Is the world going to rack and ruin? The psychologist Steven Pinker makes the case for progress and Enlightenment values

Alongside his research into cognition, the psychologist Steven Pinker has forged a career as a bestselling science writer. His latest book, Enlightenment Now tackles 21st-century doom and gloom with a vigorous defence of reason, science and progress.

According to Pinker, the idea that we’re going to hell in a handcart is an empirical claim that is just wrong – health, prosperity, peace, knowledge and happiness are all on the rise. It’s all because of the Enlightenment, he argues, and the gradual spread of the problem-solving mentality that finds its fullest expression in science.

Are wealthy baby boomers undermining younger generations? Or is the real enemy the politics of austerity and privatisation sponsored by an elite?

There’s a lot to be said for the polemic. The very form – the word comes from polemos, the Greek term for “war” – is a recognition of the possibility that through writing, we may take part in a struggle or take sides in a conflict. A polemic is partisan, unashamedly impassioned, and – since it typically carries a greater sense of urgency than other modes of writing – often has the virtue of being short.

John Sutherland’s self-described polemic is a quick and provocative read. Its central argument is that the young today have it hard, very hard, and that this is neither an unalterable fact of life nor an accident or blip: rather, the young are the victims of a concerted attack perpetrated by their elders, above all the selfish baby boomers who enjoyed goods (such as free higher education and affordable housing) that they now conspire to deny their children and grandchildren.

Related: UK millennials second worst-hit financially in developed world, says study

The politics of austerity and marketisation have been pursued by an ideologically and often financially invested clique

From This Country to Reservoir 13, a new breed of TV dramas and novels are exposing tensions in England’s hidden corners

In the summer of 1967, the essayist Ronald Blythe pedalled his bike around the Suffolk village of Charsfield, a quiet rural community 10 miles north of Ipswich. Blythe spoke to pretty much everyone he could find: the blacksmith and the farrier, the dairyman and the district nurse. They in turn told him how to best thatch a roof, how to shape a corn dolly, and why cowhide was the ideal material when making the harness for a horse. “The village keeps the same pattern,” explained Alan Mitton, the orchard foreman. “You get more or less the same groups of people keeping the same ideas. They don’t mean to get out of their ruts.”

I don’t know where we get the idea the country is unchanging. It’s atomised and isolated. But it’s violently changing

In This Country, the Mucklowes come marauding through Northleach (population 1,800) like fiery Cotswold warlords

Andy digs out a trinket that turns out to be a Jim’ll Fix It badge. The Essex earth contains horrors as well as gold

Reservoir 13 exposes the very bones of the village, then studies the routines and habits that we deploy to sustain us

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, has brought about two miracles. First, he unblocked the road that led to female bishops and quickly ensured they were appointed, including to the third most senior position in the Church of England, bishop of London. Second, through his challenge to Wonga, the payday lender, and interventions on banking, he got the press writing about the church and money rather than gay sex.

Is he able to bring about a third miracle, by giving demoralised Britain new hope and a fresh vision for the future? Reimagining Britain – a great title – is a brave attempt. Detailing the vast changes since 1945, he argues that the present, like 1945, can be a turning point in our history.

Sal
Mick Kitson
Canongate, 12.99, pp240

Survival is all for two half-sisters, 13-year-old Sal and 10-year-old Peppa, who escape from a violent home in a small town near Glasgow and move to the wilderness of Scotland. The atmospheric story opens just before dawn and, in Sal’s distinctive voice, details their day-to-day efforts to find food, shelter and warmth using information gleaned from YouTube videos, the SAS handbook and an Ordnance Survey map. There are traumatic memories, too – of beatings and bruises, threats of the sisters being separated by social services, and how Sal killed her abusive stepfather before the two girls fled. A vivid, moving tale about the strength of sisterhood and the struggle to survive.

Ranging from 18th-century Derbyshire to 21st-century China, this study has a memorable fact or an intriguing thought on every page

The demise of the factory in the western world ranks high among the explanations for Brexit and Donald Trump. With it came the geographic isolation of the old factory lands from national prosperity, and the alienation of the former factory classes from the mainstream of British and American life. Furnaces lost their fires and smokestacks crashed to the ground. Industrial towns and cities grew ruinous – far too grand for the little business they now contained. People were poorer and felt that governments didn’t care.

