February 2016

February 2016 issue

Past issues

Essays

Adult Intensive care ward at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, Ho Chi Minh City, ©Chau Doan/Getty Images

Why we are losing the war on bugs

Elizabeth Pisani

©Daniel Lynch/Rex/Shutterstock

Security first, freedom will follow

A Palestinian protester hurls a rock towards Israeli forces during clashes near Shejaiya, an eastern district of Gaza City, December 2015. ©Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images

At the crossroads of conflict

Gershom Gorenberg

Safe space? Yale University students demonstrate against racial insensitivity on campus in November 2015. ©Ryan Flynn/AP/Press Association Images

The end of argument

A British factory ©Ken Crosby

Will our children really not know economic growth?

Lawrence Summers

Illustration by Ben Jennings

The power to intrude

Joshua Rozenberg

"A perfect mix of futility, incompetence and arrogance": Elizabeth Butler's The Remnants of an Army (1872). ©Wikimedia Commons

Should we reimagine our colonial legacy?

London's skylie. ©Ben Judah

London's migrant turf war

Silicon Valley, where many believe that "software is eating the world." But have we, as Robert Gordon argues, already had the best of the revolution?

The end of economic growth

Robert J Gordon

Regulars

Ruby Wax hosting the Institute of Fundraising's awards in 2014. ©Howard Lake

If I ruled the world: Ruby Wax

The Generalist by Didymus: issue 239

Puzzles and Enigmas by Barry R Clarke: issue 239

TE Lawrence (left) and Leonard Woolley at Carchemish in 1913. ©

The way we were: remaking the Middle East

Duel: should we have a sugar tax?

Richard Tiffin & Neena Modi

Opinions

A group chats at a care home on National Care Home Open Day. ©CQC/Joe D Miles

The great social care dilemma

An Iranian oil worker makes his way through Tehran's oil refinery south of the capital Tehran, Iran. ©Vahid Salemi/AP/Press Association Images

Cheap oil won’t bring peace

Britain's Chancellor George Osborne, right, and China's Minister of the General Administration of Customs Yu Guangzhou shake hands after signing an agreement. Britain will be China's "partner of choice" in the West ©Suzanne Plunkett/Pool Photo/AP

The time to “fix the roof” has come

Anatole Kaletsky

A man and woman twirl a jump rope for a girl at a park in Beijing, Saturday, 31st October, 2015. ©AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Reinventing the Chinese family

A job interview. ©SportSuburban

Judgement and prejudice: a fine line

President Barack Obama speaks in the White House Rose Garden about measures to reduce gun violence with family members of victims of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting. Photo taken in April, 2013. ©Carolyn Kaster/AP/Press Association Images

Why Obama is taking gun control into his own hands

Arts & Books

Shostakovich with fellow composers Sergei Prokofiev (left) and Aram Khachaturian (right)

Shostakovich: a midnight meditator on life’s futility

Book Review: The Syrian Jihad—Al-Qaeda, ISIS and the Evolution of an Insurgency by Charles R Lister

David Patrikarakos

Book review: Reacher said Nothing, Lee Child and the Make Me by Andy Martin

Book Review: In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine by Tim Judah

Annabelle Chapman

Book Review: The Love of Strangers, What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen's London by Nile Green

Book Review: The Vanishing man, In Pursuit of Velázques by Laura Cummings

Emma Crichton-Miller

Book Review: The Lost Boys—Inside Football's Slave Trade by Ed Hawkins

David Aaronovitch marches with anti-cuts demonstrators, as a journalist, in 2011. ©Jude Edginton/Camera Press

Children of the revolution

Arfa Khatun Chowdury, originally from Bangladesh, holding her British certificate of naturalisation ©CATE Gillon/Getty Images

Do ethnic majorities now need special protection?

Book Review: Shylock is My Name by Howard Jacobson

Anthony Cummins

Book Review: The Prose Factory—Literary Life in Britain since 1918 by DJ Taylor

Tough humanism: Sergeant Welsh played by Sean Penn (centre) in The Thin Red Line. ©DDP/Camera Press

The wonder of Terrence Malick

Society and Culture

Wine Glasses at The Vines of Mendoza resort in Argentina. ©longhorndave

Why is it so hard to describe the taste of a wine?

A child sleeps on the sofa after a heavy night of trick-or-treating. ©pessap

Why are children obsessed with the forbidden?

©Rental Realities

How to get 6 per cent yields on your savings

©woodleywonderworks flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/5623339500

Relationships that last a lifetime

February: month of the potato

Wendell Steavenson