Greg Graffin, evolutionary biologist and lead singer of pioneering US band Bad Religion, talks music and rebellion ...

Godwin (4th Estate) by Joseph O’Neill. Joseph O’Neill remains best known for Netherland (2008). Hailed as a Great American ...

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 ...

Most scientific breakthroughs take years of research – but often, serendipity provides the final push, as these historic discoveries show .

The popular association of atheism with immorality is a particular deterrent for women who have religious doubts, since in Arab society they are expected to be “virtuous” in order to marry. “It is ...

Mycorrhizal fungi growing with a plant root. Credit: Dr Yoshihiro Kobae As Giuliana Furci picks her way through the dense, dripping greenery of Chile’s Patagonian forest, her keen eyes are seeking out ...

The great Buddha statue in Nha Trang, Vietnam by Petr Ruzicka On paper, Buddhism looks pretty good. It has a philosophical subtlety married to a stated devotion to tolerance that makes it stand out ...

Technology is enabling us to retreat from the outside world. But we should resist the urge – for ourselves and for each other Patrons outside a busy pub in the Yorkshire Dales. Credit: Alamy There ...

The British ethical societies, forerunners of Humanists UK, emerged in the 1880s. As the London Ethical Society put it in its first report in 1887, they offered a basis for “well-doing and well-being” ...

This article is a preview from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here. Everyday Humanism (Equinox Publishing) by Dale McGowan and Anthony B. Pinn (eds) How ...

London's Soho in 1976 The Diaries of Mr Lucas: Notes from a Lost Gay Life (Atlantic Books) by Hugo Greenhalgh Meet George Leo Lucas. At the turn of the 1970s, he is a middle-aged civil servant in ...

Historian Jonathan Israel's magisterial three-volume history of the 'Radical Enlightenment' is the intellectual version of a JCB, ripping up the terrain around him. Kenan Malik follows him down the ...