For a man who once walked the corridors of power as a minister of the Crown, Shahid Malik must have found the atmosphere of Bradford Crown Court inescapably different. The wood-panelled formalities, the quiet murmurs of legal argument, the crushing weight of a verdict delivered not by a jury but by a single judge – these are the landscapes of a life that has travelled extraordinary distance from its pinnacles. When Judge Christopher Smith rose to deliver his judgment, the former Labour MP for Dewsbury, who had served as justice minister and communities minister before losing his seat in 2010,…

In the wake of a national crisis, a software consultant and university professor found himself grappling with a question that has come to define our era: how can a democracy function when its citizens cannot even agree on a shared set of facts? David Levitt, a professor at Metropolitan State University, was driving home one afternoon in January 2021, having just picked up a book on campus, when the radio began broadcasting reports of the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The news stopped him cold. He had always taken the peaceful transfer of power for granted, a bedrock assumption of…