James Meek

Leon Festinger’s concept of cognitive dissonance was born in the 1950s out of research into what happens when there’s a doomsday cult and doomsday fails to arrive. A tiny minority of cultists have their warped worldview confronted by reality. How do they deal with it? They rationalise the unreasonable. They cherry-pick information to suit themselves. They deny the evidence of the...

The authorities​ in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, have been de-Russifying its street names. Instead of commemorating an avant-garde Russian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s, the name of the street where I stayed last month now remembers an avant-garde Ukrainian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s: Vladimir Mayakovsky Street is now Mykola Khvylovy...

One morning​ in Manchester, in November 2023, a young man went looking for a place to stay. He’d lost his job and couldn’t pay the rent on his flat. When he asked the council for advice, they told him to stay put. He did, until the bailiffs came and changed the locks. He slept rough in a train station. He was on drugs. His phone was stolen; he told the police but there was an...

We​ needed a new bathroom, and found some plumbers – interesting, attractive young men with remarkable stories to tell about their lives and travels around the world. The most interesting of them – S.’s sister described him as ‘a hot mess’ – went home after work one evening having forgotten to tighten a nut, which led to a leak and the near collapse of...