For Hannah Arendt, hope is a dangerous barrier to courageous action. In dark times, the miracle that saves the world is to act | Continue reading
For the K’iche’ Mayans, animals were not lower beings but neighbours, alter egos and a way to communicate with the gods | Continue reading
The story of Marie Aymard and five generations of her family tells an intimate history of slavery in a small French town | Continue reading
The engineer who invented the magnetic levitation train deconstructs his ingenious design in this archival lecture from 1975 | Continue reading
How can animals whose brains have been drastically remodelled still recall their kin, their traumas and their skills? | Continue reading
Lillian has a coin’s flip chance of testing positive for Huntington’s disease, a deadly condition. Should she get tested? | Continue reading
For the K’iche’ Mayans, animals were not lower beings but neighbours, alter egos and a way to communicate with the gods. | Continue reading
Knowing the content of one’s own mind might seem straightforward but in fact it’s much more like mindreading other people | Continue reading
This clever stop-motion animation from 1947 uses fruit to show how every flat map of the world is a grand compromise | Continue reading
It is a powerful, liberating therapy that lets you (literally) shift perspective on who you are, and who you could become | Continue reading
Patients and psychiatrists at Saint-Alban in France fought against fascism side by side. What can we learn from them? | Continue reading
Patients and psychiatrists at Saint-Alban in France fought against fascism side by side. What can we learn from them? | Continue reading
See how dormant potential energy explodes in psychedelic swirls when chemicals meet by combining oils, alcohols and inks | Continue reading
Knowing the content of one’s own mind might seem straightforward but in fact it’s much more like mindreading other people | Continue reading
Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer | Continue reading
Solving the mystery of how and why fireflies flash in time can illuminate the physics of complex systems | Continue reading
A nocturnal tour of Salt Lake City from the little-seen, often overlooked yet oddly meditative perspective of cleaners | Continue reading
Solving the mystery of how and why fireflies flash in time can illuminate the physics of complex systems | Continue reading
The psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik explains how the act of caring puts us in touch with our deepest humanity | Continue reading
While the West belonged to a European geography, its name meant something. Now it is a vague invocation, laden with fear | Continue reading
Adults sleep less than babies. Sperm whales sleep less again. A new mathematical theory unlocks the mysteries of slumber | Continue reading
Adults sleep less than babies. Sperm whales sleep less again. A new mathematical theory unlocks the mysteries of slumber | Continue reading
‘Personal responsibility’ used to mean our duty to others, now it argues the opposite. How did the idea become inverted? | Continue reading
A retelling of a Hawaiian story recalls how third-gender healers came to inhabit the islands, and keeps their power alive | Continue reading
Having a concept of death, far from being a uniquely human feat, is a fairly common trait in the animal kingdom | Continue reading
An artist finds inspiration in the repetition of Hong Kong’s vast vertical sprawl, where each window hints at separate lives | Continue reading
Brilliant and fierce, the philosopher and educator Amalia Holst demonstrated how the German Enlightenment failed women | Continue reading
Look beneath the surface of Bach’s music and you will find a fascinating hidden world of numerology and cunning craft | Continue reading
Look beneath the surface of Bach’s music and you will find a fascinating hidden world of numerology and cunning craft | Continue reading
The Standard Model is as revolutionary as heliocentrism and the theory of evolution but much harder to sum up. Until now | Continue reading
The Standard Model is as revolutionary as heliocentrism and the theory of evolution but much harder to sum up. Until now | Continue reading
Machine-written literature might offend your tastes but until the dawn of Romanticism most writers were just as formulaic | Continue reading
What’s a better way to understand human psychology – ‘I think, therefore I am’ or ‘A person is a person through other persons’? | Continue reading
When an artist spots his brother leading a canine abduction at a funeral, it starts a meditation on family, loss and home | Continue reading
Was there no room for the queer individual in Arab history? Have people like us simply never belonged? | Continue reading
The ‘selfish gene’ persists for the reason all good scientific metaphors do: it remains a sharp tool for clear thinking | Continue reading
Vitamins or whole foods; high-fat or low-fat; sugar or sweetener. Will we ever get a clear idea about what we should eat? | Continue reading
‘The song of a world without work’: in Bakersfield, California, street racing lets field labourers breathe a sigh of relief | Continue reading
Vitamins or whole foods; high-fat or low-fat; sugar or sweetener. Will we ever get a clear idea about what we should eat? | Continue reading
The ability to stir new life into being, all across the Universe, compels us to ask why life matters in the first place | Continue reading
Thomas Jefferson founded a university believing it would safeguard republican freedom. Slavery was another matter altogether | Continue reading
Remarkable 20th-century footage is hidden behind paywalls. Unless those images can be set free, our history remains untold | Continue reading
Remarkable 20th-century footage is hidden behind paywalls. Unless those images can be set free, our history remains untold | Continue reading
Remarkable 20th-century footage is hidden behind paywalls. Unless those images can be set free, our history remains untold | Continue reading
The ‘selfish gene’ persists for the reason all good scientific metaphors do: it remains a sharp tool for clear thinking | Continue reading
The ‘selfish gene’ persists for the reason all good scientific metaphors do: it remains a sharp tool for clear thinking | Continue reading
Governments now answer to business, not voters. Mainstream parties grow ever harder to distinguish. Is democracy dead? | Continue reading
For the economist E F Schumacher, the ‘postwar miracle’ sowed the seeds of ruin. The solution? See that small is beautiful | Continue reading