STAY ON TOP OF THE WORLD WITH GEOGRAPHICAL

Read every issue of Geographical, the official magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, on any device. Your digital subscription includes the complete searchable archive dating back to May 1935, close to 1,000 issues of journalism, photography and cartography.

Published monthly since 1935, Geographical covers the people, places, environments and ideas shaping the world.

Much of what shapes our lives remains hidden from view. The beneath the oceans, the trauma soldiers bring home from war and the ancient light gathered by an immense telescope all operate beyond most people’s immediate experience.

This month, we look behind those visible surfaces. Mark Rowe on Page 50 asks who really runs Britain when essential services are increasingly delivered by private contractors, and what happens when responsibility becomes difficult to trace. In Ukraine, Boštjan Videmšek (Page 24) reports on the psychological toll of drone warfare, where an unseen threat can linger

long after soldiers leave the battlefield. On Page 35, Marco Magrini visits Chile’s Extremely Large Telescope, a machine designed to see further into the universe’s past than ever before, while our ‘Do You Know?’ (Page 18) maps the submarine cables that quietly support the modern digital world.

Together, these stories reveal the networks and institutions beneath everyday life. Some connect us, some protect us and some demand closer scrutiny. All remind us that understanding the world often begins by looking beyond what is immediately visible.