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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.

Insanity has always been integral to New Labour

Martin Bright says that the party labels its enemies as ‘mad’ for Freudian reasons: ‘projecting’ its own collective and individual mental disorders upon foes and rebels alike

It is child-rearing, not sexism, that explains the pay gap between men and women

Rod Liddle says that Harriet Harman’s notion of ‘structural pay discrimination’ is nonsense. It is women’s decision to have children that disrupts wage equality

Growing your own

It is, at present, almost impossible to open a garden magazine, or the gardening pages of a national newspaper, without coming across an article on how we are all now kitchen gardeners and allotmenteers; the theme is that the uncertain economic conditions have turned us back to our gardens, to grow comestibles and thereby ensure that we eat well, now that lack of the readies has reconnected us with our cookers.

All the stalkers you see are desperate marketing men

This will be the Year of the Nosy Parker, says Catherine Blyth: researchers chasing dwindling custom desperate to find out what is going on inside our heads

The BBC can’t help loving Obama, just as it can’t help encouraging recession

Rod Liddle says that television news is intrinsically biased: it transforms what it reports.
In the case of the economy, ministers are right to counteract this with a dose of optimism