The creation of global mushroom maps is unearthing new species and teaching us how they support Earth’s ecosystem ...

As big questions go, you can’t get much bigger than “What is the meaning of life?” It is a question that is often modified slightly, becoming “Does life have a purpose?” One can quibble over the ...

Hopeful Pessimism (Princeton University Press 2025) by Mara van der Lugt ...

Most scientific breakthroughs take years of research – but often, serendipity provides the final push, as these historic discoveries show .

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 ...

God: An Anatomy (Pan Macmillan) by Francesca Stavrakopoulou. We don’t know his real name. In early inscriptions it appears as Yhw, Yhwh, or simply Yh; but we don’t know how it was spoken. He has come ...

The popular association of atheism with immorality is a particular deterrent for women who have religious doubts, since in Arab society they are expected to be “virtuous” in order to marry. “It is ...

Can the Integrated Education Act help to break the segregation of Catholic and Protestant education in Northern Ireland?

The great Buddha statue in Nha Trang, Vietnam by Petr Ruzicka On paper, Buddhism looks pretty good. It has a philosophical subtlety married to a stated devotion to tolerance that makes it stand out ...

Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire (Allen Lane) by Priya Satia Priya Satia begins Time’s Monster with a statement: historians, she says, are above all storytellers. At first ...

This article is a preview from the Winter 2017 edition of New Humanist. How many of us haven’t in some idle moment imagined what the world might be like if it had always been run by women? Not that ...

Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, discusses her new book, on the importance of fiction to democracy.