I didn't like the story I was given. So I wrote a new one.A feminist, a social-justice advocate and a media sensation in her own right, the US journalist Elizabeth Cochran Seaman (1864-1922) – aka, Nellie Bly – would have been right at home in the 21st-century media environment. … | 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
The Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) was formed in 1956 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the mission to create science-education materials for US high-school classrooms. In this PSSC film from 1961, the physics professors J N Patterson Hume and Donald Ivey … | Continue reading
Of all the ancient philosophers, it is Epicurus, not the Stoics, who helps us with the challenges of modern secular life | Continue reading
Interstate 5, the primary highway on the West Coast of the United States, runs for more than 1,000 miles between Mexico and Canada, through California, Oregon and Washington. In this experimental short film, the US filmmaker Conner Griffith takes the Californian stretches of the … | Continue reading
Of all the ancient philosophers, it is Epicurus, not the Stoics, who helps us with the challenges of modern secular life | Continue reading
Far from being illogical or unintelligent, ad hominem arguments can be a very good way to challenge appeals to authority | Continue reading
During their weekly Sunday breakfast together, Ivy discovers that her octogenarian mother Riki is losing her memory. Soon after, Ivy decides that Riki would be better off moving out of the cozy Brooklyn apartment where she lives alone, and into an assisted living community in the … | Continue reading
For centuries, people have navigated the globe using instruments. But what if the Earth itself can help us feel our way? | Continue reading
Life is suffering, whether you sit under a Bodhi Tree or stand with the workers. But do the two schools agree on the remedy? | Continue reading
Artificial neural networks were created to imitate processes in our brains, and in many respects – such as performing the quick, complex calculations necessary to win strategic games such as chess and Go – they’ve already surpassed us. But if you’ve ever clicked through a CAPTCHA … | Continue reading
Life is suffering, whether you sit under a Bodhi Tree or stand with the workers. But do the two schools agree on the remedy? | Continue reading
The Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) was formed in 1956 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the mission to create science-education materials for US high-school classrooms. In this PSSC film from 1961, the physics professors J N Patterson Hume and Donald Ivey … | Continue reading
The hikikomori can stay locked in their rooms for months or even years. How can we help them to re-join the world? | Continue reading
As aspirational avatars, idolised icons and vessels of collective memory, celebrities permeate all aspects of modern life | Continue reading
The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do | Continue reading
'Girls are weird. Babies are weird. Bodies are extra weird,' says the Spanish animator Ana Pérez López. In Las del Diente, she uses excerpts from candid conversations with three women as a canvas for a refreshingly honest and unapologetic meditation on modern womanhood. The anecd … | Continue reading
Learning from his family, his animals and his work with tribal people, Gregory Bateson saw the creative potential of paradox | Continue reading
The backlash against antidepressants results from a suspicion of medicine, and misunderstands the very nature of depression | Continue reading
The short film The River evocatively adapts the US spoken-word poet Anis Mojgani's performance of 'To Where the Trees Grow Tall' from his book In the Pockets of Small Gods (2018). Mojgani invokes a surreal scene of confusion, mystery and casual conversations between newly decease … | Continue reading
Across time and place, royal women wielded power in remarkably similar ways, building political agency on a par with kings | Continue reading
Today, the term ‘government cheese’ is perhaps most commonly associated with the late US comedian Chris Farley and his 1993 Saturday Night Live sketch in which a motivational speaker warns a couple of wayward teens that, if they don’t get their act together, they’ll soon be ‘livi … | Continue reading
The backlash against antidepressants results from a suspicion of medicine, and misunderstands the very nature of depression | Continue reading
Far from being illogical or unintelligent, ad hominem arguments can be a very good way to challenge appeals to authority | Continue reading
Master Nissho Inoue and his band of assassins teach some uncomfortable truths about terrorism, for those who will hear | Continue reading
Artificial neural networks were created to imitate processes in our brains, and in many respects – such as performing the quick, complex calculations necessary to win strategic games such as chess and Go – they’ve already surpassed us. But if you’ve ever clicked through a CAPTCHA … | Continue reading
Despite the vagaries of free will and circumstance, human behaviour in bulk is far more predictable than we like to imagine | Continue reading
What can a deer-tooth necklace seemingly made for the burial of a woman in France tell us about our Ice Age ancestors? | Continue reading
Quarrels over honour in duelling cultures can enlighten us today and demonstrate why some insults are intolerable | Continue reading
Our brains predict the outcomes of our actions, shaping reality into what we expect. That’s why we see what we believe | Continue reading
The original rules of Monopoly were meant to demonstrate what was wrong with capitalism. What went wrong? | Continue reading
Lee Hadwin has been scribbling in his sleep since early childhood. By the time he was a teen, he was creating elaborate, accomplished drawings and paintings that he had no memory of making – a process that continues today. Even stranger perhaps is that, when he is awake, he has v … | Continue reading
On Nias island, the heart can be ‘squeezed’, ‘hot’, even ‘hairy’. What can anthropology say about unfamiliar emotional zones? | Continue reading
How did the sailors of early modern Europe learn to traverse the world’s seas? By going to school and doing maths problems | Continue reading
We think we know how quantum particles get ‘entangled’ across space – but what about entanglement through time? | Continue reading
'Nobody's coming on a magic carpet ... we are the saviours, we are the redeemers, we are the deliverers, we are the answers that we've been seeking.'The Detroit 300 is a 1,500-member community policing group cofounded by the forceful Minister Malik Shabazz with a mission to ‘figh … | Continue reading
What can a deer-tooth necklace seemingly made for the burial of a woman in France tell us about our Ice Age ancestors? | Continue reading
In 1971, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault met at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands for their first and only debate. Produced by the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation as a part of their International Philosophers Project, the programme featured discussions with … | Continue reading
Our brains predict the outcomes of our actions, shaping reality into what we expect. That’s why we see what we believe | Continue reading
When wakefulness is seen as the main event, no wonder so many have trouble sleeping. Can we rekindle the joy of slumber? | Continue reading
Animals use tools, love their friends and remember our faces. These complex memories could help treat Alzheimer’s in humans | Continue reading
That drink, that cigarette, that dance: wanting things is highly contagious. Can you be immunised against the infection? | Continue reading
From computers and toys to guns, condoms and food, our world is being colonised by cute characters, logos and emojis. Why? | Continue reading
Well before Bentham, Cesare Beccaria radically questioned the right of the state to imprison and execute its citizens | Continue reading
Human language is, of course, far from static. Our vocabularies are constantly being influenced by cultural movements, migrations, new technologies and much, much more. Indeed, even good old-fashioned mixups can shape the way we speak, write and think. As this animation from BBC … | Continue reading
How did the sailors of early modern Europe learn to traverse the world’s seas? By going to school and doing maths problems | Continue reading
'I have belief in God. But not all of the time,' Megumi Ueno admits as she ascends steps on the Kumano Kodo, a sacred pilgrimage route in Japan’s Kii Mountains that’s been travelled by Shintos and Buddhists for more than a millennium. While Ueno considers herself a Buddhist, she … | Continue reading
In our image-saturated, over-sped world, we are losing the imaginative power to create and find meaning through metaphor | Continue reading