As his new novel is published, the US author talks about nurturing the next generation of creatives, debating Sam Altman – and why he writes on a boat in San Francisco Bay

At Dave Eggers’s suggestion, we’re starting the interview by life drawing together. The novelist dropped out of art school but has been drawing for decades, and his new book is set in the art world. Prudence, our model, stands before us with her palms open, nude but for a pair of black knee-high socks. This, unsurprisingly, is an interview first for me. Eggers shows me how to hold my pencil at arm’s length and use my thumb to measure Prudence’s proportions. Since the pandemic, he’s been organising regular life‑drawing sessions in the book-lined offices of McSweeney’s, the publishing house and literary journal he founded in San Francisco in 1998. He loves the element of chance in figure drawing – you never know which sketch will work out – and believes it helps cultivate empathy.

How so, asks Prudence, helpfully interviewing him for me, because I’ve been thrown off my game. “I feel like in three hours of drawing a human, you learn so much about them and there is so much affection that comes from carefully trying to get them right,” he says.

The philanthropist always saw Epstein for who he really was – despite his meetings with her then husband Bill Gates. Now carving out a life on her own terms, she explains why she’s focused on the fight for women’s health

Melinda French Gates has entered a new phase of life, and it is “beautiful”, she says. It is five years since her painful, public divorce from the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and two years since she stepped down from their charity, the Gates Foundation, to focus her full attention on Pivotal, the philanthropic organisation she founded in 2015 to promote women’s empowerment. Her three children have all left home, she goes by “Nonna” to her two granddaughters, and as an empty nester she finds herself in the strange position of having time on her hands.

She has started visiting her local independent bookshop more often, chatting to the staff about what she should read next; when she finishes work at five, she often texts a friend to meet for a walk, and they go exploring new neighbourhoods of Seattle, decaf coffees in hand. She no longer runs daily but insists on a morning stroll to enjoy the natural beauty of her adoptive home town, Lake Washington glittering in late-spring light. This morning, she saw a blue heron, she says, sounding almost boastful.

A psychologist wades into controversial territory in this counterintuitive study of nature, nurture and gender

According to the evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams, almost everyone gets sex wrong. Traditionalists tend to exaggerate the natural differences between men and women. Progressives tend to minimise them, and to assume that nurture and socialisation play a decisive role. He wants to promote a more nuanced, scientifically rigorous public conversation about why and how men and women differ to guide better policymaking.

Some sex differences are relatively pronounced, he claims, such as whether you’re primarily attracted to men or women, upper body strength, height, the likelihood you’ll murder someone and occupational interests. Many, such as ability in maths, or conscientiousness, are much more modest. Such differences are best visualised as two overlapping bell curves. To illustrate this, consider height: the shortest humans are almost all women, the tallest are men, the average man is taller than the average woman, but there is considerable common ground. Knowing that someone is 5ft 8in won’t enable you to guess with any confidence whether they are a man or a woman, for instance.

With the war on Iran, Ukraine, AI and climate breakdown increasing the likelihood of a nuclear war, the clock stands closer to midnight than ever before. So who decides how many seconds we have left – and can we buy ourselves more time?

The Earth is getting hotter. Conflicts are raging, in the Middle East and Ukraine, each increasing the chance of nuclear war. AI is infiltrating almost every aspect of our lives, despite its unpredictability and tendency to hallucinate. Scientists, tinkering in labs, risk introducing new, deadly pathogens, more destructive than Covid. Our pandemic response preparedness has weakened. The Doomsday Clock – a large, quarter clock with no numbers, keeps ticking, counting down the seconds until the apocalypse. Tick. Tick. Tick. In January, we reached 85 seconds to midnight. Experts believe humanity has never stood so close to the brink.

“What we have seen is a slow almost sleepwalk into increasing dangers over the last decade. And we see these problems growing. We see science advancing at a rate that defies our ability to understand it, much less control it,” says Alexandra Bell, CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organisation that sets the Doomsday Clock. She speaks of the “complete failure in leadership” in the US and other countries, which are doing little to address global, catastrophic threats, even as they feed into one another. Climate change increases global conflict, for instance, and the incorporation of AI into nuclear decision-making is, frankly, terrifying.

Her philosophical approach to therapy has become a global phenomenon, and inspired a new book. Could a session with her change Sophie McBain’s life?

The existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen moved to the UK inspired by RD Laing, the Scottish anti-psychiatrist who said insanity is a “perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”. It was 1977 and Van Deurzen, who is Dutch and had studied philosophy and psychology in France, found work with the Arbours Association in London, a therapeutic community based on Laing’s ideas, in which people in crisis, psychiatrists and therapists lived together as equals. It was a rude awakening.

Arbours aimed to create space for people to “explore their madness”. “Now that was a very interesting idea,” Van Duerzen says, “but in practice it meant that people self-medicated, with alcohol and pot, and it was not a happy situation.” The residents were often very depressed or psychotic, and it was common to be woken up at night because someone was seeing things or had become suicidal. Van Deurzen came to believe that anti-psychiatry had “lost courage”: it had proposed a different way of thinking about madness, but having released people from asylums and taken them off neuroleptic drugs, it was “kind of leaving them to it”. “And this is what I realised wasn’t good enough,” she says. When people are experiencing a mental health crisis, they need help to make sense of what has happened to them, and to find their way to healing. “From that moment on I just knew: nobody’s doing this. I’m going to have to do it myself,” she says.

