A Point of View

Adam Gopnik revisits two famous American essays from the 1960s and finds a remarkably contemporary vision - and one 'that seems to have an application to our own time and its evident crisis.' He couples Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' with Daniel Boorstin's 1962 classic on 'image' and America's tenuous relationship with facts. 'It is the admixture of Hofs...

From Kamala Harris' 'word salads' to her views about wealth redistribution, Zoe Strimpel finds little to like in a Harris presidency. But it's her views on Israel that Zoe finds particularly hard to stomach. 'In those halcyon days of my youth,' says Zoe, 'our family's concerns that the leader of the free world protect Israel was normal, uncontroversial and, with Clinton and Bush at the helm, not a...

With the help of certain Conservative politicians, form number 48879-2039-876/WC and a rabbit hutch, Howard Jacobson takes a wry look at the advantages of a nanny state. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Sarah Wadeson

Three of Megan Nolan's close friends have given birth in the past year. Another two are doing IVF. And anyone who can afford to, Megan says, is freezing their eggs. Megan reflects on how attitudes to having children have changed profoundly in Ireland in the space of a generation. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Tom Bigwood

As America gears up for next week's debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Sarah Dunant looks at the seismic shift in sexual politics in the US since Trump debated with Hillary Clinton. 'Looming, threatening, even the word stalking was used' to describe that encounter, Sarah remembers. But when this presidential debate gets underway in the early hours of Wednesday morning UK time, Sarah th...

In the week that one of Britain's most famous Paralympians Tanni Grey-Thompson was forced to crawl off a train, Tom Shakespeare describes his encounters with crawling. 'Don't get me wrong,' Tom says, I am not against crawling.' His holidays, he says, involve a lot of crawling: in Egypt to visit the apartment of the poet Constantine Cavafy or in Italy to see the childhood home of the communist revo...

At a village fete in rural France, AL Kennedy finds herself among barrel organs, sleeping piglets and 'a guy in a flowing blue smock gliding about on an ancient motor bicycle, just because he could.' After US Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz turned the word 'weird' into 'the soundtrack of our summer,' Alison relishes how the concept is reclaiming its roots. Producer: Adele Armstrong S...

David Goodhart says that with 40% of universities facing deficits and, he believes, too many graduates chasing too few graduate jobs, it's time for a rethink on universities. And he has a reassuring message for those who didn't make the grade in Thursday's A level results. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Jonathan Glover Production coordinator: Sabine Schereck Editor: Tom Bigwood

Sara Wheeler on why sleeping in Captain Scott's bunk in the Antarctic got her thinking about imposter syndrome. 'It took me many years,' writes Sara, 'to realise that I had as much right to be in Captain Scott's hut as anyone else, because nobody owns the Antarctic, or the hut, or Scott's legacy." Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Rod Farquhar Production coordinator: Janet Staples Editor: Tom Bigwo...

Will Self muses on change as he prepares for a stem cell transplant, an operation 'which will result in the greatest change in what has been a notably changeable life.' And he discusses the preparations he's making which he believes put him 'in pole position to race with this ...devilish adversary.' He concludes that the art of living is about recognizing that 'life is in continual flux - and our...

As the Olympics gets underway, Michael Morpurgo says we need to take care that the event doesn't stray too far from the ideals of the Olympics and the Paralympics. 'The announcement this year,' writes Michael, 'that athletes at the Olympics will, for the first time, be awarded prize money - $50,000 for each gold medal - sets a precedent in the Games' 128 year history.' But, he says, 'over the next...

Adam Gopnik muses on why he'll always love the steam baths in New York. 'My own pet answer,' Adam says, 'justified by intuition and half-heard rumours, is that it helps sleep to have a low internal body temperature. All that sweating lowers my own burning inner furnace and makes me more able to sleep.' This is, he admits, 'a perfectly sound scientific explanation that I have no intention of checki...

Sarah Dunant argues that Joe Biden's refusal to understand his moment in history is forcing the nation to confront the fact that she is no longer young. 'In the relatively short history of America from new country to super power,' writes Sarah, 'she has always - even when she behaves badly - projected an aura of self confidence, a vitality, almost cocky certainty that we associate with youth. And...

