Fearing future catastrophe is nothing new – ancient Greek and Roman philosophers all visualized the apocalypse

Do your feelings of existential dread extend beyond your own personal mortality? Do they include fears about the survival of our culture and institutions, our species, nonhuman life and the Earth itself? Do you feel like there’s nothing that can help to wrap your head around the biggest problem we face: the end of the world as we know it?

Apocalyptic expectations are on the rise. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 39% of Americans believe that we are living in the end times.

Near-mystical musings from a scientist who believes we are on the brink of a revolution in understanding ourselves

Under the letter “B” in the index at the back of Carlo Rovelli’s latest book you will find Francis Bacon, bats, behaviourism, Henri Bergson, and the big bang. This intriguing little miscellany reflects the sweeping ambition of what is perhaps Rovelli’s most overtly philosophical work to date.

Rovelli, who directs a quantum gravity research group in Marseille, has written several books on physics for the general reader, including the global bestseller Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. His latest is an attempt to integrate principles and theories from the discipline into a broader Weltanschauung: one of the essential unity of all things, and the profoundly relational and perspectival nature of the universe. “Electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgments and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another,” he writes. “They are notions that illuminate each other.”

With a character inspired by Wittgenstein, this exploration of the mysteries of the universe draws on multiple philosophical traditions

For several years I ran community groups that involved reading books aloud with other adults. Sharing the experience of reading in that way made me notice how, when one or more of us was baffled by a story, this bafflement was rarely experienced without an accompanying sense of mild anger. It was so easy to make us, the readers, angry – at the characters; at the author; perhaps even at the nature of this reality on which we’d lost our grip. We were confronted with the fact that our capacity to understand the world was limited. We didn’t like that.

Irish author Adrian Duncan’s fifth novel, A Thought Without Collision, takes risks with this bafflement: it relates and conveys an experience of being mystified by the universe. As it opens, in Ireland in 1923, it is becoming apparent that six-year-old Catherine has exceptional academic gifts, and that her father’s farm is failing. In the next chapter, set in 1951, Dr Josef Alois, a Tyrolean émigré academic in his mid-50s, is living in his self-built house on the east coast of Scotland. He is alone until Catherine reappears, “a handsome woman in her mid-thirties”, and now an Oxford professor. The second chapter ends starkly: Alois “is more unwell than he believes and will perish in one month and eleven days”.

The literary critic brings his vast reading to bear on life’s most inescapable fact

Terry Eagleton is not a fan of sloppy thinking, especially when it comes to the granite fact of death. He particularly doesn’t like the attitude of Dylan Thomas who famously urged his ailing father to “not go gentle into that good night”. If the “night” – death – is so “good” then why, asks Eagleton reasonably, would Thomas want his dad to dawdle? Shouldn’t DJ Thomas, rather, be encouraged to trot towards his lovely end like an ecstatic marathon runner on the home straight?

Eagleton’s reproach to Thomas’s doublethink should not be read as panicky denial about the reality of his own mortality. To the contrary, Eagleton, who at 83 admits that he wasn’t sure whether this book would end up being published posthumously, finds it hard to think or write about much else. After a 60-year academic career spent tussling with Marxist literary theory, not to mention the epistemological void at the heart of postmodernism criticism, these days Eagleton is more interested in pondering death and how it “lacks a sense of occasion”. It might visit, for example, while you happen to be dressed in a giraffe outfit.

The author and academic explains how an open, questioning mindset can bring people with opposing views closer together – and even change history

Asking a question can change your mood, and having a questioning mindset can change your life – or, as the philosopher Lani Watson, an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh, is more likely to put it, “create change in your life”. When you live in an answer-oriented world, your phrasing tends towards the glib certainty, which is one of the things Watson – speaking to me from her home in Edinburgh – seems quite naturally to avoid.

Questioning fosters exploration and curiosity, she says. It changes your relationship to yourself and to others: it can make you fall in love; it can stop you going to war. Watson’s challenging book, Q: The Hidden Power of Questions in a World that Wants Answers, is written with a deceptive simplicity and an almost kindly encouragement, so you’re knee-deep into her proposition before you have even considered that it might turn out to be quite hard work.

In this disorienting book, a poet argues we have been looking at nature – and ourselves – the wrong way

The eastern breakwater of Granton harbour is almost 1km long, and swimmers can follow its crooked finger, heading straight out into the Firth of Forth, while benefiting from its reassuring presence. One Thursday lunchtime, I thought: why not, let’s give it a go, and headed for its tip. I felt cold, but, as I progressed, I seemed to grow strangely warmer. I did not notice the complaints from my body: the creeping numbness which proceeded from my fingers to my elbow, nor the coldness of my pee. Only by the time I exited the water, club footed and claw handed, did it hit me that I was hypothermic.

