenment, why Forster has been largely written out of history, and whether travel really does broaden the mind - or whether, as G.K. Chesterton suggested, it might do the opposite.

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There is in Britain today a widespread mood of public despair, a deep premonition of imminent national decline. According to Ipsos, just over half of Britons feel worse off since Keir Starmer was elected. Going further back, 60% feel the country has gone backwards since 2022.

Are Britain's best days really behind it?

Pratinav Anil, Rachel Clarke, Tanjil Rashid, John Kampfner, Gary Stevenson, and Polly Toynbee debate the issue.

This debate was chaired by Anoosh Chakelian and recorded at the Cambridge Literary Festival.

Find out more here: cambridgeliteraryfestival.com

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What is the relationship between politics and the built environment? between the spaces inhabited by the public and the policies that govern them? 

From parliaments to monuments… from open squares to closed off palaces… there clearly is a connection, but how that manifests itself remains deeply contested. 

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Jan Werner-Muller, a German philosopher and historian, whose latest book, Street, Palace, Square: The Architecture of Democratic Spacesinvestigates this relationship between place, people and politics.

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Political instability, democratic decline, the rise of populist movements - politicians and headlines today are quick to diagnose things as modern day Weimar. But what was Weimar actually like, and how did a city associated with culture and intellectual life become bound up with the rise of Nazism?

Historian Katja Hoyer joins us to discuss her new book on Weimar, the process of fascism taking hold at a local level, her previous book Beyond the Wall, and what today’s politics, including the rise of Alternative for Germany, may and may not have in common with the past.

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Donald Trump’s political style has often been compared to reality TV - but what if the better comparison is professional wrestling?

Satirist Munya Chawawa joins Luke O’Reilly to discuss his new documentary, Wrestling With Trump, which explores the connections between WWE spectacle and modern American politics.

Wrestling with Trump is available to stream now on 4.

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What makes someone a good spy? And does the fiction writer, in many senses a professional liar, share the traits of a double agent?

Novelist and screenwriter William Boyd first explored the theme of espionage in his 2002 novel Any Human Heart and went on to pen a James Bond continuation novel called Solo.

His latest trilogy (Gabriel's Moon, The Predicament and Cold Sunset) explores what happens when a travel writer becomes entangled in Cold War Espionage.

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For decades, James Baldwin has stood as one of the most piercing moral voices of the 20th century, But Baldwin himself has remained, in his own words, elusive.

A new biography by Nicholas Boggs - Baldwin: A Love Story - sets out to change that.

Drawing on newly uncovered archives and decades of research, Boggs reframes Baldwin’s life through an intimate and sometimes unsettling lens: love.

Luke O'Reilly sits down with Nicholas Boggs to discuss Baldwin’s loves and contradictions, the relationship between intimacy and politics, and why Baldwin’s insistence that “love is the only reality” might matter more now than ever.

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The Resistible rise of Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht's darkly comic allegory of authoritarianism is a play that straddles past and present. Written in 1941, it was conceived as a warning; a grotesque gangster-inflected retelling of the rise of Adolf Hitler. It holds out the warning that such a rise is not, in fact, inevitable – it can be resisted.

In a new production, Mark Gatiss steps into the role of Arturo Ui, a character who is at once absurd, ridiculous, sinister, and terrifying. It's a part that delicately walks the tightrope between satire and menace.

So how does a play rooted in 20th century politics land in Britain today? What does it mean to stage breath in an era saturated with political performance and media spectacle? And can satire still function as a warning rather than just a mirror?

Tanjil Rashid speaks with Mark Gatiss in this fascinating and wide-ranging interview.

Mark Gatiss is speaking at the Stratford Literary Festival on Sunday 10 May. Book tickets: https://www.stratfordliteraryfestival.co.uk/

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Or has the term lost its meaning?

It’s a label that’s everywhere now: used by political commentators, thrown around on social media, and increasingly a part of everyday conversation.

