Category Archives: Society books

The big idea: is tourism bad for us?

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Wanderlust may be surging once more – but will travel really help us find what we’re looking for?

In 2019, the United Nations World Tourism Organization reported that international travel had increased to a record 1.4 billion tourist arrivals. It predicted a 3% to 4% annual increase in coming years. That didn’t happen, of course. At the end of 2021, international tourist arrivals were 72% below pre-pandemic levels with 1 billion fewer arrivals than two years earlier.

This is despite airlines’ ingenuity. During Australian lockdown, Qantas organised flights to nowhere: one left Sydney for a fly-by tour of Byron Bay and the Gold Coast, the Great Barrier Reef and Uluru; another in May last year took passengers to 43,000ft to see the blood-red supermoon.

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The big idea: how can we adapt to life with rising seas?

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Traditional defences may fail, and migration won’t be possible for everyone. But we may yet find more creative ways to live


We have passed the point of no return: rising seas will soon directly affect hundreds of millions of people around the planet. They will indirectly affect many millions more as transport connections, water supplies and factories in low-lying areas are lost or have to be relocated. What exactly are we facing? The latest research suggests we are likely to see a rise of a metre by the year 2100. Given how much carbon dioxide is already in the air and oceans, as much as three metres may be baked in over the 200 years or so that follow. And while that might seem like a long way off, coastal groundwater levels will rise much sooner, wrecking infrastructure and causing toxic pollution well before cities such as Miami, New York and San Francisco are permanently inundated.

Where will all those people, warehouses, water treatment plants and rail lines move to, given that the interior of large land masses will have become drier? The forced migration of hundreds of millions of people will undoubtedly lead to serious international conflict over space and basic resources like fresh water. Conflict is another word for war.

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The big idea: is it time to stop worrying about stress?

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Our beliefs about difficult feelings may do more damage than the feelings themselves

In the late 19th-century America, a somewhat bizarre form of abstinence emerged. The vice was not alcohol but anxiety. Citizens of New York began to attend regular “Don’t Worry Clubs” in which they encouraged each other to look on the bright side of life. Their founder, Theodore Seward, argued that Americans were “slaves to the worrying habit”, which was the “enemy which destroys happiness”. It needed to be “attacked” with “resolute and persevering effort”.

By the early 20th century, the psychologist William James described how people had developed a kind of “religion of healthy-mindedness” with the aim of turning the mind away from all negative thoughts and feelings.

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I’ll fight to overturn US ban on my ‘Queer Bible’, says British author

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Former model Jack Guinness caught up in furore over Mississippi mayor’s attempt to withhold funding for library until ‘homosexual materials’ are withdrawn

A British writer, presenter and former model says he is shocked to find himself at the centre of an unprecedented wave of book banning in the US.

A Mississippi mayor has told the Madison County Library to remove LGBTQ+ books from its shelves or lose funding. One of the books singled out as an example was The Queer Bible, a collection of LGBTQ+ history essays edited by Jack Guinness. Ridgeland’s Republican mayor, Gene McGee, has refused to release funds to the library until “homosexual materials” are withdrawn.

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Polygamy in Senegal, lesbian hookups in Cairo: inside the sex lives of African women

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Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s new book The Sex Lives of African Women examines self-discovery, freedom and healing. She talks about everything she has learned

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah has a face that smiles at rest. When she is speaking, it is with a constant grin, one that only falters when she talks about some of the difficult circumstances she and other African women have gone through in their quest for sexual liberation. She speaks to me from her home city of Accra, Ghana, where she says “no one is surprised” that she has written a book about sex. As a blogger, author and self-described “positive sex evangelist”, she has been collecting and recording the sexual experiences of African women for more than a decade. Her new book, The Sex Lives of African Women, is an anthology of confessional accounts from across the African continent and the diaspora. The stories are sorted into three sections: self-discovery, freedom and healing. Each “sex life” is told in the subject’s own words. The result is a book that takes the reader into the beds of polygamous marriages in Senegal, to furtive lesbian hookups in toilets in Cairo and polyamorous clubs in the United States, but without any sensationalism or essentialism. Her ambition, in the book as in life, is “to create more space” for African women “to have open and honest conversations about sex and sexuality”.

Sekyiamah was born in London to Ghanaian parents in a polygamous relationship, but grew up in Ghana. Her formative years in Accra were under a patriarchal, conservative, Catholic regime that instilled in her a fear of sex and all its potential dangers – pregnancy, shame, becoming a “fallen” woman. “I remember once my period didn’t come,” she recalls. “I was in Catholic school at the time, and I would go to the convent every day and pray, because I thought that meant I was pregnant.” From the moment she reached puberty she was told: “Now you have your period, you’re a woman, you can’t let guys touch you. That was always in my head.” Later, she was told: “If you leave your marriage no one else is going to want you. If you have a child as a single woman men are going to think of you just as a sexual object and not a potential partner.” Her mother would only speak to her about sex in cautionary ways. “The idea of messing with boys was so scary to me. It kept me a virgin for years and years.”

