Selfies have made you ugly

Modern man, wrote the social psychologist Erich Fromm in 1956, “has been transformed into a commodity”. Scroll through social media, and you will see this transformation is absolute. On one side, we are asked to rate glamorous, increasingly similar-looking people …

Ireland’s Troubles will not return

The political climate in Northern Ireland has always been reflected in its graffiti. In nationalist and unionist areas, slogans and murals commemorating aspects of the Troubles are still common, though the paramilitary emphasis has declined in recent decades. Years ago, …

The Tories should embrace chaos

Politicians act with good intentions. But they rarely seem to grasp that intentions are not the same as outcomes. The social and economic worlds are both complex and change rapidly. This places inherent limits on our ability to understand them. …