In recent months it's been used to describe matters including Indian cricket, Sainsbury's use of facial recognition, the 'Dubai Dream'.

But what did George Orwell actually warn us about, and how closely does our modern world resemble it?

Nick Harris speaks to acclaimed Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, whose latest film Orwell: 2+2=5revisits Orwell not as a distant, dystopian novelist, but as a deeply political thinker, shaped by his own life experience: his birth in colonial India, his immersion in the working class, his wartime fight against fascism.

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Last night, the Artemis II crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a 10-day mission to space and a lunar flyby. The voyage, which included the first woman and a non-US citizen to take part in a lunar mission, is part of a program to place humans once again on the Moon by 2028, a return after 56 years apart.

But why do we bother? Where does this fascination come from?

Can the moon teach us something about ourselves? Is it a hunger for something different?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Rebecca Boyle, science writer and author of Our Moon: A Human History.

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It's almost impossible to separate how we think about modern life from the phenomenon that is capitalism, and to think, what would life look like without it?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Sven Beckert, Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Capitalism: A Global History, to trace the long emergence of capitalism, and to ask what the world looked like before it took hold.

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Michael Pollan, a writer best known for his work on the effect of psychedelics, has taken a journey into the inner mind.

For much of modern history, we’ve understood the mind in comparison to our most advanced machines. Once it was clockwork, then looms, now computers. Each metaphor promises clarity - the ability to be mapped and modelled - but each, in its own way, falls short.

Drawing on philosophy, literature and his own experiments with altered states, in Michael Pollan takes aim at this habit of thinking.

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In 2025, Elon Musk took on an extraordinary role inside Washington, leading something called the Department of Government Efficiency - or Doge.

What followed was a radical experiment: an attempt to remake the machinery of the state using the logic of Silicon Valley and the language of memes.

To understand that moment, it helps to understand Musk himself. This is a figure shaped by his upbringing in apartheid South Africa and by coming of age alongside the early internet. He built his reputation by disrupting entire industries -  even extending his reach beyond Earth -  by moving fast, ignoring convention, and pushing his teams to extremes.

So what happens when you apply that philosophy to the state?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian.

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Despite KPop Demon Hunters becoming Netflix’s most-watched film in history and dominating music charts for months, it’s also the kind of cultural phenomenon many people might never have encountered.

The animated musical feature has been cleaning up at awards season and this weekend it could pick up two Oscars.

In this episode of the New Society, we discuss how the film became a global hit and the rise of K-pop and fandom culture.

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If you’ve ever taken a random walk around the block to push your step count to 10,000… rushed through a lesson on Duolingo to keep your streak alive… or checked a post one more time to see if the likes have ticked up - you’ll know the quiet power of the score.

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen thinks modern life is increasingly organised around scores, rankings, targets, dashboards, and that these numbers don’t just track what we value. They quietly replace it. In his new book, The Score, he asks a simple question: how did we all end up playing someone else’s game, and how do we stop?

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In 2014, Helen Macdonald published H is for Hawk - a book that arrived, at least on the surface, as a memoir about grief: the death of their father, and Macdonald's decision to train and live with a goshawk in the aftermath.

It was nature writing, literary biography, cultural history, and a deeply personal account of what happens when someone steps sideways out of ordinary life and into something more feral. Readers found their own stories in it about parenthood, identity, politics, and the uneasy relationship between the human world and the wild.

More than a decade on, that story has taken another form.

You can read more from Helen Macdonald here

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For one of the most famous historians in Britain, conquering the past is not enough.

This month, alongside co-host Tabitha Syrett, Dominic Sandbrook is launching a new podcast - this time shifting his focus from history to literature.

Tanjil Rashid sat down with Sandbrook to talk about this new venture, what he’s reading (he insists it’s a balanced diet) and why reading still matters, not just to us as individuals, but to the health of society itself.

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Wuthering Heights is a story that has been told and retold, adapted and reinterpreted so many times since publication in 1847.

