Science once communicated in a polyglot of tongues, but now English rules alone. How did this happen – and at what cost? | Continue reading
The term collage – the artistic technique of gluing different elements together – has its origins in the early modernist movement, especially in Cubist works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. But before such combining of disparate source materials became a mode of the artistic … | Continue reading
I was a teenager struggling to deal with my body and my feelings until William James taught me I had free will and choices | Continue reading
After she was widowed at age 32, Grażyna Sochacka founded the Panakeja Foundation – a social-assistance centre for homeless men on Sobieszewo Island in Gdańsk, Poland. Alongside her sister Wioletta Sienkiewicz, Sochacka has dedicated her life to caring for men living on the fring … | Continue reading
Pastness, presentness and futurity seem to be real features of the world, but are they? On McTaggart’s philosophy of time | Continue reading
Mead argued that non-Western cultures offered alternative (often better) ways to be human. Why was she so vilified for it? | Continue reading
Woolf loathed it but it spurred her on. Hemingway drew ideas of manliness from it. Self-help haunted the modernist imagination | Continue reading
Woolf loathed it but it spurred her on. Hemingway drew ideas of manliness from it. Self-help haunted the modernist imagination | Continue reading
King Midas looked to the gods for an easy way to get rich, but modern chemists use ingenuity to pan for gold in our waste | Continue reading
A generation ago, children in classrooms in the United States prepared for natural disasters such as fires and tornadoes. Today, active-shooter drills force them to confront the grim possibility that someone – perhaps a fellow student – might open fire in their school. In this St … | Continue reading
Mead argued that non-Western cultures offered alternative (often better) ways to be human. Why was she so vilified for it? | Continue reading
‘We're not so much abandoning the idea of the gods, we're just trying to pull them all the way into the Universe.’From the possibility of infinite universes to the prospect of panpsychism, puzzles have arisen in physics that can take science to some very counterintuitive places. … | Continue reading
Time does not heal everything. Like a severely inflamed wound, complicated grief needs special treatment to aid healing | Continue reading
Must radical political change generate uncontainable violence? The French Revolution is both a cautionary and inspiring tale | Continue reading
The West focuses only on slavery, but the history of Africa is so much more than a footnote to European imperialism | Continue reading
How China’s new state surveillance culture is changing the country’s centuries-old Confucian-inspired understanding of ‘face’ | Continue reading
If you’ve ever tripped up over the term ‘Bayesian’ while reading up on data or tech, fear not. Strip away the jargon and notation, and even the mathematics-averse can make sense of the simple yet revolutionary concept at the core of both machine learning and behavioural economics … | Continue reading
How China’s new state surveillance culture is changing the country’s centuries-old Confucian-inspired understanding of ‘face’ | Continue reading
On 16 April 2014, the ferry MV Sewol sunk off the coast of South Korea, killing 304 people – the vast majority of them high-school students on a field trip. Like many other tragedies, the event made headlines around the world before quickly fading from the international news cycl … | Continue reading
The West focuses only on slavery, but the history of Africa is so much more than a footnote to European imperialism | Continue reading
Wild, feral and fossil-fuelled, fire lights up the globe. Is it time to declare that humans have created a Pyrocene? | Continue reading
It is not enough to conserve species and ecosystems. We have an ethical duty to care for each individual animal on earth | Continue reading
Can history help tell us what happiness is? It certainly shows that it is not one simple, self-evident thing | Continue reading
Dadaism was an avant-garde artistic movement born amid the wreckage of the First World War in Europe and formed in reaction to the perceived meaninglessness of modern life – in particular, of capitalism and its violence. The Swedish artist Viking Eggeling’s stop-motion animation … | Continue reading
We can chose how we live – why not how we leave? A free society should allow dying to be more deliberate and imaginative | Continue reading
‘We laugh and for one heartbeat forget to be afraid…’The Battle of the Somme, fought by French and British forces against the German army in northern France in 1916, was one of the bloodiest in history. It lasted 140 days and resulted in more than 1.5 million casualties. The Scot … | Continue reading
A novel, by definition, tells a fictional story – but does that make its author a liar? On the space between stories and lies | Continue reading
The challenge of chess – learning how to hold complexity in mind and still make good decisions – is also the challenge of life | Continue reading
Ghostly hallucinations and other unusual experiences can be therapeutic – we should be careful not to overpathologise them | Continue reading
When you need robot assistance, a sheet of paper is a better model than the human body: the future of robotics is origami | Continue reading
In La Ensenada on Colombia's Pacific coast, local women embark on regular downriver journeys to harvest shellfish from a nearby mangrove forest. This short documentary by the Peruvian filmmaker Guille Isa and the Colombian filmmaker Angello Faccini follows a local mother as she t … | Continue reading
When you need robot assistance, a sheet of paper is a better model than the human body: the future of robotics is origami | Continue reading
Philosophy will thrive if we model debate on the playful exchanges of friends, not the adversarial arguments of a tribunal | Continue reading
We keep chasing happiness, but true clarity comes from depression and existential angst. Admit that life is hell, and be free | Continue reading
The Canadian author, artist and naturalist Bill Mason (1929-1988) was celebrated for his films exploring his country’s vast wilderness. Perhaps his best-known work is a trio of films about wolves – Death of a Legend (1971), Cry of the Wild (1972) and Wolf Pack (1974) – aimed at e … | Continue reading
We keep chasing happiness, but true clarity comes from depression and existential angst. Admit that life is hell, and be free | Continue reading
In polyphonic overtone singing, vocalists manipulate their tongue, mouth and throat to produce two tones at once. While the technique has emerged in disparate societies, it is thought to have originated in (and is most commonly associated with) Mongolian culture. For this video, … | Continue reading
It seemed Darwin had banished biological essences – yet evolution would fail without nature’s library of Platonic forms | Continue reading
Philosophy will thrive if we model debate on the playful exchanges of friends, not the adversarial arguments of a tribunal | Continue reading
Jesuits knew the miserable truth of European empire in India and Brazil, yet their writings rendered it grandiose and sacred | Continue reading
On the inner life of molecules and electrons: or why panpsychism is highly likely to be true, even if it sounds crazy | Continue reading
The US artist Ed Ruscha has created a celebrated body of work inspired by the iconic seediness of Los Angeles – its cars, billboards, gas stations and low-slung houses all strung out in a seemingly endless sprawl. This short film combines photos from the Getty Research Institutes … | Continue reading
Are we part of a dying reality or a blip in eternity? The value of the Hubble Constant could tell us which terror awaits | Continue reading
Against absolutist thinking: to navigate life, we must appreciate nuance, understand complexity and embrace flexibility | Continue reading
It’s no secret that the biggest gains in the growing global economy are reaped by the extremely wealthy. And from philanthropy to tech initiatives, plenty of the world's billionaires claim to have solutions to combat the escalating inequality. But while members of the winning cla … | Continue reading
The challenge of chess – learning how to hold complexity in mind and still make good decisions – is also the challenge of life | Continue reading
Ghostly hallucinations and other unusual experiences can be therapeutic – we should be careful not to overpathologise them | Continue reading
History is full of sorrowful knights, sobbing monks and weeping lovers – what happened to the noble art of the manly cry? | Continue reading