A night walk, listening to nightingales, and a memory of her late father lead Rebecca Stott to ponder Iris Murdoch's theory of 'unselfing'. The theory, writes Rebecca, was 'essentially about looking out and beyond ourselves and away from what Murdoch described as the 'fat, relentless ego.'' In this post election moment, Rebecca says, 'to rise to the challenges of housing, global migration, war, th...

Mary Beard argues that 21st Century disputes about what museums should own - or give back - are far from being a modern phenomenon. 'Almost as far back as you can go, there have been contests about what museums should display, and where objects of heritage properly belonged,' writes Mary. 'These debates are written into museum history.' From the Great Bed of Ware to the Lewis Chessmen, Mary reflec...

Megan Nolan ponders her generation's housing crisis. 'Sometimes it all crashes over me, how adrift I am, and how laughably inconceivable the idea is that I would ever own a place on my own,' writes Megan. But there are other ways of framing this dilemma too, she believes. 'My favourite of those is to think that I'm unusually capable of feeling at home in the world at large, instead of just one bui...

Zoe Strimpel reflects on the 'commercial exploitation' of fandom. From Swiftie 'friendship bracelets' to beauty products and sportswear, she argues that you can no longer be a true superfan, or a true popstar, without the merch. 'But it is striking,' writes Zoe, 'that rather than reject the purely cynical commercialism of their fandom, fans demand it. Which begs the question of whether we are real...

When it comes to fast cars or literary festivals, Howard Jacobson reckons that, for the average male, there isn't usually much of a contest. 'You don't get as many men at a literary festival as you do on a street corner where there's a Lamborghini parked,' writes Howard. 'Or you didn't.' But he senses a change - and a new interest in men talking and reading about love. It's not that men find femal...

Mark Damazer looks to George Orwell's essay, 'Politics and the English Language', to see if he can be our guide through the fractious language of the next few weeks of the election campaign. He says Orwell's critique in 1946 of the political slogans, the carefully honed phrases and the rehearsed answers of his day remind us that there's never been a golden age of political language. A thought to h...

Sara Wheeler asks whether trying to get away from it all is a futile endeavour. 'We go to all that trouble', writes Sara, 'up at 4.30, cancelled planes and trains and bent tent poles - only to find ourselves, boring as ever, glum and pink on a beach or glum and damp in a Welsh cottage!' But there are still good reasons, Sara argues, why so many of us want a change of scene. And so 'off we go, in l...

Tom Shakespeare calls for new thinking to fix the current crisis in our prisons. Against a backdrop of overcrowding, violence and high rates of reoffending, he says we need a clearer vision of what prisons are really for. "We want them to do lots of rather different things: punish people who have broken our laws; protect the public from violent criminals; rehabilitate offenders and teach them usef...

Rebecca Stott is on a quest for a decent-tasting apple. Along the way she discovers a revival of interest in wonderful heritage varieties: the rough-textured russets like Ashmead's Kernel, the rich, aromatic Saltcote Pippin or the sharp tanginess of the Alfriston. Rebecca asks why - given the UK has an impressive two and a half thousand varieties of apple - we can only buy four or five in the aver...

Megan Nolan on the allure of New York and the city's 'main character' syndrome. The city is, she says, 'the place that makes me happier to be alive than anywhere else - not in spite but because of its thoroughly human hopelessness.' 'Nature is nature, permanent and without moral taint,' writes Megan, 'but cities are paeans to the marvellous filth of the human spirit.' 'The real challenge is being...

Patients care apps - which give patients unprecedented access to their health records - are being rolled out by NHS trusts across the country. You might imagine, says Will Self, that 'this previously unimaginable access to such a wealth of medical data should empower me, make me feel I have a choice, and enable me to assist those treating me by being what every conscientious statistic wants to bec...

Caleb Azumah Nelson on why anger is no longer a stranger to him, but a friend. He talks of a childhood in which he tried to navigate a world which was 'already coding a young black man as dangerous, threatening. Angry.' 'As I've grown older,' writes Caleb, 'the question is not whether I should be angry, but do I love myself enough to be angry, to object when I feel wronged or faced with injustice....