The irony of this reckless exercise was that in my swim bag there was a book by Melanie Challenger called Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World. It’s an ambitious examination of the wisdom of bodies, a rhizomatic guide not just to our own, but also all the living forms around us: from bacteria to chimps. Her case is that we have ignored or misread the agency and purpose of bodies to our detriment; in a way it is a plea to listen to them. I wish I had read it before my ill-advised swim.

Italian academic and author who challenged traditional approaches with his pursuit of microhistory

It would be no exaggeration to claim that the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who has died aged 87, revolutionised the practice and understanding of history. In particular, in a series of books published in the 1970s – above all, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976) – he embraced a new field of study called microhistory, which challenged traditional ways of understanding the discipline of which he was part.

Far from the overarching theoretical approaches of Marxism or liberalism, Ginzburg emphasised the edges, the marginalised, the detail rather than the bigger picture. The chance discovery of Inquisition trial documents in archives in Udine opened a way to an understanding of a society and culture through one individual previously ignored by history.

The work of one of Italy’s greatest scholars focused on ordinary lives oppressed by power and prejudice. That approach resonates today

Reflecting on the genesis of his most famous work, Carlo Ginzburg wrote that by immersing himself in the trial of a 16th-century miller burned by the Roman Inquisition, he turned a possible footnote into a book. Fifty years on, after being translated around the world, The Cheese and The Worms still stands as a supreme exemplar of historical research devoted to the lives of “the persecuted and the vanquished”.

Ginzburg’s death last week, at the age of 87, means that one of the last living links with a remarkable postwar generation of historians has gone. In its passion for reconstructing the fabric of lives previously thought too marginal to bother with, his writing had affinities with EP Thompson’s “history from below” movement and the Annales school in France. As the rise of 21st-century authoritarianism creates new generations of scapegoats and misfits, the approach of one of Italy’s greatest scholars speaks directly to our times.

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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.

In the midst of violent upheaval, the author and activist reminds us of the power and promise of transformation

In 2004, Rebecca Solnit released Hope in the Dark, a series of extended essays in response to the war in Iraq. She offered a vision of solidarity and tenacity. The book experienced a sharp surge in popularity after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, selling out in short order. Returning to Hope in the Dark 10 years later, I remembered why it was so lauded. It is a slim, steady book full of sensible reminders about the limits of the intellect and the dangers of becoming poisoned by pessimism. “Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed,” Solnit wrote. Humility requires us to acknowledge that no matter how damningly certain the future may seem, it remains fundamentally unknowable. That’s where hope begins.

Her timely new book picks up this thread: “You do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking,” she tells us. Solnit has written more than a dozen books since 2004, but in format, design, and theme, The Beginning Comes After the End feels like the direct successor to Hope in the Dark: a novella-length essay broken into short but wide-ranging chapters that cite history, philosophy and contemporary writing, paying special note to moments of reparation and progress.

A winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, Kluge was a committed pacifist and one of the last living torchbearers of the Frankfurt school of neo-Marxist cultural criticism

Alexander Kluge, a German film-maker and author who elevated cinematic collages into an art form and won the top prize at the Venice film festival in 1968, has died aged 94, his publisher has announced.

A former assistant of expressionist master Fritz Lang, Kluge was an accomplished director of intellectually rewarding, if at times oblique filmic essays, and an ever-productive writer of short fiction.

The philosopher, who has died aged 96, was often caricatured as a consensus-seeking liberal. But his belief in the need for shared understanding had a radical underpinning

Despite its canonical name, the Frankfurt School is not a school. It is, at least according to my former teacher, the critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi, a constellation. For a century, this scholarly constellation has pursued the intellectual endeavour of critique. Critique here is not the “thumbs down” or “blocking” exercised on social media. It is the wild aspiration to describe reality in a way that transforms it.

Jürgen Habermas, who died on 14 March 2026 at the age of 96, was a fixed star in this constellation. He set the compass for several generations of mostly German and North American thinkers. Habermas was incredibly prolific, with more than 40 books to his name, and very charismatic. There was an intensity, a concentration to Habermas’s thought and dialogue that his writings convey only poorly. The thundering polemics he brought to public debates also seem a far cry from the consensus-oriented discourse ethics he is known for.

Eva von Redecker is a German philosopher and nonfiction writer

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The former archbishop delves deep into a word that is easy to use on social media, but hard to follow through on

You don’t need to scroll far down a social media feed to find someone expressing “solidarity” for the victims of cruelty or injustice. A show of solidarity feels more emphatic than expressing support or sympathy. As Rowan Williams argues, it can act as “a moral intensifier”, positioning us squarely alongside the victim. It can also be a declaration of innocence, a way of distancing ourselves definitively from the perpetrators and their guilt.