Every generation seems to rediscover Emily Brontë’s ever-enduring novel, and every generation seems convinced it finally understands it.

Now, it’s British filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s turn. And once again, we’re left asking: is this a love story, a ghost story, a story of obsession, or something stranger that refuses to settle into any single interpretation?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Lucasta Miller.

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A new documentary, Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision, offers a rare glimpse into the deeper ideas shaping King Charles’s view of the world. Known for decades as an environmental campaigner, the King has often spoken about the need for “harmony” between humanity, nature and the environment - but what does he really mean by that?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian Mark Sedgwick.

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Thirty years ago, David Foster Wallace published Infinite Jest - a novel so sprawling, so formally strange, and so unnervingly prescient that it has never quite stopped happening.

Set in a near-future North America obsessed with pleasure, entertainment, and escape, the book asked a question that feels even sharper today than it did in 1996: what happens when a culture confuses happiness with anaesthesia?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by DT Max and Jonathan Derbyshire to discuss why the novel still matters, and what it can tell us about the world we’ve built since.

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Over 100 million people around the world have downloaded AI companion apps. Friends, therapists, lovers ... mediums - for some, their closest connection in this life is a chatbot.

How did we get here?

Catharine Hughes is joined by James Muldoon, sociologist and author of Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships.

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A professional sumo tournament in London in October 2025 offered more than sporting spectacle.

It became a lens through which to view Japan’s growing cultural pull in the West, a society where ancient ritual, hierarchy and Shinto belief coexist with hyper-modern life.

Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian Christopher Harding to explore how Japan balances tradition and modernity, and why that balance is proving increasingly compelling to Western audiences.

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Born into a Muslim family in Bombay, India, in 1947, two months before the country’s partition, educated in the UK and now resident in New York, Salman Rushdie is a writer of multiple, interconnected worlds. At the heart of his work – ever since he won the 1982 Booker Prize with Midnight’s Children – has been some kind of history: the world’s, his own, or both at once. 

The latest chapter in the history of Rushdie’s life sees the now 78-year-old writer – and survivor of a near-fatal assassination attempt – turn his mind to ageing and dying. That is the unifying thread running through the narratives in his 26th book, the short story collection The Eleventh Hour. 

He sat down with the New Statesman's culture editor, Tanjil Rashid, late last year.

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The youngest winner of the Booker Prize fell silent for nearly 20 years. Now she's back with a new novel.

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With only her second novel The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai won the 2006 Booker Prize, the leading literary prize in the global Anglosphere, becoming - at the time - the youngest person ever to do so. She was thirty-five. Then: silence. 19 years of it, before another novel emerged - this year. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

Desai joins Tanjil Rashid on The New Society to discuss her latest novel, and why it was 19 years in the making.

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The experimental novelist on finding God, being "a misfit" and her return to writing.

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Nicola Barker is "has broken the mould so many times it's almost beyond repair".

She's a post-punk literary anarchist who writes from the peripheries of the UK.

Her experiments with narrative form have won her many plaudits, including the Goldsmith's Prize for literary fiction, which the New Statesman partners with.

Barker joins Tanjil Rashid on the New Statesman culture podcast to discuss her latest novel, Tony Interrupter: a comedy about art, virality, chaos, and the surprising impact of freak events in Kent.

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Cinephiles are revisiting Whit Stillman's 90's movies. Tanjil Rashid meets Stillman to find out why.

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Whit Stillman is something of a cult film director. He rose to prominence in 1990 with his debut film Metropolitan, which became the first in the so-called “Doomed. Bourgeois. In love” trilogy: Barcelona came out in 1994 and The Last Days of Disco in 1998. Set among America’s so-called “Preppy” class, the films are comedies of manners in the tradition of Jane Austen, exploring the transitional phase of youth and a certain American identity.

The films are now having something of a revival. Stillman joins the New Statesman's culture editor Tanjil Rashid.

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