The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

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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Despite KPop Demon Hunters becoming Netflix’s most-watched film in history and dominating music charts for months, it’s also the kind of cultural phenomenon many people might never have encountered.

The animated musical feature has been cleaning up at awards season and this weekend it could pick up two Oscars.

In this episode of the New Society, we discuss how the film became a global hit and the rise of K-pop and fandom culture.
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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?

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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

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