Two books explore the drivers of health anxiety Odd as it may sound – for the pandemic played strange tricks on our experience of time – it has been more than five years since the World Health ...

How should we represent humankind to aliens? With Pioneer 10 and 11, Nasa fell short. Next time, we must do better ...

Country music has long shed its Bible-bashing image. Today, bluegrass is helping to heal America’s deep divides ...

In William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the character Mariana claims, “No legacy is so rich as honesty.” Morgan Talty’s debut novel Fire Exit could well be written in direct response to ...

This piece accompanies Marcus Chown's feature on the discovery of cosmic background radiation, from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. Perhaps the most famous accidental discovery of all is ...

For many generations in societies shaped by Christianity, monogamy has been the almost undisputed champion of relationship norms. In Britain and the US, it has been held up as the dominant – really ...

Octopuses are having a moment. So are slime moulds and honeybees. Mushrooms are in vogue. After 250 years of humanity (well, some of humanity…) confidently atop the great pyramid of being, we in the ...

This article is a preview from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here. I’d arranged to meet the sorceress at 4pm, but I was running late. Hurrying past ...

Technology is enabling us to retreat from the outside world. But we should resist the urge – for ourselves and for each other Patrons outside a busy pub in the Yorkshire Dales. Credit: Alamy There ...

This article is a preview from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here. Azar Nafisi is an academic and writer, who left her native Iran for the US in 1997.