A psychologist delves into the genetics of bad behaviour in a book littered with fascinating scientific findings

In 2021, the psychologist and writer Kathryn Paige Harden co-authored a paper outlining her research into the genetic patterns linked to a higher risk of developing substance abuse problems or engaging in risk-taking behaviour, such as having unprotected sex or committing crime. The paper referred to the genetics of “traits related to self-regulation and addiction”, but Harden thought of herself as studying the genetics of sin.

Harden is a professor at the University of Texas and the author of a previous book, The Genetic Lottery, on how our knowledge of genetics should shape our views on meritocracy. She once received a letter from a man who has been in prison since he was 16 for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman. “What would drive a boy to do such a thing?” he asked her. Her new book is a heartfelt, subtly argued response to his question, an attempt to outline how our expanding knowledge of what makes people do bad things – the interplay of our inherited tendencies and our life circumstances – should influence how we assign moral responsibility and blame.

Her research popularised the idea of the wood wide web, but the scientific backlash was brutal. As the author of The Mother Tree returns to the forest in a new book, she discusses her battle to reimagine our relationship with nature

In 2018, the ecologist and writer Suzanne Simard was conducting research in the forested Caribou Mountains of western Canada when a thunderstorm rolled in. She was with her two teenage daughters and her close friend and colleague, Jean Roach. They saw flashes of lightning, heard a loud rumble and then they smelled smoke. They were forced to run the half kilometre back to Simard’s truck as the trees behind them caught alight and the air grew thick. As they ran, animals burst out of the forest: a deer, a rabbit, a grey wolf. They reached the truck with no time to spare, all four of them covered in soot and dirt. Overhead, helicopters began circling the orange-black air, dropping water on the flames below.

Wildfires have become an ever bigger problem in Canada. The 2018 wildfires were the biggest in British Columbia’s history, but this record was broken in 2021, and then again in 2023, when fires consumed an area three times the size of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and the smoke travelled as far as New York City. The cause is not only global heating, which has brought hotter, dryer summers, but also the changing makeup of the forest. When logging companies clear forest, they replant it with fast-growing conifer species, but these trees are much more flammable than Canada’s diverse, native forest.

The Lincoln in the Bardo author is back with another metaphysical tale. He discusses Buddhism, partisan politics and the terrifying flight that changed his life

Like his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker prize in 2017, George Saunders’s new novel is a ghost story. In Vigil, an oil tycoon who spent a lifetime covering up the scientific evidence for climate change is visited on his deathbed by a host of spirits, who force him to grapple with his legacy. What draws Saunders to ghost stories? “If I had us talking here in a story and I allowed a ghost in from the 1940s, I might be more interested in it. It might be because they are in fact here,” he says, gesturing to the hotel lobby around us. “Or even if it’s not ghosts, we both have memories of people we love who have passed. They are here, in a neurologically very active way.” A ghost story can feel more “truthful”, he adds: “If you were really trying to tell the truth about this moment, would you so confidently narrow it to just today?”

Ghosts also invite us to confront our mortality and, in so doing, force a new perspective on life: what remains once you strip away the meaningless, day-to-day distractions in which we tend to lose ourselves? “Death, to me, has always been a hot topic,” Saunders says. “It’s so unbelievable that it will happen to us, too. And I suppose as you get older it becomes more …” he puts on a goofy voice: “interesting”. He is 67, grizzled and avuncular, surprisingly softly spoken for a writer who talks so loudly – and with such freewheeling, wisecracking energy – on the page. He says death is close to becoming a “preoccupation” for him and he worries that he is not prepared for it.

The author of The Power looks to the past for lessons in surviving an era of seismic technological change

Naomi Alderman argues that one of the most useful things to know is the name of the era you’re living in, and she proposes one for ours: the Information Crisis. In fact, the advent of digital media marks the third information crisis humans have lived through: the first came after the invention of writing; the second followed the printing press.

These were periods of great social conflict and upheaval, and they profoundly altered our social and political relationships as well as our understanding of the world around us. Writing ushered in the Axial Age, the period between the eighth and third centuries BC, when many of the world’s most influential religious figures and thinkers lived: Laozi, Buddha, Zoroaster, the Abrahamic prophets and the Greek philosophers. Gutenberg’s printing press helped bring about the Reformation. While it is too early to know where the internet era will take us, in her new book, which she describes as a “speculative historical project”, Alderman suggests that those earlier crises offer clues.

Genius and arrogance play leading roles in a new biography of the man who helped uncover the structure of DNA

Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work. Fewer know that Crick also played a key role in modern neuroscience and inspired our continuing efforts to understand the biological basis of consciousness.

Crick once said the two questions that interested him most were “the borderline between the living and the non-living, and the workings of the brain”, questions that were usually discussed in religious or mystical terms but that he believed could be answered by science. In his new biography of the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Matthew Cobb, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, does an admirable job of capturing the rare thinker who not only set himself such ambitious goals but made remarkable progress in achieving them, radically remaking two scientific disciplines in the process.