The US lost roughly 5m manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2016, while the UK lost 619,000 from 2006 to 2016 – adding in each country to the millions that had vanished in the previous three or four decades. An idea of the future also disappeared. These were regarded as “good jobs”: well paid (when they were skilled), secure, with regular hours, subsidised canteens and paid holidays. “The unionised giant factory helped create what many Americans look back at as a golden era of shared prosperity,” writes Joshua B Freeman of a recent time “when children did better than their parents and expected their children to do better than themselves.”

Freeman has freed factories from the cliches of the national narrative – the spinning jenny and the power loom

The renowned editor and writer takes a walk from the south of Paris to the north and finds the metropolis still in the grip of revolution

Eric Hazan’s politically engaged books on Paris reveal not a museum city but a loud, lively, chaotic metropolis, relevant and revolutionary even in the 21st century. France’s capital is, like any other major city, a place with a radical spread of haves and have nots. What it looks like now, the nature of its living history and how it is under threat from gentrification and other market forces are the subjects of Hazan’s new study, which follows a walk across Paris from south to north, along “the Paris meridian”.

In a review of Hazan’s essential and encyclopedic The Invention of Paris, published in 2002, Julian Barnes described the author as a “bookish psychogeographer, rescuing historian and committed Benjaminic flâneur; he is memory, conscience and scourge”. But where The Invention of Paris stayed within the périphérique that contains the 20 arrondissements of Paris, this book begins and ends in the banlieue, or suburbs, on a long walk from one community bookshop in Ivry in the south to another in Saint Denis in the north.

The best moments are those of personal writing, in which Hazan remembers his early days as a cardiovascular surgeon

The former bishop of Edinburgh considers old age an opportunity for self-examination, in a book enriched by its breadth of cultural reference

Richard Holloway had his first taste of mortality in his 20s, when he started going bald. Though no narcissist, he hated the hair loss, and tried to reverse it with pills, then disguise it with an artful comb-over, before cropping the whole lot off. As he says, baldness is not a terminal disease but he thinks of it as “good preparation for ageing and death, the skeleton being the ultimate baldy”. Just as he grew to accept his baldness then, so now, at 80, he has come to accept that he won’t be around for ever.

For most of us, such acceptance doesn’t come easy. Humankind cannot bear very much reality: don’t ask for whom the bell tolls and maybe it won’t. What Holloway acronymises as AAPD – the Anti-Ageing and Postponement of Death industry – has never been busier. Modern medicine prolongs life even when it no longer has quality or agency. The hucksters of cryogenics promise to bring us back even when we’ve gone: for $200,000, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona will preserve your corpse at a temperature of -190C then thaw you out on resurrection day (for the cheaper neuro-only option at $80,000 they’ll freeze just your brain instead).

Holloway has seen too much suffering and cruelty to conjure a benign overseer

In the coming weeks, voters in Ireland will have the chance to repeal the eighth amendment, which recognises the equal rights to life of a foetus and the mother during pregnancy. We must send a message to the world, the author declares

Recently I spoke to a reasonable, sane Irish woman who said that she was against abortion and because she was so reasonable and sane, I was curious what she meant by that. Was she against the morning after pill? Certainly not. What about chemical abortifacients? They did not really worry her too much. So, what about terminations before 12 or 13 weeks, the time when woman are often given the all clear to confirm their pregnancy to family and friends? This woman was not, all things considered, against terminations during this window, when pregnancy is not considered medically certain. She was also, just to make clear, in favour of abortion in cases of fatal foetal abnormality, rape and incest. In 1983 this woman might have voted “against abortion”, despite the fact that she is not against abortion, especially if it happens during those weeks when the natural loss of an embryo is called miscarriage. She just found abortion, in general, hard to vote “for”. Had there been no referendum in 1983 – where people with a range of uncertainties were asked for a single “yes” or “no” – then limited abortion might well be available now in Ireland, in the way that the morning after pill is legally available and widely used.

