Ben Jackson

Earlier​ this summer, pandemic restrictions in Canada began to loosen and my wife, Beth, and I decided to take a trip to British Columbia to visit family and friends we hadn’t seen in eighteen months. At the end of June a devastating heat dome – caused when high pressure clamps hot air over a region for days or weeks – struck western North America, overturning countless...

If you know​ anything about Magnus Carlsen, you probably know that he is supposed to be making chess cool. Before he was twenty, he was the subject of two books and a film; in the years since – he’s now 28 and the world’s best chess player – he has been one of Cosmopolitan’s sexiest men and one of Time’s hundred most influential. He is imposingly...

In January​ 2011, Aaron Swartz was arrested for downloading 4.8 million academic articles from the digital archive JSTOR, using a laptop hidden in a broom cupboard on the MIT campus. He was 24, and already a respected and influential computer programmer. As a teenager, he had helped develop RSS, a syndication format that led to the explosion in popularity of blogging, and Markdown, an easy...

Sometimes​ there’s nothing more useful than bad news. So when it was confirmed at the start of September that Canada’s economy was in recession, the leaders of the opposition parties were turning cartwheels on their way to the stump. ‘The news that is consuming Ottawa today is old hat to Canadians across the country,’ declared Justin Trudeau, the Liberal...

Caroline Lucas became the Green Party’s first MP when she won Brighton Pavilion in 2010. Two years later she resigned as leader of the party in England and Wales and was replaced by Natalie Bennett. In 2011, the Greens took minority control of Brighton and Hove City Council, and in 2013 Jenny Jones, who has represented the Greens in the London Assembly since 2000, became a peer in the House of Lords. At the beginning of 2014, the party had 15,000 members; now the figure is closer to 60,000 (Ukip and the Lib Dems have about 45,000 each).