What Antoni Gaudí began in 1882, Etsuro Sotoo aims to finish: the Sagrada Família as a divine conversation between artists | Continue reading
Renowned for his pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer was nonetheless a conoisseur of very distinctive kinds of happiness | Continue reading
The Fayum portraits are a vivid evocation of the diverse peoples living in Egypt’s desert oasis amid the fall of Rome | Continue reading
In the 19th century, the rest cure tested women’s sanity. Today, it challenges cherished myths about work and productivity | Continue reading
Hurts – your own or those done to you – keep you stuck. Forgiveness therapy can help you gain perspective and move on | Continue reading
Evolution is extraordinarily creative in the wake of a cataclysm. How does life keep steadily ticking over in between? | Continue reading
An award-winning film captures a mysterious bubbling substance. What it is stays a mystery until the explosive finale | Continue reading
Evolution is extraordinarily creative in the wake of a cataclysm. How does life keep steadily ticking over in between? | Continue reading
Why we don’t feel pain in dreams, and other brain puzzles that neuronal assemblies might help neuroscientists unlock | Continue reading
Partly of the earth, partly of our body, the shoe sits on the edge of an ontological threshold. Where can it transport us? | Continue reading
For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices | Continue reading
Plato’s timeless ‘allegory of the cave’, brought to life with retro-surreal animation and Orson Welles’s narration | Continue reading
For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices | Continue reading
The ignorant pundit is absolutely certain; the true expert understands their own limits and how to ask the right questions | Continue reading
The ignorant pundit is absolutely certain; the true expert understands their own limits and how to ask the right questions | Continue reading
An elegant meditation on the intersections of streets, stories and social forces that give shape to a Barcelona square | Continue reading
Before death became a source of disgust and denial, Europeans cheerfully painted with – and ingested – human remains | Continue reading
Brain-to-brain interfaces promise to bypass language. But do we really want access to one another’s unmediated thoughts? | Continue reading
How the American Museum of Natural History grappled with its controversial statue of Roosevelt before pulling it down | Continue reading
Brain-to-brain interfaces promise to bypass language. But do we really want access to one another’s unmediated thoughts? | Continue reading
‘My battery is low and it’s getting dark’: the sights and sounds of life on Mars before Oppy the rover’s expedition ended | Continue reading
Being an employee is a threat to your liberty. But while firms exist, compulsory unions are a basic safeguard of freedom | Continue reading
Antisemitism flourished in response to the unsettling, abstract growth of finance capitalism in the early modern world | Continue reading
Our planet is a tiny porthole, looking over a cosmic sea. Can we learn what lies beyond our own horizons of perception? | Continue reading
Our planet is a tiny porthole, looking over a cosmic sea. Can we learn what lies beyond our own horizons of perception? | Continue reading
From Ancient Egypt’s deltas to Edinburgh’s crags and peaks, the city pushes back against the dream of human separateness | Continue reading
If language began with gestures around a campfire and secret signals on hunts, why did speech come to dominate communication? | Continue reading
A deadpan glimpse of life aboard a cruise ship, where rituals of excess and organised fun have built a $45 billion industry | Continue reading
From Ancient Egypt’s deltas to Edinburgh’s crags and peaks, the city pushes back against the dream of human separateness | Continue reading
If language began with gestures around a campfire and secret signals on hunts, why did speech come to dominate communication? | Continue reading
Philanthropy is vital – but its mechanisms are as intricate and troubling as the baroque structures of high finance | Continue reading
Before he pioneered the eight-hour workday, in 1832 Robert Owen tried to reboot currency with his banknote per working hour | Continue reading
‘Once we are gone, the art of hand weaving itself will die’ – inside the workshop in Kerala still making textiles by hand | Continue reading
Philanthropy is vital – but its mechanisms are as intricate and troubling as the baroque structures of high finance | Continue reading
The owls are not what they seem: how medieval bestiaries expressed in visual code the antisemitism of the English Church | Continue reading
Far from being a recent or 21st-century phenomenon, people have chosen, courageously, to trans gender throughout history | Continue reading
If language began with gestures around a campfire and secret signals on hunts, why did speech come to dominate communication? | Continue reading
The developing cityscape of 1920s New York, framed by Walt Whitman’s poetry and set to a new score, commissioned by Aeon | Continue reading
By rejecting sampling in favour of exhaustive enumeration, communist China’s dream of total information became a nightmare | Continue reading
Breaking free of the 9-to-5 was originally a feminist project. So how did it become part of oppressive 24/7 work culture? | Continue reading
Jamie is empathetic and funny – and a ‘complete mystery’ to those who love him. The challenge and blessing of Down’s syndrome | Continue reading
Breaking free of the 9-to-5 was originally a feminist project. So how did it become part of oppressive 24/7 work culture? | Continue reading
Neuroscience is finding what propaganda has long known: nostalgia doesn’t need real memories – an imagined past works too | Continue reading
Revisiting the footage of the day in 1969 when a Haida village came together to raise its first totem pole in a century | Continue reading
Neuroscience is finding what propaganda has long known: nostalgia doesn’t need real memories – an imagined past works too | Continue reading
An operation to remove a brain cyst changed Matthew’s identity. Who will he become after the next round of surgery? | Continue reading
Like sea monsters on premodern maps, deep-space images are science’s fanciful means to chart the edges of the known world | Continue reading
In Hermann Hesse’s novels, as in his life, self-discovery walked a tightrope between deep insights and profound solipsism | Continue reading