The 1983 referendum was a little like the Brexit referendum– a population voting about something that seemed, on one side, clear, and on the other, contingent and hard to describe. As it turned out, the language problem worked both ways. In order to bring the issue to a vote, a new legal term had to be minted, one that did not appear in any previous laws. The eighth amendment to the Irish constitution acknowledges the right to life of “the unborn” and this seemed to invent a new category of rights-holder, possibly a new kind of person. By acknowledging the “equal right to life of the mother” an impregnated woman was changed from a human being into a relationship, that of motherhood, and a peculiar equivalence established. Pregnancy was a binary state, in which two souls temporarily shared the same blood supply. The question of who had it first was neither here nor there and a fertilised egg was a grown adult, temporarily inconvenienced by being a few hundred cells large.

How does access to abortion vary across the UK?

Acknowledging the 'right to life' of the unborn seemed to invent a new category of rights-holder – a new kind of person

Related: Ireland's government approves abortion referendum bill

In 2016, Britain and the US voted for the tribal and symbolic –in Ireland we had a tribal, symbolic vote in 1983

The archbishop of Canterbury was raised by an alcoholic and answered God’s call ‘kicking and screaming’. Now, his unorthodox views are at odds with many in his Anglican church. Here he talks about his demons and his mission

Lambeth Palace, mucked about with down the centuries and later badly damaged by German bombs, is something of a muddle, architecturally speaking. Its looming gatehouse, for instance, is early Tudor, built of the same blood-red brick as Hampton Court; while the Great Hall, ransacked by Cromwell’s men during the civil war, is 17th-century gothic (“a new old-fashion hall”, as Pepys had it). As for the building in which the archbishop of Canterbury lives, it is 19th-century neo-gothic, and resembles an Oxford college complete with quadrangle – except, that is, for a few older remains, among them Lollard’s Tower, which dates from 1435 and once housed ecclesiastical prisoners whom the authorities hoped to persuade to renounce their heresy.

Justin Welby’s study, the room where he “reads and works and thinks and prays”, is in yet another tower, also Tudor: a gloomy, somewhat cell-like, wood-panelled affair with – pull back the heavy velvet curtain – a view over the chapel below, where services are held three times a day. It’s unexpectedly touching to be invited to interview him here. There is something so intimate about the sight of his desk, on which there stands not much more than a crucifix, an icon and a Bible, open at Psalm 73 (“My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever”), though we’ve been talking for almost half an hour before he reveals that it was in this room that Thomas Cranmer is reputed to have written The Book of Common Prayer. How does that make him feel, I ask, picturing his long ago predecessor thrusting his right hand into the pyre that would kill him. (Cranmer was executed by Queen Mary, to whose half-sister, Elizabeth, he was godfather, and whose father, Henry VIII… well, you know the rest.)

In Nigeria, a militiaman was told to take Welby out and execute him

Related: The Guardian view of abuse in the church: a truly dreadful story | Editorial

The YA novelist on researching addiction, dealing with transphobes and why she loves writing for teens

Award-winning “Queen of Teen” Juno Dawson was born James Dawson and raised in West Yorkshire. She worked as a teacher and journalist before becoming a full-time author. In 2015, she announced her intention to undergo gender transition and live as a woman. Her 14th book is the young adult novel Clean, the story of a teenage girl’s battle with heroin addiction and stint in rehab.

Drugs, sex and swearing feature highly in Clean, so what makes it a young adult novel?
The publishing world tends to focus more on the “young”, less on the “adult”. But I spend lots of time with teenagers and they’re truly the broadband generation. They’ve been online all their lives and seen things that would make milk curdle: beheadings, graphic violence, hardcore porn. Shielding them is never going to work. What makes this book YA is that it tackles issues in a non-judgmental way. We know these things exist, so let’s talk about them. I don’t think people will have a problem with how I’ve handled addiction. What might cause a fuss is [protagonist] Lexi’s positive attitude to sex. She clearly enjoys it. We never teach girls that sex should be enjoyable for them. That’s one thing porn absolutely doesn’t do. Pornography is not sex education.

After you come out, after the initial makeover and being on hormones, what happens next? That’s a story nobody tells

Related: Why my book is gay: and I'm proud of it

A great iconoclast has written a polemic about ageing that sends up New Age platitudes and is full of scepticism of the wellness industry

Ten years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich read an article in Scientific American that shook her to the core. Its argument was that the body’s immune system, far from protecting us, can enable the growth and spread of tumours, “which is like saying that the fire department is indeed staffed by arsonists”. In the 1960s, Ehrenreich had worked on immune cells as a PhD student, specifically on those known as “macrophages”, and had come to think of them as friends – frontline defenders against microbial invaders. Now that they stood exposed as traitors, one of her basic beliefs was shattered. If our body can attack itself, why bother trying to look after it? What’s the point in striving to stay healthy, when longevity is beyond our control?

