The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

A third of British adults who used to read for pleasure don't anymore.

And according to the OECD, literacy itself, not just the habit of it, is declining or stagnating across most of the developed world.

In a new book, The New Dark Ages, James Marriott argues that we're living through a great unwinding: a retreat from the written word and the kind of rational, analytical mind that print culture built over five centuries, back towards something closer to the pre-literate world: one dominated not by books, but by images, screens, and short-form video.

In this episode, Tanjil Rashid is joined by James Marriott to ask: are we really heading back into the dark?
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Terror has sought Salman Rushdie out time and time again for the past 40 years, ever since the controversial publication of his novel The Satanic Verses and the furious response to it from much of the Muslim world.

He believed that his life of extreme measures and isolation was a closed chapter in 1998, after Iran stepped back from the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. But four summers ago, in a quiet lake town in New York, death came knocking again. Rushdie was about to give a public lecture when a man ran on stage and attacked him with a knife.

He first revisited this attempt on his life in his 2024 book Knife. Now, with his wife, the poet and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and director Alex Gibney, Rushdie has retold this life-changing moment through film.

He spoke with Tanjil Rashid on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, with which he feels a “line of connection” - between the attack on himself and the attack on his adopted home in New York, and reflected on what it means to live in this age of terror.

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Historical fantasy, campus satire, industry exposé; five books in, and no one's quite worked out what a "RF Kuang novel" is supposed to look like. That's rather the point.

This September she publishes her sixth: Taipei Story, a semi-autobiographical account of a summer spent learning Mandarin in Taiwan - her most personal book yet.

She joins Tanjil Rashid in this episode of the podcast.
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From the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the current escalation of the war between Israel, Palestine and their neighbouring countries, the Middle East has been besieged by almost constant conflict.

Is it history? Politics? Resources? Or religion driving these tensions?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose new book The Cauldron tells the story of the making of the modern Middle East.
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Charlotte Higgins has spent most of her career interviewing and critiquing artists, authors and poets as the Guardian's chief culture writer. It was unlikely that her work would ever take her to a warzone.

But following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she found herself drawn to this country under siege. She wanted to ask, what happens to art under war? And could Ukrainian culture not just survive, but flourish?
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