Property’s principal corruption
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 obsession rivalled…
Previous editions
Essays, interviews and ideas from New Philosopher on Previous editions.
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Fixing the living to make a killing
Do you trust your doctor? Should you trust your doctor? A recent op-ed in The New York Times suggests that doctor-patient trust is wavering. Pay for…
Flourish by Antonia Case selling out fast
After just a week, Flourish by Antonia Case has sold out at some locations in Australia and in some online stores but Bloomsbury is in the…
New Philosopher celebrates 10 years
We're thrilled to be celebrating 10 years of New Philosopher. Back in 2013, we launched the magazine at the Byron Writers Festival - at the time,…
COVID-19
You hardly need to be told that life has changed over the past few weeks. We are experiencing an upending of our lives. It was only…
The lost art of travel
We’re in perpetual motion; we can go anywhere, at any time, and the momentum builds. Before long, we’re planning another trip abroad, or we’re packing our…
Medicating the masses
In November of last year I took part in a public debate in London; the motion – which I proposed – was that: “Psychiatrists and the…
An app for an ailing planet
It is often said that the first full image of the ‘blue planet’, taken by the Apollo 17 space mission in December 1972, revealed Earth to…
The call to your own true adventure
Think, for a moment, of who you are today, right now, reading this wherever you are – waiting in an airport, sprawled across a couch, shoulder…
Are we getting smarter?
Your typical adult from 1900 was pretty dumb, by today’s standards. Yank one off the street and run them through a modern standardised intelligence test like…
Does the future matter?
In Tino Sehgal’s installation of his artwork This Progress, each visitor walked into the bottom of The Guggenheim’s spiral rotunda and was met by a child…
Alternative hedonism
Imagine if we all wore the same clothes, lived in the same sort of house and drove the same sort of car. Social scientists ponder this…
Human engineering
You know the situation is getting desperate when three bioethicists propose genetically modifying humans to reduce our environmental impact. In a bizarre paper titled ‘Human engineering…
Rat race to the afterlife
So you’ve spent your life accumulating money – you’ve worked hard, invested wisely; every waking moment has been devoted to moneymaking. Well, almost every moment. When…
Are we the barbarians?
The ancient Greeks invented a whole bunch of important stuff: democracy, tragedy, philosophy (if you ignore India and China, which you shouldn’t), and more besides. Perhaps…
The fourth revolution
We live in amazing times. Digital media and the Internet have transformed how we exchange ideas, how we learn, how we think about ourselves, and even…
Who are we behind closed doors?
In the midst of a nuclear war, an evacuation plane from England crash lands on a deserted, paradisiacal island in the remote Pacific. The only survivors…
Piketty: unequal selves
Thomas Piketty’s recent work Capital in the Twenty-First Century, provides disturbing evidence about the increasing inequality of income and wealth between and within nations. Piketty claims…
