At its height in the 1940s and '50s, the now-defunct Calvin Company of Kansas City, Missouri was one of the largest and most successful producers of advertising films in the United States. With Your Name Here (1960), Calvin Company offered a wry, tongue-in-cheek satire of its own … | Continue reading
Spending time alone is an opportunity for self-reflection: in a world of distractions, be open to the benefits of solitude | Continue reading
Bigfoot, Sasquatch and their ilk roam the forests of our imagination, embodiments of the messy reality of being human | Continue reading
but today you swirl and spinin sea water as if,creatures of salt and slimeand naked under the sun,life were a waking dreamand this the only life.– From ‘A Swim in Co Wicklow’ (2011) by Derek MahonIn 2012, the Irish long-distance swimmer Stephen Redmond became the first person to … | Continue reading
A century ago, Weber both diagnosed the ills of the corporatised, modern university, and pointed out the path beyond it | Continue reading
Navigation and spatial awareness sustained humans for tens of thousands of years. Have we lost the trail in modern times? | Continue reading
Don’t judge a friend for dating on the rebound – a new relationship does more than mend a broken heart: it’s a lifesaver | Continue reading
From scoreboards to trackers, games have infiltrated work, serving as spies, overseers and agents of social control | Continue reading
Pushing the boundaries of the corporeal in a quest for the ethereal: the history and science of dancing in pointe shoes | Continue reading
Let's say you’ve decided to enrich yourself by learning to appreciate classical music, even though you didn't have much previous interest in it. Such a resolution is hardly uncommon, but acting on the aspiration requires you to value an activity that you don't yet know how to. In … | Continue reading
The prejudice against physical work is deeply misguided: when I dance, I embody philosophical ideas of autonomy and freedom | Continue reading
For Albert Einstein, being Jewish and German were not questions of identity but rather mutable matters of identification | Continue reading
The South Korean violinist Hyung Joon Won has held a singular – and perhaps quixotic – dream for the past seven years: a joint concert by North and South Korean musicians at the world’s most contentious border. At 160 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, the Korean Demilitarised Zone ( … | Continue reading
‘Chemobrain’ – memory loss and mental fuzziness after cancer treatment – is real. Here’s how cancer survivors can prepare | Continue reading
We are demigods of discards – but our copious garbage became a toxic burden only with the modern cult of ‘disposability’ | Continue reading
Marc Lasher works as an addiction medicine specialist but, between his regular appointments, he oversees a clean-needle exchange on the streets of Fresno County in California, out the back of a modified school bus. Lasher’s decades-long dedication to public health is all the more … | Continue reading
Marriage is practised in every society yet is in steep decline globally. Is this it for longterm intimate relationships? | Continue reading
Theories of perception are heavily tilted to the visual: we have much to learn from our surprisingly acute sense of smell | Continue reading
When it comes to civil disobedience, it’s not just what you do that matters. What you don’t do matters too, when done right | Continue reading
As kids, we make secret worlds – in trees, in our imaginations, even online – but can we go back to them when we’re grown? | Continue reading
‘I decided it was OK to have fun with my body … I probably have more balls than anybody!' Jim Hall worked in urban development for four decades before retiring as the principal city planner of Baltimore. Aged 78 and beginning to feel some of his faculties slip, he is planning a m … | Continue reading
In our friendships, we operate outside the law. But the digital era has brought with it a new era of friendship policing | Continue reading
It was one terrifying, exciting night of delusions, hallucinations and paranoia. What would it teach a future psychologist? | Continue reading
Replika is a chatbot that was launched in 2017 with the aim of offering users emotional support – or, as the company’s advertising copy puts it, becoming their ‘AI friend’. To give users a personalised experience, the deep learning bot gathers information about conversation partn … | Continue reading
Luck – whether good or bad – means that what we do is not fully in our control. Should we find this unsettling? | Continue reading
We are demigods of discards – but our copious garbage became a toxic burden only with the modern cult of ‘disposability’ | Continue reading
The owls are not what they seem: how medieval bestiaries expressed in visual code the antisemitism of the English Church | Continue reading
Quick-fix psychotherapies have been hailed as the gold standard. But depth therapies can be far more enduring and profound | Continue reading
In 1957, Charles and Ray Eames, the legendary husband-and-wife design team, created a solar-powered kinetic sculpture for the Aluminum Company of America ( ‘Alcoa’). Although the American designers coined their novel contraption ‘The Solar Do-Nothing Machine’ for its whimsical lo … | Continue reading
According to Russian legend, in the 13th century, the mythical city of Kitezh was on the verge of being ransacked by Mongols when its residents began to pray. In an instant, water spouted from the earth, at once submerging the city and protecting Kitezh from invaders. Today, in t … | Continue reading
The art of walking is antithetical to ‘screening’ our world – for the full life experience, just step out the door and walk | Continue reading
Are your decisions made by your brain, or via the experience of the world relative to your body? A dialogue on consciousness | Continue reading
Following amputation, many patients mourn the loss of their limb like a spouse. A more dignified limb disposal could help | Continue reading
‘When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud, and take everything away from me?’Tom Hanks, winner of two Oscars, four Golden Globes and six Emmys, interviewed in 2016First coined in a 1978 research paper on high-achieving women in the workplace, the term ‘imposter … | Continue reading
In the Moon’s shadow, the world holds its breath. Then the solar eclipse passes, and you awake to the awe of being alive | Continue reading
You know that feeling when you don’t have a word for a feeling? That’s hypocognition, and it can be used to censor and suppress | Continue reading
How a concern to protect the autonomy of patients leads to the exclusion of families just when they are needed the most | Continue reading
In 1957, Charles and Ray Eames, the legendary husband-and-wife design team, created a solar-powered kinetic sculpture for the Aluminum Company of America ( ‘Alcoa’). Although the American designers coined their novel contraption ‘The Solar Do-Nothing Machine’ for its whimsical lo … | Continue reading
Some are born great. And some can achieve greatness by nurturing their creative brain with flexible and persistent thinking | Continue reading
What the Lord’s Resistance Army can teach us about flaws in the ideal of human rights and the fight for justice | Continue reading
My father was ageing and unhappy: would Montaigne’s lessons on how to find inner peace in solitude help him? | Continue reading
My father was ageing and unhappy: would Montaigne’s lessons on how to find inner peace in solitude help him? | Continue reading
We know how to replace toxic, intensive livestock raising with beautiful, efficient grasslands. Do we have the will? | Continue reading
In Vietnam, radio is dominated by the state broadcaster, the Voice of Vietnam, whose plethora of programmes is estimated to reach more than 90 per cent of households across the country. The Vietnamese filmmaker and artist Phạm Ngọc Lân turns this ubiquity into a beguiling explora … | Continue reading
Improved insight is more than a route to self-knowledge: it offers people with psychosis an exit from terrifying symptoms | Continue reading
Judith Shklar fled Nazis and Stalinism before discovering in African-American history the dilemma of modern liberalism | Continue reading
Getting a paper published in a respected scientific journal can be an exhilarating opportunity for researchers to contribute to their fields, but it's often a patience-testing exercise in rejection, rewriting and waiting. In this short by the French filmmaker Charlotte Arene, the … | Continue reading
Getting a paper published in a respected scientific journal can be an exhilarating opportunity for researchers to contribute to their fields, but it's often a patience-testing exercise in rejection, rewriting and waiting. In this short by the French filmmaker Charlotte Arene, the … | Continue reading