Senior Editor, Aeon+Psyche
Marina is a former arts editor of the New Statesman and deputy arts editor of the Evening Standard newspaper in London. Her books include, Living at the End of the World which looked at end-time cults, Rocket Dreams, an off-beat elegy to the Space Age, and Last Days in Babylon, the story of the Jews of Iraq. Marina specialises in the culture of science, developmental psychology and strong personal narratives. Her acclaimed memoirs The Middlepause and Insomnia have been translated into 9 languages. Her latest memoir A Little Give will be published in 2023. She can be found on Twitter @marinab52.
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Cognition and intelligence
Playing games for real
My father was hopelessly, joyously addicted to gambling and I his moral critic. How did I end up playing pro blackjack?
Marina Benjamin
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Childhood and adolescence
My daughter, myself
Storms of doubt and change I expected as the parent of an adolescent, I just thought they would be hers, not mine
Marina Benjamin
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Art
Milk, pity and power
Since antiquity, artists have depicted a perverse scene of a daughter breastfeeding her aged father. What does it mean?
Margie Orford
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Biography and memoir
My blackness
At times I’ve tried to escape it. Other times I’ve embraced it. But at all times, people have attempted to define me by it
Colin Grant
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Music
Enter the conductrice
Will a new generation of women on the podium perpetuate the tyrannical charisma of their male predecessors or overturn it?
Xenia Hanusiak
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History of ideas
The first Romantics
How a close group of brilliant friends, in a tiny German university town, laid the foundations of modern consciousness
Andrea Wulf
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Earth science and climate
Our Earth, shaped by life
Darwin was the first to see that all lifeforms, from worms to corals, transform the planet. What does that mean for us?
Olivia Judson
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History of ideas
The invention of free love
Percy Shelley thought romantic love freed men and women from the strictures of monogamy, but did it free them equally?
Neil McArthur
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Stories and literature
Leave them alone
Parenting advice from D H Lawrence: don’t smother your children with love. They are more sagacious than you think
Lara Feigel
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Subcultures
The utopian machine
For children like me, growing up in an utopian community, life was a bewildering chaos of freedom and indoctrination
Susanna Crossman
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Biology
A touch of moss
Inside a rainforest or on the city pavement, moss asks so little yet offers so much: a tactile encounter with time itself
Nikita Arora
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The environment
Here’s to the aquapolis
Unkempt, beguiling and lacking conventional geometry, wetlands bring a roguish, raffish wildness to the city
Tom Blass
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History of ideas
Reasons to be cheerful
A cheery mood, you might think, is a terribly self-absorbed response to serious times. But history tells us otherwise
Timothy Hampton
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Cities
The haunted city
The city, for all its mechanical speed, artificial light and industrialisation, is the most uncanny of human habitats
Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel