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Martha GillThe Guardian |
It has been a tough beginning to the year for Rachel Reeves. The chancellor has found herself in the spotlight as debt interest costs spiralled, while...
Over the decades, research has chipped away at our most cherished ideas about human specialness: it turns out that we share such things as theory of...
Crime stories serve up a reliable set of emotions – shock, sympathy, horror, outrage, morbid curiosity and fear. But there is something different,...
Does winning the lottery wreck your life? When it was revealed earlier this week that an anonymous Briton had won £177m in the November...
I was struck by a conversation on LBC last week, which followed the news that several Premier League footballers refused to wear armbands...
To the optimist, it may seem as though we are at last emerging from a dark age when it comes to children with neurological and learning disorders....
What links these two news stories? The first: “manifesting” has been declared Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year. The self-help practice,...
Is the age of the megastar fading at the BBC? It is possible to read too much into Gary Lineker’s retirement, which has dominated headlines. Some...
Imagine we’d found a way to get millions of people to switch from alcohol, which in this country kills 10,000 people a year, to another kind of...
You may have heard of Cop29, the global climate change conference that doesn’t start until 11 November but has already been generating headlines...
Compared with the screaming scare campaigns of the 1990s, anti-drugs messaging is thin on the ground these days. So the casual observer may not...
Sex, drinking, smoking, gambling, joining the army, being put to work – we now take it as obvious that there should be strict laws protecting...
They are problems of success, really, these modern ills. Social media addiction, gaming disorders, the compulsive over-eating of sugar and...
Plastic surgery is a brutal business. No wonder it makes a good subject for a horror film. In fact, the subject may be too much for the genre....
Idea for a TV show. Cancelled celebrities compete against each other for the ultimate prize: public forgiveness. Hosted by a coterie of bitchy...
At the age of 25, casting around for what to do next, I was lucky enough to get a few weeks paid work at a newspaper. The work itself wasn’t...
Not all of us are good at clothes. Some have the gift of sartorial certainty; some suffer from a sort of “mirror blindness”, doomed to stand in...
It’s hard to satirise the super-rich. Not that we don’t enjoy trying. The most recent attempt – The Perfect Couple, a murder mystery starring...
The details differ, but really it’s the same story, turning up every few weeks, for around a decade now. The revelation – and it’s always...
Have you ever wondered why pubs in Britain bother with gardens? They seem like a solid enough investment now, in summer, sure. But what’s the draw...
‘The age of boredom… has now passed”. So begins On Boredom , a 2021 essay collection that claims the likes of TikTok and YouTube have driven it...
‘You may turn over your papers now.” For how many of us, decades after A-levels, does that phrase still cause a ripple of nerves in the stomach?...
What to make of last week’s annual report by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which declares – I summarise – that the inhabitants...
There’s nothing I find so cheering, these days, as the rise of the horror movie. Take its intrusion into this year’s summer blockbusters. We have...