My new year began not with resolutions, but with tentacled monsters menacing 1980s children and their trusted adults. At the ...

Proto-Indo-European gave birth to a plethora of modern languages, but there remains a question mark over its origins ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The vast domain of space is easy to ignore. It’s up there, invisible, while our headlines focus on billionaire rocket launches. But every single one of us has a vested interest. We need to act to ...

This year is the 130th anniversary of the death of Charles Bradlaugh, Britain’s first openly atheist MP. Known by his opponents as the “bellowing blasphemer”, Bradlaugh repeatedly dominated the ...

In an era defined by “fake news”, public trust in institutions is increasingly under threat, along with our ability to discern fact from fiction. In the UK, 94 per cent of people say they have ...

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 ...