A petition from the Jamaican government last year asked for up to £7bn. It was dismissed by the British High Commission on the grounds that those directly harmed by slavery are no longer alive. Some activists have demanded an equivalent to the £20m – £17bn in today’s money – with which Britain compensated slaveowners when it outlawed the practice throughout the Empire in 1833. It’s certainly a “cost-free” exercise for those asking for the cash, says Douglas Murray in The Times: even if the former colonialists don’t pay, the question distracts from domestic corruption and misgovernance. Reparations are “one of the great shakedown attempts of our time”.

For many people, “we live not in a time of reason but in an age of mythology”, says James Marriott in The Times. Witchcraft is undergoing an “improbable” revival: there are more than a million self-described witches in America, up from only a few thousand in the early 1990s. More and more people believe in aliens. Among the “educated young”, tarot and astrology are “unprecedentedly fashionable”. The self-help philosophy of the conservative intellectual Jordan Peterson is imbued with the language of mythological archetypes: “the virtuous hero”, “the great father” and so on. In films and books, too, there is a growing preference for “grandiose fantasies of human power”: the highest-grossing movies are about superheroes; emotionally complex literary fiction has become unfashionable compared to political dystopias and “quasi-mythological fantasies”.

There’s nothing the left loves more, says Andrew Sullivan in The Weekly Dish, than cancelling historical figures for having said things that would be considered bigotry today. Thomas Jefferson, David Hume, Immanuel Kant – all have been unceremoniously binned in recent years, in each case for single sentences or asides that merely reflected the “lazy bigotries” of the past. But when it comes to their own heroes, liberals are rather less critical.

Far from being a deep and ancient cultural divide, says Jon Ronson in the podcast Things Fell Apart, America’s fight over abortion dates back just a few decades. In the 1970s, Christian evangelicals weren’t remotely interested in the issue, viewing it as a niche Catholic concern. It was an aspiring Hollywood director called Frank Schaeffer, the “errant son” of a revered Christian intellectual, who changed that. Tasked by his father with directing a religious documentary, Frank insisted they include two episodes attacking abortion. He felt strongly about the issue because he had kept – and loved – a baby he never wanted. “It was very personal,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the philosophical argument.”

When Leonard Cohen’s dad died, the then nine-year-old wrote a poem, sliced open his father’s favourite bowtie, inserted his elegy, and buried it in the garden. Echoes of this ghoulish act reverberated through Cohen’s six-decade career, says Susan Cain in LitHub, so much so that record label bosses joked about giving razor blades away with his albums. But it’s evidence of a peculiar symbiosis: the “mysterious force” which ties together melancholy and creativity. Statistically, sad people tend to be more artistic. A study of nearly 600 top creative types found that 25% had lost at least one parent by age 10. By age 20, the figure was 45%.