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Ian Leslie is a writer, author of CURIOUS: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It, and writer/presenter of BBC R4's Before They Were Famous.
Zoom meetings, although necessary, are void of the comfort that comes with shaking hands or kissing someone before a conversation.
When the violence of the George Floyd protests began to prompt an authoritarian crackdown, black leaders rose to the moment.
Each briefly threatened to become a pandemic, but those who dealt with them directly knew they could have caused far greater damage.
In 2011, in the shadow of the much-criticised swine flu response, officials prepared a new pandemic blueprint.
The soothing phrase “guided by the science” means very little.
Unearned confidence can infect anyone, though some individuals are more vulnerable to it than others.
If his path to the White House now seems vanishingly narrow, that’s because being a successful overdog requires a very different disposition.
Would I have followed the moral norms of a hundred years ago?
It can be liberating to accept that the whole trick of life is deciding how, not whether, to screw up. And the benefits can often outweigh the costs.
Malcolm Gladwell’s cool, playful intelligence has made him one of our leading public thinkers, and he has a host of imitators. But, in a time of antagonistic debate and polarised opinion, does he still have something to say?
