For 97 per cent of human history, all people had about the same power and access to goods. How did inequality ratchet up? | Continue reading
A radical therapy based on eye movements can desensitise painful memories, heal hurts and aid transformation at warp speed | Continue reading
A comic and nostalgic exploration of adolescence, and so-called adulthood, cast from a filmmaker’s middle-school yearbook | Continue reading
Conflicts only fully end when the delicate threads of peace have been steadily and quietly woven by ordinary, dedicated folk | Continue reading
An archival look into how the oldest US sporting association moved from marksmanship to reactionary politics, led by racism | Continue reading
Is evolutionary science due for a major overhaul – or is talk of ‘revolution’ misguided? | Continue reading
Sure, lovers and children are great. But friends are more than ever the heart of happiness, of family and of love itself | Continue reading
Like the ancient Greeks, the Aztecs cared about happiness – but for them it was one lucky step on life’s treacherous road | Continue reading
A data-centric deep dive into the climate crisis shows the importance of rejecting fatalism when solving the problem | Continue reading
Shaking off Nazism was no simple matter: the work to create a plural and peacable Germany was prolonged and painful | Continue reading
Humanism did not replace Scholasticism, nor is it clear that ideas like the Renaissance help us understand history at all | Continue reading
Why is Rumba Morena, the formidable female rumba group shaking up Cuba’s music scene, proving so controversial? | Continue reading
A radical therapy based on eye movements can desensitise painful memories, heal hurts and aid transformation at warp speed | Continue reading
‘Komorebi’ (Japanese): the special kind of beauty that emerges in the dance of shadows when sunlight filters through trees | Continue reading
Humanism did not replace Scholasticism, nor is it clear that ideas like the Renaissance help us understand history at all | Continue reading
What happens to pacifist soldiers stuck in a war video game? A history of military desertion with the aid of Battlefield V | Continue reading
Physics displays an uncanny alignment at its very deepest levels. Is a grand theory of everything finally within reach? | Continue reading
For Leo Strauss, public life was muddied by opinion and persecution, so philosophers should shield their work from view | Continue reading
What happens to pacifist soldiers stuck in a war video game? A history of military desertion with the aid of Battlefield V | Continue reading
Tearing down sexist paintings or racist monuments raises as many problems as it resolves. There’s a better way to combat hate | Continue reading
The regenerative power of the hydra and its stem cells is plain to see, even when it’s been put through the blender | Continue reading
Social media makes us feel terrible about who we really are. Neuroscience explains why – and empowers us to fight back | Continue reading
Building a chum of one’s own: how the Nenets people of Russia’s Far North turn the open tundra into a warm family space | Continue reading
Rape in the Middle Ages was seen as a routine part of women’s lives, even as it was condemned. How far have we really come? | Continue reading
When a person is in distress, we can draw on deep, evolved mechanisms to calm the storm, through attention, touch and care | Continue reading
The Lion Man ivory sculpture straddles 40,000 years of history: even as his tale remains a mystery, he joins us to our ancestors | Continue reading
For Leo Strauss, public life was muddied by opinion and persecution, so philosophers should shield their work from view | Continue reading
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity | Continue reading
Death, intimacy and forbidden tears: the walls come down in this uniquely conceived portrait of a Vietnamese Canadian family | Continue reading
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity | Continue reading
From coping with Tourette’s to visiting a parent in the care home: how children open up in the hairdresser’s chair | Continue reading
Vandals, Goths, Alemanni, Sueves… the Romans grappled endlessly with the status of ethnic peoples in their vast empire | Continue reading
What if the need for fabric, not food, in the face of a changing climate is what first tipped humanity towards agriculture? | Continue reading
The p-factor is the dark matter of psychiatry: an invisible, unifying force that might lie behind a multitude of mental disorders | Continue reading
We need to rethink the relationship between space and time: the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin on a fundamental mystery | Continue reading
What if the need for fabric, not food, in the face of a changing climate is what first tipped humanity towards agriculture? | Continue reading
Far from being profoundly destructive, we humans have deep capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight | Continue reading
How the New Age guru Louise Hay gained an ardent following across the US by teaching that self-love healed all – even AIDS | Continue reading
Kids don’t just say ‘the darndest things’. Playful and probing, they can be closer to the grain of life’s deepest questions | Continue reading
Kids don’t just say ‘the darndest things’. Playful and probing, they can be closer to the grain of life’s deepest questions | Continue reading
Why ums, likes and y’knows aren’t verbal litter but filled pauses that add context, emphasis and meaning to our conversations | Continue reading
Innocent, passive, apolitical: after the Holocaust, the standard for ‘true’ victimhood has worked to justify total war | Continue reading
Modern mindfulness strips Buddhism of its spiritual core. We need an ethics of reincarnation for an interconnected world | Continue reading
A history of the ‘dangerous nonsense’ of phrenology shows how facile solutions often gain traction over rigorous empiricism | Continue reading
Physics has long looked to harmony to explain the beauty of the Universe. But what if dissonance yields better insights? | Continue reading
From choreographed violence to gardening and table manners, the samurai code was built on maintaining a good reputation | Continue reading
Far from being profoundly destructive we humans have deep capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight | Continue reading
An Oscar-winning portrait of a French resistance fighter’s visit to the concentration camp where her brother died in 1945 | Continue reading