Love of science, not Trump’s ignorance, will make America great again
Amid a pandemic, the president rails against reason itself. The passions of his predecessors throw his failure into sharp relief
Movie magic: ‘The cinema is my solace in times of crisis’
The writer Simon Stephenson looks forward to the days when he can eat popcorn in the dark again
Radioactive review – Marie Curie biopic fast-forwards to Hiroshima
Rosamund Pike plays the physicist with dignity and froideur in this respectful drama that shows her brilliant discoveries – and their effects
Top 10 four-dimensional novels
A conceptual adventure first embarked on in the 19th century has inspired daring fiction from authors including HG Wells, Kurt Vonnegut and Madeleine L’Engle
Isaac Newton proposed curing plague with toad vomit, unseen papers show
Notes made in the shadow of a devastating outbreak show the great scientist sketching out some distinctly queasy remedies
An A to Z of old words to calm and inspire hope
Have a ‘kaffeeklatsch’ until you become ‘unsoulclogged’: archaic soothing terms to use in troubling times
A letter to my post-lockdown self: ‘Keep listening to the birds’
Author Bernardine Evaristo, broadcaster Hugh Pym, playwright James Graham and more pen letters to themselves, to be opened in May 2021
Reviewing the arts in lockdown: ‘Life is lonelier, but also more thoughtful’
Guardian critics on working from their living rooms, and why wifi could be the saviour of culture
‘Sacrifice’: from animal slaughter to pandemic rhetoric
We’re grateful for those making sacrifices during the outbreak, but who decides what offering is required?
‘We are living through the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene’
Forget the butterfly effect, this is the bat effect – our stranglehold on nature has unleashed the coronavirus outbreak. And the pandemic is forcing us to rethink how to run our networked world
Can you solve it? Are you smarter than an 8-year-old?
Four playful puzzles for kids in quarantine
Majority of authors ‘hear’ their characters speak, finds study
Research on writers appearing at the Edinburgh international book festival reveals 63% listen to their creations, and 61% feel they have their own agency
Giving the Devil His Due by Michael Shermer – a defence of free speech
Shermer is a particular kind of “scientific” truthteller, who aims to cut through the bullshit. How useful are these short reflections?
Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Will coronavirus change our attitudes to death? Quite the opposite’
Will the coronavirus pandemic return us to more traditional and accepting, attitudes towards dying – or reinforce our attempts to prolong life?
The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women review – bold study of chromosomal advantage
Sharon Moalem offers an intriguing theory on how two X chromosomes give women the edge in everything from colour vision to coronavirus