Society

The traveller, as V.S. Naipaul describes that role in A Turn in the South (1989), 'is a man defining himself against a foreign background'. Over the past forty years, Paul Theroux has built his career writing books, nearly fifty novels and travelogues, to become an exemplar of that definition. He seeks always to go farther and deeper, often journeying, to b ...

In 1971, the Boston Women's Health Collective published Our Bodies, Ourselves, which became an international phenomenon and was translated into twenty-nine languages. For second wave feminists, taking control of their lives and their bodies was a basic principle. The book provided information related to sexuality, birth control, abortion, pregnancy and chil ...

The Economist’s foreign correspondent John Hooper turns to a quintessentially English theme: Italians. Italians seem to be a sort of recurring obsession, a presence that periodically intrudes into the English imaginary. The cultural construction of Italy is a particularly sensitive and timely topic in the context of debates about the future of Europe. The a ...

What are the implications of the ever-accelerating revolution in information communication technology on our lives? Is the Internet a force for good, for increased freedom and democracy? Or are we so in thrall to the prophets of Silicon Valley that we have lost sight of the perils that lie in ‘big data’, the extension of algorithms and quantification into every ...

In her long-form essay Dear Life, columnist and fiction writer Karen Hitchcock considers how we in Australia treat the elderly and dying. To the task she brings her formidable skills as a writer and her experience at the coalface, working as a staff physician in a Melbourne public hospital. The result is a sensitive, rigorous, and moving account that ex ...