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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.

Sarkozy’s burqa ban panders to racism, not feminism

Rod Liddle says that the French President may be right about Islam’s ideological content but that his proposal is shockingly illiberal and wrong-headed

If Rushdie deserves free speech, why not Harry?

Salil Tripathi says that the Prince’s remarks were ill chosen and regrettable but the deeper principle concerns freedom of expression and ever greater encroachments upon it

Studying Islam has made me an atheist

Douglas Murray says that he stopped being an Anglican after analysing Muslim texts and deciding that no book — of any religion — could claim infallibility

An evening with the Muslim Facebook crew

Sarfraz Manzoor celebrates an iftar meal with homeless people and his fellow Muslims, a web-generated ‘flashmob’ observing an Islamic tradition of generosity to the needy

Have we ever faced an enemy more stupid than Muslim terrorists?

These narcissistic adolescent halfwits should not fill us with fear, says Rod Liddle. The aircraft plot trial showed yet again that those who wish to murder us with fizzy pop and peroxide are a bunch of cowards