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The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Labour’s U-turn on social housing for non-immigrants is welcome but too late

Rod Liddle says that metropolitan liberal ideology is too deeply ingrained in local councils, social services and the judiciary to be overturned by one panic measure driven by Labour’s sudden fear of the BNP

To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with

Cass Sunstein — co-author of the hugely influential Nudge and an adviser to President Obama — unveils his new theory of ‘group polarisation’, and explains why, when like-minded people spend time with each other, their views become not only more confident but more extreme

Who would have thought a herd could moonwalk?

The acclaimed web theorist, Mark Earls, says that the death of Michael Jackson unleashed the extremes of collective action: mass mourning and sick jokes

A splendid lunch with Jimmy McNulty

In the first of an occasional series of interviews over meals, Deborah Ross talks to Dominic West about The Wire and the challenge to an Old Etonian of playing an American cop

What Jacko needed was someone to say ‘No’

My defining memory of Michael Jackson — vulnerable, brilliant, otherworldly — is of watching him dance to the soundtrack of a movie.

Moscow Notebook

Before boarding the flight to Moscow, it dawned on me that I might have somehow contracted swine flu from Michael Nyman.

There is something comforting about North Korea’s nuclear weapons

Rod Liddle takes issue with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and otherdoom-mongers: Kim Jong-il’s nukes are quaintly amateurish

Happy birthday Big Ben

Though the moral fabric of Parliament is in tatters, its architecture remains an inspiration. Stephen Bayley celebrates Pugin’s crazy, magnificent clock tower

Wales and the Welsh are no longer a dismal joke

A decade after the first elections to the National Assembly of Wales, Harry Mount says that the principality is at last escaping its dire caricature. No, really

How I became the ‘femme fatale’ of New York gossip

Victoria Floethe, whose affair with the married Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff was a scandal in America, says that New York has fallen prey to a new, scourge-like puritanism