Essays, interviews and ideas from New Philosopher.
East London, Sunday afternoon. I am at a custom-built concert hall with thousands of people including eight members of my family, for ABBA Voyage. After the hit, ‘Dancing Queen’, the whole place erupts. My eighty-year-old father whoops; my…
Read article
A crowd descends upon parliament, or congress, or some other seat of power. Some in the crowd carry signs making demands of the government,…
In 1842, after a series of military defeats through the course of the First Opium War, the Chinese Qing dynasty signed the Nanjing Treaty…
“The easy thing is just to conform. If you look at the history of intellectuals back to the earliest times, every society that…
In one of the most frequently quoted aperçus about marriage, Rainer Maria Rilke exhibited a rare wisdom for someone not yet thirty. He wrote:…
“The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise, and noise of desire – we hold history’s record…
Signals are information worth attending to. Noise is interference you ought to ignore. When I’m talking to you on the phone, the sound of…
It’s difficult to say when and how my children first became aware of the concept of a prison. It was certainly very early, well…
In the lead-up to the general election in the UK, everyone was talking about property. In the crowded south of our archipelago, it’s an…
To celebrate the publication of our 50th edition, we're giving away 50 prizes to subscribers, with first prize a 50-edition subscription (up to our…
Over the last few years Scott had vacationed to countries like Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia and other destinations in Asia. He hunted out new vistas…
Many of the great artists were travellers. Gauguin travelled to the islands of Martinique and Tahiti for inspiration; Van Gogh hopped all over Europe;…
It is unclear just how the “Man from Song” (Songren) acquired his reputation, but classical literature is replete with stories of his stupidity. These…
