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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.

Labour has left Britain on the fringes of Europe

William Hague responds to David Miliband’s claim in The Spectator that the Tory EU policy is suicidal and says the government’s own strategy has been an abject failure

The C of E has forgotten its purpose. Why, exactly, does it exist?

Rod Liddle offers an Easter message to the leaders of the Church, who have ditched its traditions and reduced it to a sort of superannuated ad-hoc branch of social services. It has lost all sense of mission and direction. Whatever happened to muscular Christianity?

‘In a global era, we need our roots more than ever’

Gordon Brown tells Matthew d’Ancona why he is so preoccupied with national identity. In the modern world, he says, we must be explicit about what being a Briton means

Obama could be a great ally to a prime minister — but not this one

Gordon Brown has absurdly high expectations of the political boost he will get from this week’s trip to Washington and the G20 summit in London next month, says James Forsyth. It is David Cameron who stands to be the likely beneficiary of the special relationship

Beware the new axis of evangelicals and Islamists

Melanie Phillips says there is a dangerous new alliance between anti-Israel Christians and radical Muslim groups, often plotting in secret against their common enemy