"Project Hail Mary" is sci-fi storytelling at its best: solid science, an everyman hero, and a funny little alien ...

Renting in England can be bleak. Many of us have lived, at some point in our lives, in a dingy, drafty, dilapidated flat, whose owner is squeezing as much profit as possible from the arrangement.

Saraswati (Serpent’s Tail) by Gurnaik Johal. Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, is often criticised for using religious identity ...

This article is a preview from the Autumn 2016 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here. In a 2008 article in Wired magazine entitled “The End of Theory”, Chris Anderson ...

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 ...

On paper, Buddhism looks pretty good. It has a philosophical subtlety married to a stated devotion to tolerance that makes it stand out amongst the world religions as uniquely not awful. Even ...

When Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán strode up to the podium in April to give his victory speech, a look of glee was spread across his face. He had just beaten a six-party united opposition to ...

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 ...

In his 1976 debut volume, Richard Dawkins pioneered the concept of the “selfish gene” – the idea that genes propagate themselves through whatever mechanisms necessary, thus explaining phenomena such ...

This article is a preview from the Autumn 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here. Watch one of the BBC’s political programmes – such as the Daily Politics and This Week ...

This article is a preview from the Summer 2017 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here. What do we mean when we talk about “empire”? We use the narratives of imperialism to ...

As a young child, my brother and I would be packed into the family car each year at Christmas and driven to Rochester, in north Kent. There, my father had an annual engagement that, to be quite frank, ...