Country music has long shed its Bible-bashing image. Today, bluegrass is helping to heal America’s deep divides ...

Academics Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman believe they have finally arrived at an answer. In Born to Rule: The Making and ...

In William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the character Mariana claims, “No legacy is so rich as honesty.” Morgan ...

How should we represent humankind to aliens? With Pioneer 10 and 11, Nasa fell short. Next time, we must do better ...

This piece accompanies Marcus Chown's feature on the discovery of cosmic background radiation, from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. Perhaps the most famous accidental discovery of all is ...

For many generations in societies shaped by Christianity, monogamy has been the almost undisputed champion of relationship norms. In Britain and the US, it has been held up as the dominant – really ...

The 'Super-K' detector is built 3,000 feet down in a mine beneath Hida in Japan. This is one of its most famous images. Marcus Chown explains This picture of the Sun is hardly high-definition. But, in ...

In comparison with other schools of thought, 19th and 20th century humanism was well-off for women. From Mary Shelley to Harriet Mill to Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Margaret Knight to Barbara Wootton ...

A century ago, European empires dominated much of the planet. Gurminder K Bhambra and Charlotte L Riley ask what we can learn from the past. The British Empire – and the people who lived under British ...

As Ernest Hemingway famously claimed, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” In his latest novel, James, Percival Everett reimagines Twain’s ...

Technology is enabling us to retreat from the outside world. But we should resist the urge – for ourselves and for each other Patrons outside a busy pub in the Yorkshire Dales. Credit: Alamy There ...