menu_open Columnists

The Guardian

We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

The Guardian view on universities: Labour needs a clearer plan

Education opens doors, and the expansion of higher education begun under New Labour means that millions of young people who would not previously...

latest 8

The Guardian

Editorial

Is your community bushfire-ready? In Cobargo after black summer we don’t just have a plan, we have one another

latest 2

The Guardian

Zena Armstrong

New year resolutions? How to free yourself from brain rot in 2026

latest 2

The Guardian

Look!! A Bird!!

Trump is marching into 2026 with the worst cabinet in history

As 2024 ended and Donald Trump’s cabinet picks were rolled out, commentators scrambled to decide which one was the worst. Was it Matt Gaetz for...

latest 10

The Guardian

Austin Sarat

I got married twice in my 20s. Now I’m in love with my midlife situationship

We were just two midlifers in our 50s who met back in 2020 using a popular dating app. Bored, lonely and emerging from lockdown we jumped at the...

latest 30

The Guardian

Natasha Ginnivan

Why the surprise over Trump’s Venezuela coup? US presidents promise isolation – and deliver war

It is starting to trickle out. Last week in Caracas was not an invasion, it was a putsch. It was the militarised kidnap of one ruler to aid his...

latest 20

The Guardian

Simon Jenkins

Elon Musk is moving back into politics. Can’t he take up a new hobby instead?

“You know, I’ve generally found that when I get involved in politics, it ends up badly,” Elon Musk mused on Nikhil Kamath’s podcast in...

latest 10

The Guardian

Arwa Mahdawi

Now Musk’s Grok chatbot is creating sexualised images of children. If the law won’t stop it, perhaps his investors will

It’s a sickening law of the internet that the first thing people will try to do with a new tool is strip women. Grok, X’s AI chatbot, has been used...

latest 10

The Guardian

Sophia Smith Galer

Europe’s failure to condemn Trump’s illegal aggression in Venezuela isn’t just wrong – it’s stupid

There is no two without a three, as we say in Italian. After their complicit silence on Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and their tacit acceptance of...

yesterday 100

The Guardian

Nathalie Tocci

Is Trump really as lawless as he seems? Or is he just a law unto himself?

yesterday 30

The Guardian

It’S Open To Interpretation

Greta Thunberg came to stay – and my kid may have inadvertently helped her get arrested

It was 6am. London. A few days before Christmas. My four-year-old is singing at the top of her lungs and charging around my parents’ house on a...

yesterday 40

The Guardian

Arwa Mahdawi

Male bonds develop one way, female friendships another. Should we stop trying to make men more like women?

It’s good to talk. Or so men are always being told, by everyone from mental health campaigners to the women they live with, bemused by the male...

yesterday 40

The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff

What did I learn from a new – and very random – poll? Our interior lives are much weirder than I thought

New polling just dropped from TV’s channel 5, conducted by More in Common, about a range of topics that fall under the umbrella, “every little...

yesterday 5

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Trump’s new world order is being born – and Venezuela is just the start

As Venezuela’s skyline lit up under US bombs, we were watching the morbid symptoms of a declining empire. That may sound counterintuitive. After...

yesterday 100

The Guardian

Owen Jones

It’s not easy being an English northerner surrounded by southerners. Here’s how we survive

Of course they weren’t being mean, but each time my university friends jokingly echoed my Leeds-accented “no” with a noise that is perhaps best...

yesterday 10

The Guardian

Robyn Vinter

Donald Trump poses a threat to civilization

Trump’s domestic and foreign policies – ranging from his attempted coup against the United States five years ago, to his incursion into Venezuela...

yesterday 100

The Guardian

Robert Reich

Forget all the artisanal cheese. French crisps are absolutely depraved

I spent Christmas in France, which was on its best behaviour: tasteful, twinkling lights, market stalls stacked with exquisitely fresh fruit and...

yesterday 20

The Guardian

Emma Beddington

Many schools don’t think students can read full novels anymore. That’s a tragedy

Reading fiction has been such a joy for me that my heart broke a little to learn recently that many schools no longer assign full books to high...

yesterday 20

The Guardian

Margaret Sullivan

We can safely experiment with reflecting sunlight away from Earth. Here’s how

The world is warming fast – and our options to avoid catastrophic harm are narrowing. 2024 was the first full year more than 1.5C hotter than the...

yesterday 10

The Guardian

Dakota Gruener And Daniele Visioni

Why is it so perilous to be a person of colour on The Traitors?

It was the first real day of 2026: 2 January. There was already no shortage of mayhem, which is to say “news”, in the world but the papers were...

yesterday 10

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

As we farewelled Ronda our soft-hearted labrador, the grief was as painful as any I’ve felt

Each time a family dog dies, I go over it all again and decide that the intense grief is far outweighed by the joy the animal brought to our lives....

yesterday 10

The Guardian

Paul Daley

Ever been caught short? Here’s the good news: a great British toilet revolution could be on the way

Why do we have so few public toilets in UK cities? It’s hard to think of two more fundamental social needs than a) not being forced to relieve...

yesterday 10

The Guardian

Eddie Blake

Trump’s Venezuela invasion sets a perilous precedent

No matter how you slice it, Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela is an act of naked aggression. It is blatantly illegal and sets a disturbing...

