The latest Google phone promises to transform my children into perfect, smiling angels. Why would I want that?
Tom Whyman
I much prefer the fun and mess of unvarnished childhood snaps, says philosopher and writer Tom Whyman
September 2017
Books blog
Charles Baudelaire: the debauchee’s debauchee
A privileged, arrogant poet who produced only one collection, Baudelaire has had huge influence in many spheres – and it continues 150 years after his death
July 2017
Stranger in a Strange Land by George Prochnik review – Gershom Scholem and Zionism
The author, like his subject, rejected consumer capitalism and travelled to Israel to find a more meaningful Jewish life. But problems arose …
March 2017
On my radar
On my radar: Olivier Assayas’s cultural highlights
The French film director on the magic of Nick Cave, his fascination with Theodor Adorno and his favourite Paris market
February 2017
Shortcuts
Why it’s fashionable to quote Walter Benjamin
The Marxist German-Jewish philosopher is all the rage with designers at Gucci and Dior. But have they actually read his 1,000-page works of critical theory?
January 2017
Essential reading: nine experts on the books that inspired them
From film to philosophy, from music to history and economics, masters of their crafts pick the five books they could not live without
November 2016
Grand Hotel Abyss by Stuart Jeffries review – what happened to Cafe Marx?
This is a witty and pacy account of Adorno, Benjamin and other theorists of the Frankfurt school, who transformed leftwing thinking about capitalist society
October 2016
John Berger: ‘If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listen’
On the eve of his 90th birthday, one of the most influential writers of his generation talks about migration, Brexit, growing old – and his fondness for texting
September 2016
Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School – review
Why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is back in fashion
August 2016
Top 10s
Top 10 books featuring parks
Will Self: Our digital lives and the chaos beneath
Top 10s
Top 10 philosophers' fictions
The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin review – a master thinker's fiction
July 2016
The return of Geoff Dyer: ‘I’m incredibly competitive’
Disappointment proves a fruitful inspiration for the author as he searches for transcendence around the world in his new book White Sands. But will he take frustration on the tennis court so philosophically?
December 2015
Book of the day
Kenneth Goldsmith Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century review – a monumental hymn to the city
From sex and the subway to loneliness and gentrification, Goldsmith’s collage of many voices captures the complexity of New York life
November 2015
A life in ...
Kenneth Goldsmith interview: ‘I wanted to take Walter Benjamin off the pedestal and on to the coffee table’
Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote
Translation Tuesday: from Looking at Pictures by Robert Walser
October 2015
Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical
What is a perfect society, and what’s the best kind of utopianism? Terry Eagleton looks at future thinking and concludes that our system is run by dreamers who call themselves realists
September 2015
Books blog
Walter Benjamin’s legacy, 75 years on
Now seen as one of the founding fathers of Critical Theory, his apparent suicide on 26 September 1940 was a ‘tragedy of misunderstanding’
