Summer reads


A new collection of our most beach-friendly articles

One day a personalised diet—apps and algorithms telling you what to eat and what to avoid through devices implanted under the skin, as we set out in this imagined scenario for 2035—may be the answer to a long and healthy life. Happily for the gourmands among you, there are other ways.

You could try learning from a “Blue Zone”, as places with lots of centenarians are known. One is a community of Seventh-day Adventists in California. It must help that they frown on ultra-processed food. Just how bad is it for our bodies? You could think about your brain’s own nutritional needs, by understanding the emerging field of nutritional psychiatry. And if you hoped that counting calories was the solution, this story helps explain why the measure is so misleading.

Stephanie Studer

US digital editor

[email protected]

Expand your mind

What if everyone’s nutrition was personalised?

How the mass adoption of personalised nutrition is changing people’s health—and the food industry. An imagined scenario from 2035

What makes ultra-processed foods so bad for your health?

They are calorie-rich, nutrient-poor and hard to stop eating


Christian Californians may have a solution to America’s obesity

Lessons in longevity from Seventh-day Adventists


How food affects the mind, as well as the body

It turns out you are what you eat after all


Gentle distractions

1843 magazine | Death of the calorie

For more than a century we’ve counted on calories to tell us what will make us fat. Peter Wilson says it’s time to bury the world’s most misleading measure

How to eat to 100

Dan Buettner’s book explores America’s healthiest cuisines


A Belgian company wants to create woolly-mammoth burgers

DNA from extinct species is inspiring other business plans, too


Human diets are becoming less diverse, a new book warns

Dan Saladino tells delicious tales of rare foods and the people trying to save them


Our book guides

The five best books for understanding Silicon Valley’s history

Pentagon officials, hippies and whizzkids all feature

Our Paris bureau chief picks seven books to make sense of modern France

A readers’ guide to understanding the paradoxical country at the heart of Europe


Our former Moscow correspondent picks seven books on Russia

A readers’ guide to the mystery that is Vladimir Putin


Five essential books on football

An eclectic selection covering the beautiful game and why it matters


Dive into 1843

1843 magazine | Inside the European forest that geopolitics has turned into a graveyard

Belarus ferried thousands of migrants to the border of the European Union as a political stunt. Now they’re wandering in a cold, wet purgatory

1843 magazine | The Russian draft-dodgers who fled to Alaska in a dinghy

Sergei and Maksim eluded military sentries and braved a gale to avoid fighting in the war in Ukraine


1843 magazine | Shoulda, woulda, coulda: why FOMO won’t let go of us

The pandemic suspended our fear of missing out. Did it also teach us how to handle it better?


1843 magazine | Oxford University’s other diversity crisis

Good luck trying to become a professor if you don’t have family money


Summer watching

Video A year of war

The Russians who resist

How do you oppose a war when telling the truth is a crime?

Video Explainer

El Niño returns with a new ferocity

The combination of global warming and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) may be calamitous


Video Behind the data

What are Max Martin’s rules for songwriting?

Join us as we uncover the secret to the pop maestro’s success


Video Ask me anything

Chatbots will change how we use the internet

And they are challenging Google’s monopoly on search


Weird and wonderful

1843 magazine | Look who’s stalking: the black leopards of Gloucestershire

Frank Tunbridge has spent three decades trying to prove that big cats are prowling England’s green and pleasant land

Why everyone should eat more ugly seafood

In praise of the monstrous, abundant and delicious monkfish


1843 magazine | Hocus focus: how magicians made a fortune on Facebook

A group of illusionists got rich making addictive videos for social media. Did it cost them their souls?


1843 magazine | Billions of banknotes are missing. Why does nobody care?

Banks, gangsters and the strange resurgence of cash