Charles Sanders Peirce was a brilliant philosopher, mathematician and scientist. His polymathic work should be better known | Continue reading
A radical concept called ergodicity at the heart of economics could change our approach to risk for the benefit of all | Continue reading
DBS is an incredibly promising intervention for intractable neurological and psychiatric illness. What are the risks? | Continue reading
The first newspapers contained not high-minded journalism but hundreds of readers’ letters exchanging news with one another | Continue reading
The US filmmaker D A Pennebaker – a pioneer of the documentary form – died on 1 August 2019 at the age of 94. He is perhaps best-known for his feature films Don’t Look Back (1967), a remarkable portrait of Bob Dylan while on a concert tour near the height of his fame, and The War … | Continue reading
The first newspapers contained not high-minded journalism but hundreds of readers’ letters exchanging news with one another | Continue reading
From the Roman Empire to our own Gilded Age, inequality moves in cycles. The future looks like a rough ride | Continue reading
From Diogenes to Jane Goodall, the hypersane seem mad to the mainstream but perhaps they see more deeply than the sane | Continue reading
The Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel was born in Dubai, raised in the Ein el-Helweh refugee camp in Lebanon, studied at the National Film and Television School in the UK, and now lives in Denmark. His debut feature documentary, A World Not Ours (2012), is a personal, melanchol … | Continue reading
Secular modernity requires the weeding out of all the baloney. Yet it’s not clear that we are any less credulous than before | Continue reading
Learning from his family, his animals and his work with tribal people, Gregory Bateson saw the creative potential of paradox | Continue reading
Market booms and busts might be irrational, but we can understand why they happen – and what to do to mitigate the damage | Continue reading
Wisdom and good decision making are within your power: just as soon as you start speaking of yourself in the third person | Continue reading
Psychopaths have a reputation for cunning and ruthlessness. But they are more like you and me than we care to admit | Continue reading
Cosmic rays are constantly raining down on our planet. Their collisions with the Earth’s upper atmosphere create an endless, invisible – and, thankfully for us, harmless – particle shower on its surface. One byproduct of these collisions is the creation of extraordinarily short-l … | Continue reading
In 1965 at the University of Cambridge, two of the foremost American intellectuals were challenged with the question: ‘Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?’ From William F Buckley’s highly stylised posturing and pointing, to James Baldwin’s m … | Continue reading
Market booms and busts may be irrational, but we can understand why they happen – and what to do to mitigate the damage | Continue reading
Only since the Enlightenment have we been able to imagine humans going extinct. Is it a sign of our maturity as a species? | Continue reading
Wisdom and good decision making are within your power: just as soon as you start speaking of yourself in the third person | Continue reading
Only since the Enlightenment have we been able to imagine humans going extinct. Is it a sign of our maturity as a species? | Continue reading
In the short film Bead Game (1977) by the acclaimed Indian-Canadian filmmaker Ishu Patel, stopmotion animation of coloured glass beads offers a beautiful yet dark vision of life, characterised by brutal cycles of competition and consumption. Beginning with a single bead, a series … | Continue reading
Psychopaths have a reputation for cunning and ruthlessness. But they are more like you and me than we care to admit | Continue reading
When the UK director and artist Victoria Mapplebeck was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017, she began using her iPhone to chronicle her experience as a patient and single mother. Constructed from text messages, voicemails, snippets from video diaries, intimate conversations wit … | Continue reading
Human life is fragile but tardigrades and other extremophiles show that life itself is in little danger of disappearing | Continue reading
Science as we’ve come to understand it today – that is, conducting experiments using a hypothesis-testing method – has existed only since about the 17th century. But the Homo sapiens brain has been around since the Pleistocene, so how is it that we've gotten so good at the kind o … | Continue reading
From Diogenes to Jane Goodall, the hypersane seem mad to the mainstream but perhaps they see more deeply than the sane | Continue reading
With the overheated rhetoric around immigration dominating the political sphere, an imaginative, historically rooted perspective can be something of a tonic. This short video from Pedro M Cruz, a data-visualisation designer and assistant professor at Northeastern University in Bo … | Continue reading
Humans have evolved with little resistance to abundant, easy food. Will we gorge ourselves and our planet to death? | Continue reading
High in the Andes, Potosí supplied the world with silver, and in return reaped goods and peoples from Burma to Baghdad | Continue reading
Mass protests in the streets are never enough: to overthrow a dictator, the armed forces must join the rebellion and mutiny | Continue reading
Human life is fragile but tardigrades and other extremophiles show that life itself is in little danger of disappearing | Continue reading
Pills occupy a peculiar place in our lives. Generally speaking, we pop them, chase them down with water, and wait for them to alleviate whatever ails us. But what actually happens after we ingest? This short video from the film production company Macro Room, which specialises in … | Continue reading
High in the Andes, Potosí supplied the world with silver, and in return reaped goods and peoples from Burma to Baghdad | Continue reading
‘It’s not so much being seduced by a story. It’s the thrill of seeing in itself.’During the first film screenings in the 1890s, viewers marvelled at moving images that had an unprecedented power to transport them to faraway places in an instant. At first, these shorts – which inc … | Continue reading
‘It’s not so much being seduced by a story. It’s the thrill of seeing in itself.’During the first film screenings in the 1890s, viewers marvelled at moving images that had an unprecedented power to transport them to faraway places in an instant. At first, these shorts – which inc … | Continue reading
In our Universe, time seems to go from past to future, not in reverse. But what if time doesn’t even have a direction? | Continue reading
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre defied the gloomy existentialist stereotype. They enjoyed having a good time | Continue reading
In 1989, Robert W Levenson, a psychophysiologist at the University of California at Berkeley, began working on a study to track how emotions affect the longterm health of marriages. He suspected that his study would confirm something that seemed rather obvious: negative emotions … | Continue reading
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre defied the gloomy existentialist stereotype. They enjoyed having a good time | Continue reading
Mindfulness promotes itself as value-neutral but it is loaded with (troubling) assumptions about the self and the cosmos | Continue reading
The Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8 was launched in 2014 for a planned eight-year mission to collect forecasting, weather-monitoring and research data. For his experimental short A Year Along the Geostationary Orbit, the German filmmaker Felix Dierich used Himawari-8 data m … | Continue reading
Mindfulness promotes itself as value-neutral but it is loaded with (troubling) assumptions about the self and the cosmos | Continue reading
The lessons of Chernobyl and Fukushima: fear of radiation is more harmful to public health than ionising radiation itself | Continue reading
The music of Bach is full of suggestive structures of counterpoint and recursion (even if Hofstadter got it quite wrong) | Continue reading
The music of Bach is full of suggestive structures of counterpoint and recursion (even if Hofstadter got it quite wrong) | Continue reading
Would you carve a roast with a knife that had been used in a murder? Why not? And what does this tell us about ethics? | Continue reading
Gee's Bend (also known as Boykin) is an isolated hamlet encircled by the Alabama River, with a population of roughly 100 people, most of them African American. The tight-knit community has been known for its quilting culture for decades, including its role in the Freedom Quilting … | Continue reading
We’re opportunistic, inventive and flexible animals, and there is no ‘natural’ or ‘right’ way to bring up our children | Continue reading