Inside out

Back page gossip from the 16 July issue of Research Europe

Fruit amid thorns

This month, 153 writers and academics—including Margaret Atwood, Malcolm Gladwell, JK Rowling and Salman Rushdie—signed a letter published in Harper’s Magazine about what they called “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favour of ideological conformity”.