Handprints on a cave wall, crumbs from a meal: the new science of Neanderthals radically recasts the meaning of humanity | Continue reading
Migration is like the chemical process of osmosis: lesser flows towards greater. On the disruptive dynamics of inequality | Continue reading
Much of what we think of as Ancient Greek poetry, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, was composed to be sung, frequently with the accompaniment of musical instruments. And while the Greeks left modern classicists many indications that music was omnipresent in society – from vas … | Continue reading
Animals inevitably grow in size over evolutionary time. But is bigger always better, or will the tiny inherit the Earth? | Continue reading
American work culture, seeping around the globe, threatens to ruin the pleasures and benefits of public, communal sleep | Continue reading
‘I fear being trapped in the statue of my own body, whilst my mind gazes out.’The 20th-century British philosopher Gilbert Ryle was a critic of ‘mind-body dualism’ – the idea first formulated by the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes that there exists a clear distinct … | Continue reading
Carbon emissions have opportunity costs that make climate change a market failure. Carbon taxing is a positive-sum solution | Continue reading
A generation of schoolchildren is being exhorted to believe in their brain’s elasticity. Does it really help them learn? | Continue reading
Singapore is a tiny country with outsized influence. The Southeast Asian island nation packs some 5.6 million people into just 278 square miles, making it the third most densely populated country in the world. Its wealth is mostly built on oil but, due to a growing population, a … | Continue reading
How Friedrich Nietzsche used ideas from the Ancient Cynics to explore the death of God and the nature of morality | Continue reading
No translation of the Bible has tried to maintain both the meaning and the melody of the Hebrew scriptures – until now | Continue reading
Why we should understand jealousy as nothing more than a vice that ought to be replaced by the new virtue of compersion | Continue reading
The New Zealand-born artist Leonard Charles Huia Lye (1901-80), better known as Len Lye, is renowned for his work in kinetic sculpture and experimental film, and is widely considered one of the most innovative modernists of the 20th century. Lye's first film, Tusalava (1929), pro … | Continue reading
The future seems wide open with possibilities – but is it? What time travel can teach us about the malleability of the future | Continue reading
Via stints as reptiles, rodents and fish with feet, the evolution of humans is as meandering as it is extraordinary. Reminiscent of a similar sequence from Carl Sagan’s iconic TV series Cosmos (1980), this short animation traces human evolutionary history back 550 million years t … | Continue reading
The Satanic Verses would not be written or published today. What’s changed since Salman Rushdie’s notorious novel? | Continue reading
Philosophy need not be arcane, argued Aristotle, as he led by example, writing treatises for peers and public alike | Continue reading
Keeping African art in Western museums while deporting migrants from these countries is about patrimony, not heritage | Continue reading
Violent plasma explosions from the Sun’s surface – known as coronal mass ejections – reverberate to the farthest reaches of our solar system. However, due to the Earth’s protective magnetosphere, most people don’t take note of these events unless a particularly powerful solar fla … | Continue reading
Interoception: the sense that monitors what is happening inside our own bodies | Continue reading
Would you steal a bunch of flowers from a graveside? The dark side of creativity means that you can be both clever and wicked | Continue reading
‘If you don’t believe in God, the life of a Carmelite nun is nonsense, and I was willing to take the chance.’The Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, or simply Carmelites, is a Roman Catholic religious order that dates back to the 12th century. Founde … | Continue reading
Would you steal a bunch of flowers from a graveside? The dark side of creativity means that you can be both clever and wicked | Continue reading
In an age when so many people are at a loss to give life meaning and direction, Giacomo Leopardi is essential reading | Continue reading
A special class of vivid, textural words defy linguistic theory: could ‘ideophones’ unlock the secrets of humans’ first utterances? | Continue reading
The Russian graphic illustrator and motion designer Vladimir Tomin is known for his web videos that deploy relatively simple video-editing tools to reality-warping effect. In his short Portals, views from a leafy autumn walk slowly break apart and shift back into focus, each time … | Continue reading
What makes a dinosaur real, but a unicorn unreal? Does philosophy even pretend to know how to answer a child’s questions? | Continue reading
In China and Japan, temples may be rebuilt and ancient warriors cast again. There is nothing sacred about the ‘original’ | Continue reading
On Zhores Medvedev: The scientists the Soviet Union created became some of its most powerful and courageous critics | Continue reading
A special class of vivid, textural words defy linguistic theory: could ‘ideophones’ unlock the secrets of humans’ first utterances? | Continue reading
On Zhores Medvedev: The scientists the Soviet Union created became some of its most powerful and courageous critics | Continue reading
At the dawn of the 20th century, Oakland in Maine was part of New England's thriving manufacturing economy, and was known as the axe-making capital of the world. But by the 1960s, the rise of mass and foreign production had forced almost a dozen Oakland axe manufacturers to close … | Continue reading
Is that a snake in the grass or a stick I see before me? How the fear of snakes meant the evolution of better vision | Continue reading
Few things tell us more about the nature of state sovereignty, and the threats to it, than the politics of disaster relief | Continue reading
Your desk job is safe when everyday sedentary work demands movements too complex for robots (even ones that can backflip) | Continue reading
While walking down the street with friends roughly a decade ago, the US director Matthew Salton spotted a raccoon eating cookies in a small backyard pool. After hearing a shout from a nearby house, he met brothers Gary and Michael, who had long been feeding the raccoon, and decid … | Continue reading
Your desk job is safe when everyday sedentary work demands movements too complex for robots (even ones that can backflip) | Continue reading
Native to central and southern Europe, the amphibious alpine newt breeds in shallow water, where its larvae are born, hatch and feed on plankton, before sprouting legs and moving to land. This timelapse video from the Dutch director Jan van IJken tracks the development of a singl … | Continue reading
In Ancient Greece, the route to vengeance was through gossip for women, slaves and others with no access to legal retribution | Continue reading
How can I logically manage to deceive myself? Buddhist thought offers a way out of the philosophical paradox | Continue reading
Roughly a decade before publishing his two most famous treatises on power – Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) and The History of Sexuality, Volume One (1976) – the French philosopher Michel Foucault rose to prominence with The Order of Things: An Archaeology o … | Continue reading
In Ancient Greece, the route to vengeance was through gossip for women, slaves and others with no access to legal retribution | Continue reading
For Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, much of philosophy was mere nonsense. Then came Frank Ramsey’s pragmatic alternative | Continue reading
Native to central and southern Europe, the amphibious alpine newt breeds in shallow water, where its larvae are born, hatch and feed on plankton, before sprouting legs and moving to land. This timelapse video from the Dutch director Jan van IJken tracks the development of a singl … | Continue reading
Everyday rituals are ephemeral prayers, a hint to the gods for protection, encircling life like a fragrant garland | Continue reading
How the world became cognitively samey: the scientific, humanistic and ethical implications of global WEIRDing | Continue reading
It is difficult to catch and straightforward to treat. So why does society still shame and punish people infected with HIV? | Continue reading
Where to begin says a lot: world history courses should teach about the whole world, not just the latest winners | Continue reading