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The Forum

Internationally renowned Israeli novelist AB Yehoshua on the ambiguous nature of the ties that bind us to each other, to our identity and nationality, and the power of the ties of marriage.

Neil de Grasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and President of the Planetary Society, explains why planets have such a hold on human imagination and why it's so difficult to accept new ways of thinking about outer space.

Farzana Shaikh, associate fellow on the Asian Programme at Chatham House, discusses how Pakistan's confused ideological past has played itself out into a dangerous present. She suggests that an ideology based on Islam was never going to be sufficient to mould a nation from a society as ethnically diverse as Pakistan and that the rise of global Islam is further blurring the country's fragile sense of self-identity.