Sophie McBain

United Kingdom

Associate Editor at The New Statesman

Writer at Freelance

Award-winning features writer and non-fiction book reviewer, writing for @NewStatesman, @thetimes and @guardian

Articles

The big idea: should we embrace boredom?

1 week ago | taipeitimes.com | Sophie McBain

By Sophie McBain / The Guardian In 2014, a group of researchers from Harvard University and the University of Virginia asked people to sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. The only available diversion was a button that delivered a painful electric shock. Almost half of the participants pressed it.
should we embrace boredom?

1 week ago | msn.com | Sophie McBain

Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
The big idea: should we embrace boredom?

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Sophie McBain

In 2014, a group of researchers from Harvard University and the University of Virginia asked people to sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. The only available diversion was a button that delivered a painful electric shock. Almost half of the participants pressed it. One man pressed the button 190 times – even though he, like everyone else in the study, had earlier indicated that he found the shock unpleasant enough that he would pay to avoid being shocked again.
‘My sadness is not a burden’: author Yiyun Li on the suicide of both her sons

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Sophie McBain

As the novelist Yiyun Li often observes, there is no good way to state the facts of her life and yet they are inescapable: she had two sons, and both died by suicide. After her elder son Vincent died in 2017, at the age of 16, Li wrote a novel for him.
‘As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it’s never been clearer that writing matters’

2 months ago | msn.com | Sophie McBain

Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
Novelist Katie Kitamura: ‘As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it’s never been clearer that writing matters’

2 months ago | theguardian.com | Sophie McBain

Some years ago, Katie Kitamura came upon a headline that read something like: “A stranger told me I was his mother.” The headline gripped her, but she never clicked through to the article. She imagined the story would offer some explanation – perhaps the author had given up a child for adoption, for instance. “I was much more interested in not having a concrete answer but just exploring the situation itself,” she tells me.
The cyclical history of abortion rights

Mar 24, 2025 | newstatesman.com | Sophie McBain

The medical historian Mary Fissell begins her history of abortion with an account of her visit to a cemetery in south London to see the grave of Eliza Wilson, a 32-year-old dressmaker from Keswick who died in 1848 after an abortion went wrong. Historians have estimated that by the early 19th century, half of births in London were conceived out of wedlock, and that by 1850 rates of illegitimacy were the highest they had ever been.
Alive by Gabriel Weston review - a revelatory study of the body

Mar 6, 2025 | theguardian.com | Sophie McBain

Until the early 17th century, scientists believed that the heart operated a bit like a lamp, warming blood that had been produced by the liver. In 1616, when the English physician William Harvey corrected this misconception and explained how the heart works, the audience at the Royal College of Physicians booed him. Why did it take so long for scientists to understand the heart’s real function?
The woman who made the rape kit

Feb 11, 2025 | newstatesman.com | Sophie McBain

During the first Donald Trump presidency – when Christine Blasey Ford testified before Congress that the president’s Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh,had sexually assaulted her, and he was appointed anyway – the American writer Pagan Kennedy found herself thinking about all the man-made objects that seemed specifically designed to let men get away with rape: date rape drugs, stalkerware software and car doors with driver-controlled locks.
Author Tony Tulathimutte: ‘The great millennial theme? Resentment’

Jan 25, 2025 | theguardian.com | Sophie McBain

In 2019 Tony Tulathimutte published The Feminist, a short story that went about as viral as any short story could, becoming the most read fiction piece in the literary magazine n+1’s 20-year history, and sending certain corners of Twitter into a frenzy. The eponymous protagonist describes himself on his online dating profile as “unshakably serious about consent”.