yesterday 10

The Guardian

Kenneth Roth

For Americans, 2026 started with two starkly different visions for the country

The new year opened with a pair of scenes that illustrated the great divide within the US and the stakes of the ongoing contest over its future. On...

yesterday 10

The Guardian

Moira Donegan

With Trump’s military action in Venezuela, the US has made every other country less safe

The US military operation in Venezuela undermines a fundamental principle of international law, agreed after the horrors of two world wars and the...

yesterday 10

The Guardian

Volker Türk

I’m watching myself on YouTube saying things I would never say. This is the deepfake menace we must confront

It was my blue shirt, a present from my sister-in-law, that gave it all away. It made me think of Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, the lowly bureaucrat...

previous day 40

The Guardian

Yanis Varoufakis

The US violated international law in Venezuela. These are the questions Australia must now ask

No matter how the Trump administration seeks to justify its actions in seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in an audacious...

previous day 40

The Guardian

Donald Rothwell

The awkward truth about some of Trump’s views on Europe? European leaders agree with him

I expected the EU to push back strongly against Donald Trump’s new national security strategy. Not only does it show contempt for the EU and its...

previous day 20

The Guardian

Shada Islam

Trump’s coup in Venezuela didn’t just break the rules – it showed there aren’t any. We’ll all regret that

I never thought it possible that you could look back on the Iraq war, and the foreign invasions of the “war on terror” in general, and feel some...

previous day 100

The Guardian

Nesrine Malik

Who does new year Keir look like after his reset? Last year Keir – and that’s a huge problem

Keir Starmer kicked off the political new year with a fascinating and revealing 45-minute-long interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. The...

previous day 30

The Guardian

John Mcternan

Nine scientific breakthroughs I’d like to see in 2026 – from earworms to procrastination

People who greet the new year with hope, ambitious plans and optimised gut microbiomes might be obnoxiously apparent at the moment, but we all know...

previous day 10

The Guardian

Emma Beddington

Caroline felt she was doomed to dating failure. Learning to sit with sadness was part of overcoming her loneliness

Caroline* came to see me with one of the more common problems that plague people in our modern era – difficulties with romance and dating. She was...

previous day 6

The Guardian

Ahona Guha

The electric vehicle revolution is still on course – don’t let your loathing of Elon Musk stop you joining up

In another era, before Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed its name to X to mark the spot of its descent into barbarism, honed Grok, a generator of...

sunday 30

The Guardian

Zoe Williams

Today, Trump’s target was Caracas. What tomorrow?

“This is genius,” Donald Trump enthused. It was 22 February 2022. Vladimir Putin had just declared parts of eastern Ukraine to be independent and...

sunday 60

The Guardian

Stephen Wertheim

In 2026, remember this: Britain is much better than it was in so many ways. Don’t swallow the right’s lies

A couple of the more disruptive boys in the class put red laces in their Dr Martens, because someone had told them that was how you showed your...

sunday 50

The Guardian

John Harris

The hill I will die on: Films and TV shows are better if you read the spoilers first

I love spoiling the plot for myself. It’s something I do fairly regularly. Before watching a film, I tend to open Wikipedia and read the entire...

sunday 8

The Guardian

Jason Okundaye

After Trump’s illegal Venezuela coup, there are two dangers: he is emboldened, but has no clue what comes next

During his presidential campaigns, Donald Trump pledged to end “forever wars”, abandon “nation-building” interventions and focus instead on...

sunday 6

The Guardian

Rajan Menon

In his last days, I couldn’t bear to tell my dying husband what had happened at his beloved Bondi

A few days before he took his last, mercifully peaceful, breath, my husband, Ian Reinecke, looked at me intently and asked, “Is there anything...

sunday 20

The Guardian

Julianne Schultz

Today an illegal coup in Venezuela, but where next? Donald Trump talks peace but he is a man of war

The overthrow and reported capture by invading US forces of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s hardline socialist president, will send a shiver of fear...

sunday 100

The Guardian

Simon Tisdall

Migrants are at the heart of our art, our music, our whole history. That’s what the right won’t admit to you

We are repeatedly sold a painfully two-dimensional picture of the motivations of those seeking shelter in Britain. According to this picture,...

03.01.2026 50

The Guardian

Rowan Williams

I’m not sure a bakery needs a branded condom – can any business resist selling merch now?

For all its many charms, Norwich tends to lag behind London on internet-buzzy trends (personally, I count that as among its charms), but it’s not...

03.01.2026 3

The Guardian

Elle Hunt

At Zohran Mamdani’s block party, I observed a simple truth: people want more politics, not less

On 1 January, to mark his inauguration as mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani threw a block party. As he was sworn in outside city hall in front of a...

03.01.2026 30

The Guardian

Samuel Earle

The hill I will die on: Fan fiction is real literature, whatever the snobs say

Fan fiction is democracy in its purest, most chaotic form. It’s the people seizing the means of production. Every “what if?” is a tiny revolution....

03.01.2026 20

The Guardian

Urooj Ashfaq 

Tennessee actually just did something amazing for women

Let’s say you’re going on a first date and you want to make sure the person you’re meeting up with isn’t a registered sex offender. If you...

03.01.2026 80

The Guardian

Arwa Mahdawi