4+ day, 23+ hour ago   (221+ words) New Statesman “I’m better than you are!” “I’m better than you are!” Those lines are from the 1964 movie, Fail Safe, screamed by Colonel Cascio, a right-wing officer in the American Strategic Air Command. After he is told to order the…...

5+ day, 1+ hour ago   (173+ words) New Statesman The rumour mill works quickly at a temporary mass-arrest jail in Washington DC. It had been only an hour since I was bundled out of a police van into a freezing warehouse filled with rows of fold-out plastic chairs…...

5+ day, 1+ hour ago   (329+ words) newstatesman.com Outside the sleek midcentury Nordic Pavilion in the centre of the Giardini della Biennale, a severed head made of raw untreated bronze is supported by a tripod of reinforced steel piles – like the stakes used to brace Venice’s…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (76+ words) New Statesman March 1996: Rachel Cusk on masculinity Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M, is reviewed in the magazine this week. Thirty years ago, the author wrote a number of articles about television for the New Statesman; her piece of…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (311+ words) New Statesman “As I write, highly sophisticated robots are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” I was searching for a way to describe my first experience of an air raid, and this modification of George Orwell’s opening line from The…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (261+ words) Jon Ronson’s Lost Boys New Statesman At what point, I wonder as I turn the final page of The Castle, did the gonzo journalist Jon Ronson decide what his latest book was actually going to be about? Was it when…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (331+ words) New Statesman When Charlie, 32, was growing up in a small town in Lincolnshire in the 1990s, she dreamed of success, of moving away, of what politicians called “social mobility”. She is an archetypal middle-class “zillennial”, on the cusp between millennials, born…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (197+ words) Christian Kracht’s dream states New Statesman Christian Kracht’s new novel opens with a quote from Georges Perec’s Things (1965), in which a young couple’s life in 1960s France is described as “like an overly long routine, like an almost serene boredom”. In…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (264+ words) Rachel Cusk’s Portmanteau novel New Statesman Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M – a fictional portrait of a film star – could be seen as a professionalisation of the approach Cusk developed in her celebrated Outline trilogy (2014-18). In those novels, a…...

3+ week, 5+ day ago   (161+ words) newstatesman.com David Runciman is surely right to shift the focus from one individual, Jason Arday, to the mesmerising presence of Cambridge and to critique the illusions behind its determined hold over imaginations of even the most informed branches of…...