The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

If you’ve ever taken a random walk around the block to push your step count to 10,000… rushed through a lesson on Duolingo to keep your streak alive… or checked a post one more time to see if the likes have ticked up - you’ll know the quiet power of the score.Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen thinks modern life is increasingly organised around scores, rankings, targets, dashboards, and that these numbers don’t just track what we value. They quietly replace it. In his new book, The Score, he asks a simple question: how did we all end up playing someone else’s game, and how do we stop?

In 2014, Helen Macdonald published H is for Hawk - a book that arrived, at least on the surface, as a memoir about grief: the death of their father, and Macdonald's decision to train and live with a goshawk in the aftermath.It was nature writing, literary biography, cultural history, and a deeply personal account of what happens when someone steps sideways out of ordinary life and into something more feral. Readers found their own stories in it about parenthood, identity, politics, and the uneasy relationship between the human world and the wild.More than a decade on, that story has taken another form.You can read more from Helen Macdonald here

For one of the most famous historians in Britain, conquering the past is not enough.This month, alongside co-host Tabitha Syrett, Dominic Sandbrook is launching a new podcast - this time shifting his focus from history to literature.Tanjil Rashid sat down with Sandbrook to talk about this new venture, what he’s reading (he insists it’s a balanced diet) and why reading still matters, not just to us as individuals, but to the health of society itself.

Wuthering Heights is a story that has been told and retold, adapted and reinterpreted so many times since publication in 1847.Every generation seems to rediscover Emily Brontë’s ever-enduring novel, and every generation seems convinced it finally understands it.Now, it’s British filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s turn. And once again, we’re left asking: is this a love story, a ghost story, a story of obsession, or something stranger that refuses to settle into any single interpretation?Tanjil Rashid is joined by Lucasta Miller.

A new documentary, Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision, offers a rare glimpse into the deeper ideas shaping King Charles’s view of the world. Known for decades as an environmental campaigner, the King has often spoken about the need for “harmony” between humanity, nature and the environment - but what does he really mean by that?Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian Mark Sedgwick.

Thirty years ago, David Foster Wallace published Infinite Jest - a novel so sprawling, so formally strange, and so unnervingly prescient that it has never quite stopped happening. Set in a near-future North America obsessed with pleasure, entertainment, and escape, the book asked a question that feels even sharper today than it did in 1996: what happens when a culture confuses happiness with anaesthesia?Tanjil Rashid is joined by DT Max and Jonathan Derbyshire to discuss why the novel still matters, and what it can tell us about the world we’ve built since.