“Old age isn’t a battle,” she says, quoting Philip Roth, “old age is a massacre.” In the past few years, she has given up on screenings and scans. Not that she is lazy or suicidal. But at 76, she considers herself old enough to die. All the self-help books aimed at her age group tell her otherwise; they talk of “active ageing”, “productive ageing”, “anti-ageing”, even “reverse-ageing”, with a long life promised to anyone who makes an effort, regardless of factors such as genetics or poverty. But to her, ageing is “an accumulation of disabilities”, which no amount of physical activity or rigorous self-denial can prevent. If she has symptoms, she’ll have them investigated. But when a doctor tells her there could be an undetected problem of some kind, she won’t play along.

Experience has taught Ehrenreich that standard health checks are at best invasive and at worst a scam

Related: 'Age can be a babe magnet': Spinal Tap's Derek Smalls on why old is gold

Ehrenreich is more persuasive when on the attack than when it comes to offering solutions

The latest treatise on technology taking over our lives suggests democratic systems are incompatible with the digital age, but the theory lacks coherence

There is a clear, algorithmic formula for writing books about technology and society in 2018. Authors are generally required to be male, their documented personal journey must have been from that of techno-optimist to techno-sceptic to techno-panicker. There must be an urgent existential threat to either democracy or humanity lurking in the code base of Silicon Valley companies. The intractable crisis is not so profound, however, that it cannot be solved by a hail of partially thought-through remedies tacked on in the appendix.

This recipe is producing a growing body of what might be termed “techlash” literature: the backlash against Silicon Valley and its seemingly unstoppable accretion of wealth, data and cultural and political capital. Where once we might have read expansive works of science fiction creating vivid and ambiguous alternative realities to help us navigate the future, now we have worrisome documentaries of threats so present they have often played out by the time the galley hits the review pile. In the last year several notable techlash titles have appeared, including Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind, Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants and Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things.

His depiction of the general population as dazed and confused by Silicon Valley's trickery does not feel grounded in fact

An important and timely book, in the wake of Grenfell Tower, which emphasises how public investment enriches lives

In June last year, three days after the fire at Grenfell Tower, John Boughton wrote a restrained yet furious post on his blog, Municipal Dreams, about the legacy of refusing to treat council housing with the dignity it warrants. “For almost four decades, we have been taught to see public spending as a bad thing; ruthless economising as a virtue … Public investment enriches lives; here it would have saved them. The best memorial to all those who have lost their lives in Grenfell is that we as a nation choose collectively to invest in safe and secure public housing for all who need it.”

This, Boughton’s first book, isn’t a reworking of the blog but an original work whose purpose is to argue passionately for that idea. For the past few years his writing has been an elegant and compendious ongoing exploration of Britain’s social history through its council estates. The book celebrates an era during which dreams of shelter and security for all – not just those who could afford to purchase it – were in large part made a reality, and asks us if we oughtn’t to consider reviving that dream before it gets destroyed completely.

Are mothers really held accountable for the world’s ills? Why does our society punish women?

Every human alive knows something about mothers. Everyone’s had one. Mothering is at the root of all our biology, male and female; it’s tangled deep in our psychic development, and all human cultures have been bound to negotiate – with different degrees of awe, anxiety, sentimentality, hostility – forms and languages around its centrality. Jacqueline Rose thinks that contemporary culture in the west has its relationship with motherhood all wrong, with disastrous consequences for mothers and for all of us.

Related: On Mother’s Day, let’s celebrate the pleasure of watching mums failing badly | Catherine Bennett

Its passion can feel like a free-floating indignation, drawing anything and everything up into its complaint

While Americans like to think that they transcend tribal thinking, Amy Chua’s new book argues that this is far from the case

In the near entirety of recorded history, humans, animated by the will to survive, inclined toward family, tribe and clan. To establish a state, or something like it, was to ask subjects to transcend narrow loyalties for greater ones. The city-states of ancient Greece to the proto-state of prophet Muhammad and the first Muslims grappled with this tension.

