Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) is not really an experiment on a bird—it’s an experiment on the people watching. How, it asks, will spectators react to ...

One thing about war crimes and other offences against international law is that they should survive the news cycle. Such events should remain important after the news reports have come and gone. They ...

‘Despair is a luxury’: A year of hope with Žižek, Mehdi Hasan, Robert Macfarlane and others ...

How do we apply moral standards to a president that rejects any form of restraint?

President Xi’s five-year plan for his country’s film industry? In a word: insularity ...

Twelfth November was an unremarkable day in British politics. Another day when the topic of debate wasn’t one of voters’ main concerns—immigration or healthcare, say, or the budget, or the farmers—but ...

Palantir has acquired key UK government contracts, promising to make government more effective. But Peter Thiel’s controversial company has also worked with the US government and ICE on deportations ...

Tech leaders and industry insiders are giddy with excitement about the advances under way in artificial intelligence, whether due to the scaling up of existing models and functionalities, new ...

Sometimes the complexity of the present can be most effectively explained by the simplicity of the past. Britain’s current troubles began with Theresa May’s gnomic insistence in 2016 that “Brexit ...

The results of Prospect's world thinkers poll After more than 10,000 votes from over 100 countries, the results of Prospect’s world thinkers 2013 poll are in. Online polls often throw up curious ...

In 1945, in an extraordinary essay entitled “Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt warned that it would not be easy to tell the good from the ...

In the 1997 Australian comedy The Castle, an underprepared lawyer attempts to argue that the forced sale of his client’s house is in breach of the Constitution. The judge asks, “What section of the ...