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Things Are Against Us by Lucy Ellmann review – feminist pyrotechnics

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A collection of wickedly funny, rousing polemics takes aim at ecotourism, the beauty industry … and crime fiction

In 1938, three years before her suicide at 59, Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, a long-form essay on patriarchy and its seemingly inevitable trajectory, war – a forceful indictment of the fascism that was then sweeping Europe and beyond. Her most conspicuously pacifist work, Three Guineas was contentious for its time. It argued that subjugation of women in the domestic sphere (notably, Woolf refers to “the daughters of educated men”, women of her own privileged class) is reflected in an equal lack of representation in the public domain of education and influence: “The public and private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other,” she wrote. As part of a solution, Woolf proposed supporting three causes with a guinea each: specifically, a society to avert war, a campaign for the rebuilding of a women’s college and an organisation to encourage women’s professional employment. Always elegant, Three Guineas nevertheless throbs with justifiable anger and fear. Its rallying cry and the recognition that the personal is also political would go on to, for example, inspire female peace activists of the 1960s, who took various of its sentences as antiwar slogans. “Set fire to the old hypocrisies,” urges Woolf. Unsurprisingly, its central themes have not dated.

Ellmann is hellbent on upbraiding the deleterious forces of the prevailing misogyny

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‘A heartbreaker and a heart mender’: how Sapphire’s Push birthed a new American heroine

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Twenty-five years after Sapphire’s novel Push was published, Tayari Jones salutes its groundbreaking heroine, Precious

In the Reagan years, I was a teenager, more reader than writer, when I discovered the work of Sapphire. As a college student, I hung out with a cluster of intense, arty types, sharing battered copies of chapbooks, zines and small-press volumes. My good friend Angela passed me a sheaf of xeroxed pages by an author who called herself Sapphire. What I remember most clearly was a poem from the point of view of Celestine Tate Harrington, the quadriplegic boardwalk singer who fought the city for custody of her child. The poem was defiant as the speaker focused less on the joys of motherhood and more on ownership of her sexuality. Angela speculated that Sapphire would likely never receive her due in the world of letters, because she had chosen as her subject the people whose bodies are stigmatised, whose families are pathologised, and whose very lives are held up as everything America rejects. “She is a hero,” Angela declared, and I nodded in solemn agreement.

Some critics were appalled by the very idea of this story being held up as an important work of literature

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QAnon and on: why the fight against extremist conspiracies is far from over

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Far-right conspiracies ran unchecked online in the Trump years. It’s all gone quiet since the Capitol riot, but author Mike Rothschild believes there’s a radicalised audience waiting for a new rallying point

On 7 January this year, a day after the mob stormed the Capitol in Washington DC, a curious exchange occurred in the netherworld of global conspiracy. Alex Jones, the rasp-voiced mouthpiece of fake news for the past decade, was in conversation with the most visible leader of the previous day’s shocking events: Jacob Chansley, the self-styled “Q Shaman” who featured on the world’s front pages, in buffalo horns, animal skins and face paint.

Jones, on his fake-news platform Infowars, with its million-plus viewers and sharers, had for years been the loudhailer of unhinged stories that included the belief that Hillary Clinton was the antichrist, that Michelle Obama was a man, that the Pentagon and George Soros had detonated a “homosexual bomb” that turned even frogs gay, that 9/11 had been a “false flag” operation and, most viciously, that the Sandy Hook school murders, in which 20 children and six teachers died, were staged by “crisis actors” to promote gun control. Jones had inevitably been among those who addressed the restive crowd at Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” march (having donated $50,000 for the staging of the rally) and calling for supporters to “get on a war footing” to defend the president. Two days later, however, when faced with the rhetoric of Chansley, whom he had invited on to his show to explain the insurrection, it seemed even he, America’s conspirator in chief, finally couldn’t take the lies any more.

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Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’

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The AI researcher on how natural resources and human labour drive machine learning and the regressive stereotypes that are baked into its algorithms

Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world.

You’ve written a book critical of AI but you work for a company that is among the leaders in its deployment. How do you square that circle?
I work in the research wing of Microsoft, which is a distinct organisation, separate from product development. Unusually, over its 30-year history, it has hired social scientists to look critically at how technologies are being built. Being on the inside, we are often able to see downsides early before systems are widely deployed. My book did not go through any pre-publication review – Microsoft Research does not require that – and my lab leaders support asking hard questions, even if the answers involve a critical assessment of current technological practices.

