The Romans thought they had the upper hand over the fickle and furious power of nature. History warns: they were wrong | Continue reading
For all his brilliance as a physicist, Richard Feynman didn’t cut it as a philosopher: beauty is no guide to truth in science | Continue reading
Books are many things to many people, from status symbols to life-savers to dangerous portals to unwanted experiences, but few of us get to see them born. This charming short offers a swift tour of the Smith Settle printing and bookbinding company in Leeds, in the north of Englan … | Continue reading
For all his brilliance as a physicist, Richard Feynman didn’t cut it as a philosopher: beauty is no guide to truth in science | Continue reading
In 1928, the UK physicist Paul Dirac stumbled on an equation that seemed to show that, for every particle, there’s another, nearly identical particle with an opposite electric charge. Just four years later, the US physicist Carl David Anderson proved Dirac’s prediction correct by … | Continue reading
Hold out for the perfect partner or settle for good enough? In the calculus of love, flourishing means getting it right | Continue reading
If psychedelic substances are a portal to ultimate reality, why have they been the preserve of white, college-educated men? | Continue reading
From Marxism to hip hop, China’s appropriations from the West show that globalisation makes the world bumpy, not flat | Continue reading
A cat is alive, a sofa is not: that much we know. But a sofa is also part of life. Information theory tells us why | Continue reading
The move away from myth and toward reason is an ancient human impulse. But must enchantment be the enemy of enlightenment? | Continue reading
The Toronto-based filmmaker Dominique van Olm and her younger brother Dexter are separated by 13 years and hundreds of miles, so they spend very little time together. In Little Brother – a ‘hybrid of documentary and narrative fiction’ – van Olm takes that reality and turns it int … | Continue reading
Animals use tools, love their friends and remember our faces. These complex memories could help treat Alzheimer’s in humans | Continue reading
The move away from myth and toward reason is an ancient human impulse. But must enchantment be the enemy of enlightenment? | Continue reading
Making students learn to execute similar operations using three different kinds of notation – as in the case of exponents, logarithms and roots – is a bit like asking them to learn to say the same thing in three different languages for no good reason. With such counterintuitive a … | Continue reading
The Lada is a stalwart symbol of Soviet Russia. It has also been considered one of the worst cars ever made. Its heyday, if it had one, was in the 1970s, but a substantial number of vehicles remain on the roads today, and hold a special place in the hearts and minds of many Russi … | Continue reading
What would an American dictionary meen for the men and wimmen of America? Noah Webster’s civil war over the English language | Continue reading
A cat is alive, a sofa is not: that much we know. But a sofa is also part of life. Information theory tells us why | Continue reading
What’s the point of life? Kindness? Recycling? Leaving your body to science? This hybrid of animation and live-action from 2009 generates good fun and plenty of food for thought from its simple premise: asking children some of the most enduring questions in philosophy. While many … | Continue reading
Join the choir: singing with others is a social glue that works faster than laughter or dancing to bond people together | 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. Extracted from a PSSC film from 1959, the first half of this short video finds the Nob … | Continue reading
Are you here now? Impossible to say. The idea that any group of events can truly happen at once is just an illusion | Continue reading
That drink, that cigarette, that dance: wanting things is highly contagious. Can you be immunised against the infection? | Continue reading
The law and economics movement clothes a particular political and moral vision as a supposedly neutral social science | Continue reading
A light at the end of a tunnel, an out-of-body sensation: how ketamine trips are like near-death experiences | Continue reading
‘You see, I have this problem: growing up in my parent’s house was not tragic. But their past was.’Coming of age in Toronto during the 1960s, the Canadian writer and illustrator Bernice Eisenstein found herself ‘addicted’ to the Holocaust, consuming every film and book on the sub … | Continue reading
Kure Tomofusa’s hatred of democracy, human rights and liberalism has found an echo in the West. But has he been joking all along? | Continue reading
Human art evades understanding. With utterly different embodiment and experience, how will we ever ‘get’ machinic art? | Continue reading
A radically literal new translation returns Paul and his teachings to the alien world of late antiquity | Continue reading
Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers.A commute is often judged good or bad by how long it takes, but sometimes getting from one place to another can yield wrinkles in our experience of time. The Japanese filmmaker H … | Continue reading
American country music is not just hillbilly music: from Blind Alfred Reed to Garth Brooks, it has been progressive at heart | Continue reading
The science of how we sense ourselves from within, including our bodily states, is creating a radical picture of selfhood | Continue reading
We are told that we are an irrational tangle of biases, to be nudged any which way. Does this claim stand to reason? | Continue reading
Estranged but not alienated, devout but not obedient, philosophical but not a systematiser, Simone Weil defies conventions | Continue reading
Hegel’s search for the universal patterns of history revealed a paradox: freedom is coming into being, but is never guaranteed | Continue reading
It seems to be a deeply human experience to catch sight of a bird on the wing and stand there entranced, whether by a hummingbird's frenetic zipping lines, a hawk's graceful curves or any of the countless other forms of avian flight. Created by the US animator Stephen Cunnane as … | Continue reading
A light at the end of a tunnel, an out-of-body sensation: how ketamine trips are like near-death experiences | Continue reading
For decades the sciences and the humanities have fought for knowledge supremacy. Both sides are wrong-headed | Continue reading
You’re at a party, perhaps finding your next drink, when someone you hardly know comes up and asks: ‘Hey, want to hear a good one?’ The real answer is almost always: ‘No, thank you,’ but as a polite guest, what choice do you really have? This excerpt from the film Shepherd’s Deli … | Continue reading
Hegel’s search for the universal patterns of history revealed a paradox: freedom is coming into being, but is never guaranteed | Continue reading
Filled with the pulses of numerous ticking watch hands, this short documentary from the UK filmmaker Marie-Cécile Embleton profiles a London-based Iranian watchmaker as he muses on the delicate and temporal nature of his work. As Faramarz meticulously polishes wood, shapes metal … | Continue reading
Misinformation on social media is a threat to public health and democracy. This is an arms race the Twitter bots must not win | Continue reading
In a strangely unremarked-upon twist, Disney films have taken to subverting romance and rethinking the happy-ever-afters | Continue reading
One of the shockwaves from Charles Darwin's idea that humans evolved from other animals was moral panic. If our ethics are not guided by an omnipotent and all-knowing god and, instead, life is driven by ‘survival of the fittest’ via natural selection, how could we possibly expect … | Continue reading
Celebrity culture began before any Kardashians were doing it for the gram, with ‘mash notes’ to 19th-century theatre actors | Continue reading
As loan sharks, drug smugglers, generals and plant hunters, Scots played a central role in expanding the British Empire | Continue reading
Adam Smith questioned the values of modern market-oriented society. How did he become a hero to conservative economists? | Continue reading
‘Imagine the despair. Everything standing still... the world standing still.’The National September 11 Memorial and Museum in downtown Manhattan opened exactly 10 years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2011. Footprint: Where the Towers Stood observes the rhythms of a d … | Continue reading
Adam Smith questioned the values of modern market-oriented society. How did he become a hero to conservative economists? | Continue reading