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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.

The race to stop Iran getting the bomb is what counts

The scenes from Tehran have been inspiring and show that democracy is changing the shape of the Middle East, says James Forsyth. But the immediate decision facing President Obama is what to do about Iran’s fast-moving nuclear programme

Moscow Notebook

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

J.G. Ballard was a man of the Right — not that the Right really wanted him

Rod Liddle says that the great writer, who died this week, always espoused the pessimism about the human condition that is the mark of a true conservative. He even wanted American missiles stationed in his garden

Dinner at the club with the Zulu Mr Everyman

As Jacob Zuma readies himself for the challenge of governing South Africa, Alec Russell recalls his encounters with the ANC leader: a politician who plays the part of the revivalist preacher and speaks the language of reconciliation but remains an unsettling enigma

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