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Practically perfect? How a new kind of nanny novel nails parents’ angst and anger

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Class, race, politics and power are at the heart of modern nanny novels that explore the complex relationship between working mothers and the women they pay to look after their children

There’s a line at the opening of Kiley Reid’s hit debut, Such a Fun Age, that encapsulates the drama at the heart of the recent spate of nanny novels. Emira, a young black woman dressed for a night out, is stopped by a security guard in an upscale supermarket with Briar, the white child she looks after. It’s late, the guard wants to know where Briar’s parents are. He won’t let Emira leave with her. “But she’s my child right now,” she tells the guard. “I’m her sitter. I’m technically her nanny …”

Emira isn’t strictly a nanny. She doesn’t get the perks of a full-time job – health insurance, holidays. Later, she reflects that, “more than the racial bias, the night at Market Depot came back to her with a nauseating surge and a resounding declaration that hissed, You don’t have a real job.” But in many ways, Briar is her child. Emira is the one who spends time with Briar, who understands her. Alix, a blogger and influencer, relies on her daughter’s nanny completely, but she is also desperate to befriend “the quiet, thoughtful person she paid to love [Briar]”. In pursuing a friendship with Emira at the expense of her own children, Alix only succeeds in putting further distance between them. As Emira reflects, Briar is “this awesome, serious child who loves information and answers, and how could her own mother not appreciate the shit out of this?”

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‘The air reeks of invisible danger’: an extract from Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic

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In this extract from her new book Breathtaking, palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke reveals the pressure and pain of splitting her time between hospice patients and hospital Covid wards

In January 2020, novel coronaviruses are nowhere on my mind. Like everyone working in the NHS, I am steeled for a home-grown catastrophe. For no matter how many patients lie on trolleys in corridors, how many ambulances sit trapped on hospital forecourts, how many photos go viral of toddlers slumped on their parents’ coats, receiving oxygen on the floor of a beleaguered A&E, nothing ever truly changes. These days, the annual NHS “winter crisis” is both dreaded and reliable as clockwork.

The numbers are so large, and repeated so frequently, they have long been leached of their force: 17,000 hospital beds lost since 2010; only 2.5 beds per 1,000 people in the UK, compared with three times that number in Germany; unfilled vacancies for more than 10,000 doctors and 40,000 nurses.

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Thirty books to help us understand the world in 2020

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The climate crisis, gender, populism, big tech, pandemics, race… our experts recommend titles to illuminate the issues of the day

A distinguished climatologist and geophysicist, Michael Mann is director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications tagias well as four books, including 2012’s The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars and his forthcoming The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, due out in January 2021 (Public Affairs Books).

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Our new normal: why so many of us feel unprepared for lockdown life

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In his former job as a war correspondent, novelist James Meek witnessed the thin line between everyday life and chaos - but no experience prepared him for our current emergency

Before the lockdown, I went to see a friend who lives a few miles away in south London. I cycled from Nunhead to her home in Blackheath. On the way I passed a tense crowd of people being forced to wait to get into the Iceland store in New Cross. I reached my friend’s block of flats, climbed the stairs to her front door and laid my satchel on the doormat. She opened the door, greeted me from a distance of a couple of yards, removed the groceries she’d asked me to bring, some salmon and a bottle of olive oil, and put them away. We chatted for about half an hour, me sitting on a step out in the hall, her standing in the doorway, neither of us getting closer than two yards. Her husband, whose mild cough a couple of days earlier had triggered her self-isolation, was a disembodied voice offstage. My friend and I always kiss hello and goodbye; we’ve known each other for 10 years. Not this time. I went back to Nunhead, to queue for more food for my family – the butcher, the fishmonger and the greengrocer all had queues outside – then went home and washed my hands.

It’s the small necessary tasks that get you through the abnormality: the assignments, the missions, the good deeds. They break down the fearfulness and strangeness of the greater emergency into smaller, more manageable chunks of personal time where we can see what we have to do and see, just as importantly, that we can actually do it. The more we have to confront the enormity of the changes around us, and our own individual powerlessness to alter the tide of events, the more likely we are to break down or be paralysed. The merciful paradox of crises like these is to bring so many new chores and duties that the difficulties – sometimes the novelties – of solving each step helps occupy the part of our brain that yearns to know what’s going on and do something about it.

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Rachel Louise Snyder: ‘Domestic abuse is as common as rain’

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Rachel Louise Snyder talks about the personal history behind her award-winning book, No Visible Bruises, which charts the shocking rise of familial violence against women in the US

In 2002, Dorothy Giunta-Cotter was shot and killed in her own home in Massachusetts by her husband and relentless abuser of 20 years, William Cotter. He then turned the gun on himself. Dorothy, 35, had fled from him with their two daughters a few days earlier because Cotter had begun to hurt their 11-year-old, but she had refused the offer of a refuge. She told the police that if her daughters were with her, Cotter would find them, and kill all three. “She attempted to avert the worst of two terrible outcomes,” wrote the American journalist Rachel Louise Snyder in an article published in the New Yorker in 2013, “the loss of her daughters’ lives along with her own.”

That article, A Raised Hand, became part of eight years of research from one of the frontlines of what the World Health Organization (WHO) has deemed “a global epidemic”. Snyder’s work is now an award-winning book, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us. In the UK, the issue of domestic abuse is not “taboo”, which Snyder says the subject still is in the US. Here, while it may be a family secret, it is recognised and discussed nationally; the impact of austerity on closing refuges, slashing legal aid and axing specialist domestic abuse services, has kept the issue high on the UK agenda. It’s a crime that impacts on men too but women make up the overwhelming majority of victims. Eighty women were killed by a partner or ex in the year to March 2019, an increase of 27% on the previous year, while an incident of domestic abuse is reported every minute in England and Wales. The government estimates that the social and economic cost of domestic abuse is a staggering £66bn a year.

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Raising the bar: Hashi Mohamed’s journey from child refugee to top lawyer

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He defied a life of poverty and hardship to reach Oxford and become a barrister. Now Hashi Mohamed has written a book which aims to rethink the stalled project of social mobility


• Read an extract from Hashi Mohamed’s People Like Us

Hashi Mohamed is a 36-year-old barrister. He has the accent, a mentor once told of him, of someone who’s “been to Eton” and the confidence of a natural orator. If you had to place him within the complex matrix of the British class system, you’d probably say he was the son of wealthy Africans who attended an independent school and Oxbridge.

In fact, Mohamed is a Somali who was born in Kenya, where he lived in a rundown part of Nairobi with his four siblings (another having died), his mother (who also had six children from a previous marriage) and his travelling salesman father. When his father died in a car accident in 1993, Mohamed and three of his siblings were sent to England as refugees.

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Back to the border of misery: Amexica revisited 10 years on

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A decade after publishing his vivid account of the places and people most affected by the US-Mexican ‘war on drugs’, Ed Vulliamy returns to the frontline to see how life has changed

If you drink the water in Ciudad Juárez, there you’ll stay, goes the saying – Se toma agua de Juárez, allí se queda. It’s not a reference to the quality of drinking water (about which polemic abounds because it is so dirty) but to the beguiling lure of this dusty and dangerous yet strong and charismatic city. It’s a dictum that might be applied to the whole 2,000-mile Mexico-US borderland of which Juárez and its sister city on the US side, El Paso, form the fulcrum.

Ten years ago, I returned from several months’ immersion along that frontier, reporting on a narco-cartel war for this newspaper and eventually writing a book, Amexica, about the terrain astride the border, land that has a single identity – that belongs to both countries and yet to neither. A frontier at once porous and harsh: across which communities live and a million people traverse every day, legally, as do hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of goods annually.

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‘It has saved countless lives’: readers’ picks of the best books this century

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After we published our list of the greatest books since 2000, you sent in your own suggestions – from Chinese sci-fi to a history of music

“London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd (2000) made me fall in love with London all over again. The blood of the city’s history soaked into the clay. Quiet hidden corners, conspiratorial whispers in coffee houses, the dirty Thames and the Great Stink. Invasions, bridges, fires and fog. It’s a very human tale told with the verve of a novelist, the detail of a diarist and the grace of a poet.” – dylan37

“The one novel I’ve read from the century to date that I am sure will stay with me for the rest of my life, for personal as well as for general reasons, is The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller (translated by Philip Boehm in 2012). It was published in German as Atemschaukel in 2009, just before she (deservedly) won the Nobel prize for literature. It’s an extraordinarily dense and poetic work and one that seems to transcend language – so perfectly written that text and idea are fused, yet still overflowing with humanity.” – nilpferd

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Want to transform your life? Stop chasing perfection

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Give up the rat race, accept reality and have the courage to be disliked – the latest self-help trend is not about self-reinvention but finding contentment in the life you have

By tradition, this is the season for personal reinvention, but these days it’s hard not to feel cynical about the idea of a triumphant liberation from the past. In the news, Brexit provides an hourly reminder that merely wishing to bring about a glorious fresh start is no guarantee that calamity won’t be the result. Meanwhile, other dark developments – from the erosion of American democracy and the resurgence of the European far right, all the way to climate change – fuel a sense of foreboding that isn’t exactly motivational when it comes to self-improvement: the creeping fear that you might be living in the end times is a poor basis for making a new beginning. In any case, the never-ending debate on nature versus nurture seems to be drifting toward a gloomy acceptance that there’s much about ourselves we’ll never change. “DNA isn’t all that matters,” writes the geneticist Robert Plomin, whose book Blueprint epitomised this mood last year, “but it matters more than everything else put together in terms of the stable psychological traits that make us who we are.”

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