Existence precedes likes: when personal agency is digitised by Big Data, it creates an online blueprint for humanity | Continue reading
The brain makes no distinction between a broken bone and an aching heart. That’s why social exclusion needs a health warning | Continue reading
Growing up in the port city of Haifa, now in northern Israel, the Jewish Israeli filmmaker Iris Zaki rarely developed relationships or engaged in meaningful conversations with her Arab neighbours. In her short The Shampoo Summit, Zaki sets out to broaden her perspective of the ci … | Continue reading
Strolling paw to foot with Yuni in the Rockies, I wonder: will be ever know the difference between a wolf and a dog? | Continue reading
As for most ancient philosophers, Lucretius saw no boundary between his scientific interests and his ethical claims | Continue reading
Science today is an intricate, collaborative, global enterprise. Nobel prizes for individual scientists are an anachronism | Continue reading
We give mice and dogs ethical protections, so why not AIs? On the future conditions for robot rights | Continue reading
Artists in the miniatures world tend to focus their passion for detailing on period pieces fit for museum displays, drawing rooms or libraries. However, the British miniaturists Kath Holden and her mother Margaret Shaw of Delph Miniatures in Bradford, Yorkshire, have carved out t … | Continue reading
We give mice and dogs ethical protections, so why not AIs? On the future conditions for robot rights | Continue reading
During the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, Great Britain, France, Portugal and Spain controlled vast territories across the globe through a combination of seapower, economic control and brute force. This video from the Portuguese visualisation designers Pedro M Cruz and Penousal M … | Continue reading
When a person goes missing, in war or in ordinary life, their story is cut off mid-sentence. A death can be easier to bear | Continue reading
Let’s get medieval, and learn from the great tools for concentration practised by the nuns and monks of the Middle Ages | Continue reading
The human eye is a surprisingly good photon detector. What can it spy of the line between the quantum and classical worlds? | Continue reading
Let’s get medieval, and learn from the great tools for concentration practised by the nuns and monks of the Middle Ages | Continue reading
The human eye is a surprisingly good photon detector. What can it spy of the line between the quantum and classical worlds? | Continue reading
In a world of difference we can – and should – work harder to cultivate subtle, perceptive empathy towards all human beings | Continue reading
Don’t just do it, think about it too: how Gilbert Ryle’s philosophy of mind can help athletes teach themselves to improve | Continue reading
'I remember everything...' So begins Maybe It’s Me, in which the Greek-born, London-based animator Dimitris Simou grapples with how to hold on to memories of the summer when his grandfather's memory began to decline. Reflecting on the simultaneous robustness and fragility of memo … | Continue reading
In a world of difference we can – and should – work harder to cultivate subtle, perceptive empathy towards all human beings | Continue reading
A lot of news is part-real and part-fake – and J S Mill suggests we should take both parts seriously, not literally | Continue reading
Originally broadcast on BBC2’s The Late Show in 1992, this delightfully simple and clever short from the UK artist John Smith deploys a camera, an amphibian and an alarm clock to show how the chasm between ‘gargantuan’ and ‘minute’ is all in the framing. | Continue reading
Don’t just do it, think about it too: how Gilbert Ryle’s philosophy of mind can help athletes teach themselves to improve | Continue reading
When is an object a person? The social, political and philosophical consequences of the Classic Maya idea of personhood | Continue reading
Celebrated annually in early spring, Passover commemorates the Jewish people's liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus. The holiday is generally marked by a large gathering of family and friends known as a Seder, and includes a reading of the H … | Continue reading
'The Universe becomes a cosmic boneyard, strewn with remnants of dead stars.'This is the way the Universe ends, not with a bang, but with an unfathomably profound and gradual chill. Or, at least that’s one guess held by many scientists – but we don’t really know, and it’s entirel … | Continue reading
Science today is an intricate, collaborative, global enterprise. Nobel prizes for individual scientists are an anachronism | Continue reading
Are actors who immerse themselves in a role lost to themselves? On playacting and the mind as a storehouse of boxes | Continue reading
In the night schools of Bombay, factory workers dreamed that literacy and learning would raise them to respectability | Continue reading
Our thinking devices – imitation, mind-reading, language and others – are neither hard-wired nor designed by genetic evolution | Continue reading
Our thinking devices – imitation, mind-reading, language and others – are neither hard-wired nor designed by genetic evolution | Continue reading
Why is it so enjoyable to drink something that sets off little explosions in your mouth? On the physics of carbonation | Continue reading
Humans love laws and seek predictability. But like our Universe, which thrives on entropy, we need disorder to flourish | Continue reading
Islamberg is a small hamlet of roughly two dozen families in upstate New York that has come to represent some of the most pernicious contradictions of political culture in the United States. Situated 130 miles north of New York City on the Pennsylvania border, the town was formed … | Continue reading
In the scariest disaster scenario, an electrical meltdown could take out modern civilisation. How can we avert the risk? | Continue reading
In the night schools of Bombay, factory workers dreamed that literacy and learning would raise them to respectability | Continue reading
The American philosopher Judith Butler is one of the preeminent contemporary thinkers on issues at the intersection of gender and identity. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley and at the European Graduate School, she’s perhaps best-known for her book Gender Trou … | Continue reading
Humans love laws and seek predictability. But like our Universe, which thrives on entropy, we need disorder to flourish | Continue reading
There’s nothing especially Christian about the birth of the book: the Romans had used the codex as well as the scroll | Continue reading
Acceptance and commitment therapy teaches us how to live a values-driven life even in the face of dark emotions and trauma | Continue reading
The London Borough of Enfield’s coat of arms features a depiction of the chimeric beast it was named for: a creature with the head of a fox, the talons of an eagle and the legs of a lion. The UK filmmaker Adam Butcher, who experienced his first brush with love in the borough, con … | Continue reading
European colonisation of the Americas didn’t cause the Little Ice Age, but its effects were amplified by colonial exploitation | Continue reading
We’re certainly on to something when we say the brain is a computer – even if we don’t yet know what exactly we’re on to | Continue reading
Before there was the internet, there was la Bibliothèque nationale de France (the National Library of France) in Paris: an ever-expanding collection of books, manuscripts, maps and other cultural artifacts that has been operating continuously since the 15th century. The documenta … | Continue reading
We’re certainly on to something when we say the brain is a computer – even if we don’t yet know what exactly we’re on to | Continue reading
Lacking confidence? Need an ego boost? Take a leaf out of the autobiographer’s book and write about chapters of your life | Continue reading
As the world becomes increasingly automated, the singular occupation of lighthouse keeper has quietly disappeared from the British coastline. Part elegy for a departed era, part meditation on the experience of solitude in nature, Ronan Glynn’s film records the stories of those wh … | Continue reading
Sex, safety and longevity: why does ageing persist in the Darwinian framework, given the optimising drive of evolution? | Continue reading
Sex, safety and longevity: why does ageing persist in the Darwinian framework, given the optimising drive of evolution? | Continue reading