As Plato records in The Republic, Socrates took such concerns to their logical extreme, advocating communal ownership of property, including women and children. In sharing women and children, says Socrates, the guardians “will not tear the city in pieces by differing about ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’.” If man naturally inclines toward family, then the solution was, in effect, to make the state into a kind of larger, all-encompassing family.

Related: After being the 'Tiger Mom', Amy Chua turns to political tribalism

Related: Political Tribes review – an unreliable guide to the American Dream

Public housing in the UK improved the lives of millions, but has left little trace in literature. John Boughton unlocks the door to the unsung history of council homes

Well over a third of Britons lived in council homes at their peak in the early 1980s, and yet the subject of public housing is hardly to be found on bookshelves. There is some good academic writing, and there are some decent local histories – though traditional works are more likely to be taken by a surviving Georgian townhouse than a neo-Georgian council estate – but you’ll struggle to find anything in the mainstream. And in literary fiction, authentic interest in or real knowledge of the lives of the millions who have lived in council homes over the years is almost nonexistent. Journalism has filled the gap – once celebratory, but latterly often demonising and sensationalist as one-time municipal dreams were designated nightmares.

Awareness has only revived more recently, as the renewed failure of the free market to provide the decent, affordable homes we need has become more stark, and – more darkly – in the aftermath of the Grenfell fire.

Related: Municipal Dreams by John Boughton review - the rise and fall of council housing

For generations the history of espionage has been dominated by He-Men. Wrapping themselves in the union flag, trampling down subtleties, recycling one another’s hoary old half-truths, mixing wrathful indignation with false bonhomie à la Farage, they churned out their crude and misleading potboilers. It was a heavily gendered approach, with good blokes and bad, black and white, straight and bent.

Improvements began in this century with Miranda Carter’s superb life of Anthony Blunt, and then Gill Bennett’s biography of Desmond Morton. Now a new generation of male authors is learning from their example. Andrew Lownie’s study of the “Cambridge” spy Guy Burgess, and now Roland Philipps’s biography of Burgess’s fellow agent Donald Maclean, show that it is possible for men to write espionage history without patriotic bluster or imperialist nostalgia.

Related: Enemies Within by Richard Davenport-Hines review – the Cambridge spies and distrust of the elite

Nurses are often underappreciated. There are laughter and tears in this remarkable account that immerses the reader in their world

Since my own medical memoir was published last September, I have received – at the time of writing – 57 other medical memoirs by post and email. From publishers requesting cover quotes, newspapers requesting reviews and self-published authors requesting advice. I’ve done my best to read as many as I can, as they flood unbidden into my house. They range from terrible to fine, occasionally tipping into good. (Who knew that so many people with fascinating lives would be able to make them come across as so boring on paper?)

The Language of Kindness, however, has thoroughly resuscitated my faith in the genre. Christie Watson spent 20 years working as a nurse, before pivoting to a career in writing – she is a former winner of the Costa first novel award and now teaches creative writing. The book darts around, chapter to chapter, from her first days as a student nurse to her final day as a very senior one – flitting backwards and forwards in time and through specialties, immersing us in her world.

Related: EU nurses no longer want to work in Britain. Brexit is poisoning the NHS | Suzanne Moore

This much-touted literary love letter to Alcoholics Anonymous is too moral in its argument for the superiority of the sober

Leslie Jamison’s narrative ode to Alcoholics Anonymous was written during a calm era (the Obama years) when getting sober may have seemed prudent and wise, but it is published, alas, at a time when intoxication is, if not prudent, at least sometimes necessary.

It might have been almost amusing to get sober under Obama, with the sun shining cheerfully every day (but never burning too hot, contained as it then was under the hopeful rubric of a climate agreement with no less glamorous a provenance than Paris). With the Orange Menace raising holy hell, a stiff drink or two before noon is practically de rigueur. Or anyway, sober though you may choose to be, a little sympathy for the intoxicated among us is surely in order with nuclear holocaust and a dozen other rotating global and national crises on the horizon.

Related: ‘Alcoholism continues long after you stop drinking': my 15 years sober

Jean Rhys keeps drinking and writes her best book drunk. John Berryman writes about getting sober and kills himself