The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

Or has the term lost its meaning?

It’s a label that’s everywhere now: used by political commentators, thrown around on social media, and increasingly a part of everyday conversation.
In recent months it's been used to describe matters including Indian cricket, Sainsbury's use of facial recognition, the 'Dubai Dream'.

But what did George Orwell actually warn us about, and how closely does our modern world resemble it?

Nick Harris speaks to acclaimed Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, whose latest film revisits Orwell not as a distant, dystopian novelist, but as a deeply political thinker, shaped by his own life experience: his birth in colonial India, his immersion in the working class, his wartime fight against fascism.

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Last night, the Artemis II crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a 10-day mission to space and a lunar flyby. The voyage, which included the first woman and a non-US citizen to take part in a lunar mission, is part of a program to place humans once again on the Moon by 2028, a return after 56 years apart.

But why do we bother? Where does this fascination come from?

Can the moon teach us something about ourselves? Is it a hunger for something different?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Rebecca Boyle, science writer and author of Our Moon: A Human History.

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It's almost impossible to separate how we think about modern life from the phenomenon that is capitalism, and to think, what would life look like without it?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Sven Beckert, Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Capitalism: A Global History, to trace the long emergence of capitalism, and to ask what the world looked like before it took hold.
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Michael Pollan, a writer best known for his work on the effect of psychedelics, has taken a journey into the inner mind.

For much of modern history, we’ve understood the mind in comparison to our most advanced machines. Once it was clockwork, then looms, now computers. Each metaphor promises clarity - the ability to be mapped and modelled - but each, in its own way, falls short.

Drawing on philosophy, literature and his own experiments with altered states, in Michael Pollan takes aim at this habit of thinking.

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In 2025, Elon Musk took on an extraordinary role inside Washington, leading something called the Department of Government Efficiency - or Doge.

What followed was a radical experiment: an attempt to remake the machinery of the state using the logic of Silicon Valley and the language of memes.

To understand that moment, it helps to understand Musk himself. This is a figure shaped by his upbringing in apartheid South Africa and by coming of age alongside the early internet. He built his reputation by disrupting entire industries - even extending his reach beyond Earth - by moving fast, ignoring convention, and pushing his teams to extremes.

So what happens when you apply that philosophy to the state?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian.

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