The term is usually used to describe the geographical area from the eastern Mediterranean to Iran, including Syria, Jordan, ...

Epstein hosted a dinner at Harvard in 2004, with attendees including evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers (centre right). Credit: Alamy Stock Photo It was not a huge surprise to find myself in the ...

The Life You Want (Hamish Hamilton) by Adam Phillips Imagine you are at the airport, picking out a new book for the trip, and ...

This piece accompanies Marcus Chown’s feature on the discovery of cosmic background radiation, from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. Perhaps the most famous accidental discovery of all is ...

On paper, Buddhism looks pretty good. It has a philosophical subtlety married to a stated devotion to tolerance that makes it stand out amongst the world religions as uniquely not awful. Even ...

Adults play on water slide set up in Bristol, May 2014. Credit: Alamy It’s late summer and the afternoon sun is beating off Shoreditch’s sheer glass facades and gum-littered pavements. My colleagues ...

Michaela Community School prides itself on its approach to discipline. At this free school in Wembley, north-west London, children walk the corridors in silence and retrieve books from their bags ...

God: An Anatomy (Pan Macmillan) by Francesca Stavrakopoulou. We don’t know his real name. In early inscriptions it appears as Yhw, Yhwh, or simply Yh; but we don’t know how it was spoken. He has come ...

For many generations in societies shaped by Christianity, monogamy has been the almost undisputed champion of relationship norms. In Britain and the US, it has been held up as the dominant – really ...

“Winter’s Gibbet” in Northumberland marks the site of a murder and execution in the late 18th century. Credit: Alamy On 9 February last year, the then-deputy chair of the Conservative Party, Lee ...

In 1786, Sir William Jones, a British philologist and judge, made the remarkable discovery that the ancient Indian language Sanskrit resembled Latin and Greek, “bearing to both of them a stronger ...

This article is a preview from the Winter 2017 edition of New Humanist. How many of us haven’t in some idle moment imagined what the world might be like if it had always been run by women? Not that ...