The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

Over 100 million people around the world have downloaded AI companion apps. Friends, therapists, lovers ... mediums - for some, their closest connection in this life is a chatbot.

How did we get here?

Catharine Hughes is joined by James Muldoon, sociologist and author of Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships.
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A professional sumo tournament in London in October 2025 offered more than sporting spectacle.

It became a lens through which to view Japan’s growing cultural pull in the West, a society where ancient ritual, hierarchy and Shinto belief coexist with hyper-modern life.

Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian Christopher Harding to explore how Japan balances tradition and modernity, and why that balance is proving increasingly compelling to Western audiences.
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Born into a Muslim family in Bombay, India, in 1947, two months before the country’s partition, educated in the UK and now resident in New York, Salman Rushdie is a writer of multiple, interconnected worlds. At the heart of his work – ever since he won the 1982 Booker Prize with Midnight’s Children – has been some kind of history: the world’s, his own, or both at once.

The latest chapter in the history of Rushdie’s life sees the now 78-year-old writer – and survivor of a near-fatal assassination attempt – turn his mind to ageing and dying. That is the unifying thread running through the narratives in his 26th book, the short story collection The Eleventh Hour.

He sat down with the New Statesman's culture editor, Tanjil Rashid, late last year.
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The youngest winner of the Booker Prize fell silent for nearly 20 years. Now she's back with a new novel.

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With only her second novel The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai won the 2006 Booker Prize, the leading literary prize in the global Anglosphere, becoming - at the time - the youngest person ever to do so. She was thirty-five. Then: silence. 19 years of it, before another novel emerged - this year. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

Desai joins Tanjil Rashid on The New Society to discuss her latest novel, and why it was 19 years in the making.

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The experimental novelist on finding God, being "a misfit" and her return to writing.

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Nicola Barker is "has broken the mould so many times it's almost beyond repair".

She's a post-punk literary anarchist who writes from the peripheries of the UK.

Her experiments with narrative form have won her many plaudits, including the Goldsmith's Prize for literary fiction, which the New Statesman partners with.

Barker joins Tanjil Rashid on the New Statesman culture podcast to discuss her latest novel, Tony Interrupter: a comedy about art, virality, chaos, and the surprising impact of freak events in Kent.
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