Michael Marshall

Do non-human animals have inner lives? Definitely, argued the late primatologist Frans de Waal, and he spent his life proving it. Michael Marshall enjoys his last book, Minds I've Met

The stories we tell about the Vikings often say more about us than them. Archaeologist Neil Price's new book The Sea-King and the Sorceress tries to show the Norse as they were, says Michael Marshall

Melanie Challenger's Alive aims to describe the living world very differently – by insisting on agency and purpose everywhere. Michael Marshall explores

Palaeontologist Steve Brusatte's The Story of Birds offers an excellent and sometimes startling account of bird evolution, finds Michael Marshall

Last year, The New Yorker revealed the late Sacks's "guilt" about his “falsification” in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, but is this story about more than just the facts?

Solving society's problems with evidence is a work in progress, argues a must-read new book. The process is surprisingly new – and riddled with complexities, finds Michael Marshall

We shouldn't dismiss flowers as merely ornamental – these blooms are world-changers, argues a vivid new book by David George Haskell. Michael Marshall is mostly convinced

Here are some things I enjoyed this year, which maybe you will too

The ideas presented in George Lakoff and Srini Narayanan's The Neural Mind are fascinating, but the writing is far less compelling

Our writers and contributors have chosen their favourite ever science-y books, films, TV shows, music, video games, board games and more to see you through the festive period

Steven Pinker’s new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows makes a compelling case for common knowledge. Shame the politics muddies the waters

Why did Christianity grow from a niche sect to a religion followed by billions? Michael Marshall explores Alice Roberts’s latest book Domination

Rearing our unusually underdeveloped young may account for the evolution of language. Michael Marshall is intrigued, but wants more evidence from Madeleine Beekman's The Origin of Language

Cuneiform, the oldest identified writing system, defied deciphering – until 1857. What happened then makes a terrific read, in Joshua Hammer's The Mesopotamian Riddle

Some animals – and even machines – may turn out to be conscious. Must we wait for scientific certainty before sharing our rights, asks The Moral Circle

There is a dirty secret in publishing: most popular science books aren't fact-checked. This needs to change, says Michael Marshall Non-fiction publishing is failing its readers. It is pumping out books with supposedly game-changing ideas, without…

There can be no victory in a war against nature, says Sunil Amrith in The Burning Earth, a must-read history of our environmental crisis The Burning EarthSunil Amrith (Allen Lane (UK); W. W. Norton (US)) So much has been written about the…

This essay was published in Arc, a sadly short-lived spin-off from New Scientist, in 2014. Arc was a wild blend of short stories, essays, criticism and general interestingness, created and edited by Simon Ings. You can buy back issues on Zinio, if…

The author of Sapiens has turned his attention to the information networks that shape our societies, but when you stop and think about what he's saying, it's obvious Reading Nexus is a strange experience. The quality of the text lurches up and down:…

During the covid-19 pandemic, beginning August 2020, my wife Sarah and I amused ourselves (if that's the term) in an eccentric way. We watched all the Star Trek films and I tweeted her reactions. The premise for this was that I had seen all of them,…