Williams wants to move us beyond this idea of solidarity as unequivocal identification. He has some sharp things to say about “empathy” as a modern solve-all, when it too often serves the needs of “a clamorous self” that “cannot bear the idea of a real stranger”. True solidarity, he argues, is less a virtue to be cultivated than a human condition to be acknowledged. It requires us to accept two stubborn truths: first, that we can never identify completely with someone else, because we are inescapably separate from them in mind and body; and second, that we are innately social beings, linked to each other by invisible threads of obligation and reciprocity.

Philosopher and social theorist who advocated a new direction for German thought after the horrors of Nazi rule

The philosopher, social theorist and defender of humane Enlightenment values Jürgen Habermas, who has died aged 96, spent the last months of the second world war helping to protect the Third Reich. He was 15 and a member of the Hitler Youth. Too young to fight and too old to be exempted from war service, he was sent to the western front to man anti-aircraft defences.

He later described his father, the director of the local seminary, as a “passive sympathiser” with the Nazis and young Habermas shared that mindset. But he was soon shaken out of his and his family’s complacency by the Nuremberg trials and documentaries of Nazi concentration camps. “All at once we saw that we had been living in a politically criminal system,” he later wrote. His horrified reaction to what he called his fellow Germans’ “collectively realised inhumanity” constituted what he described as “that first rupture, which still gapes”.

On the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations, the Scottish philospher is still invoked by the right. Yet he worried about inequality, monopoly and the power of wealth

This week 250 years ago, Adam Smith published An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations – and invented economics. The anniversary has been marked by opinion columns, new books and academic conferences. How different it was 50 years ago. The 1976 bicentenary produced the definitive scholarly edition and helped cast Smith as the father of free-market economics. This was an easy sell during the 1970s slow collapse of the postwar economic order. Smith was useful as a symbolic figure for the revival of free-market ideas. Yet the truth is more complicated.

Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate, recruited Smith as the patron saint of neoliberal economics in his 1980 book and television series Free to Choose – a manifesto that anticipated Reaganism in the US. He reduced Smith to two claims: that a voluntary exchange benefits both parties and that self-interest is led by an “invisible hand” that unintentionally promotes the public interest. In short: greed is good. In fact, Smith used the phrase “invisible hand” only once in The Wealth of Nations, to describe whether merchants invest their capital at home or abroad – and not, as Friedman claimed, as a general theory of markets.

The philosopher offers a measured and reasonable argument against assisted dying

In this admirably clear and cogent book, the philosopher Kathleen Stock sets out the case against state-sanctioned assisted dying. Her immediate objection is to the end of life bill currently before the House of Lords, but her opposition extends to the principle in general. This is a polemic, but a polite one. Stock says she hopes that by the end of it we will share her objection to the ‘‘institutionalisation of death”.

It is not a popular place to start. Polls over the past few years consistently show that around three-quarters of Britons are in favour of assisted dying for terminally ill people. But Stock has never been afraid of swimming upstream. In 2021, she resigned from the University of Sussex following protests by some staff and students over her views, set out in the book Material Girls, that sex is binary and immutable and that this, rather than gender identity, should be the basis of laws to protect women.

With the Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan transformed our understanding of food and drugs. Can he do the same for our sense of self?

Several years ago, Michael Pollan had a disturbing encounter. The relentlessly curious journalist and author was at a conference on plant behaviour in Vancouver. There, he’d learned that when plants are damaged, they produce an anaesthetising chemical, ethylene. Was this a form of self-soothing, like the release of endorphins after an injury in humans? He asked František Baluška, a cell biologist, if it meant that plants might feel pain. Baluška paused, before answering: “Yes, they should feel pain. If you don’t feel pain, you ignore danger and you don’t survive.”

I imagine that Pollan gulped at that point. I certainly did when I read his account of the meeting in his latest book, A World Appears. Where does it leave our efforts at ethical consumption, if literally everybody hurts – including vegetables?

A sociologist talks to the people putting their faith – and their hearts – in the hands of robots

If much of the discussion of AI risk conjures doomsday scenarios of hyper-intelligent bots brandishing nuclear codes, perhaps we should be thinking closer to home. In his urgent, humane book, sociologist James Muldoon urges us to pay more attention to our deepening emotional entanglements with AI, and how profit-hungry tech companies might exploit them. A research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute who has previously written about the exploited workers whose labour makes AI possible, Muldoon now takes us into the uncanny terrain of human-AI relationships, meeting the people for whom chatbots aren’t merely assistants, but friends, romantic partners, therapists, even avatars of the dead.

To some, the idea of falling in love with an AI chatbot, or confiding your deepest secrets to one, might seem mystifying and more than a little creepy. But Muldoon refuses to belittle those seeking intimacy in “synthetic personas”.

From Duolingo to GDP, how an obsession with keeping score can subtly undermine human flourishing

Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

But something odd happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favouring lessons that offered the most points for the least effort. Things came to a head when I passed an entire holiday glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second Kanji lesson over and over like a pigeon pecking a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.

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.