As the local food movement grows with every new farmers’ market, have the farmers themselves been forgotten? | Continue reading
‘This is a religious and spiritual war. God is on our side, that’s for sure.’The Russian motorcycle club the Night Wolves first made international headlines in 2014, fighting as a paramilitary group alongside pro-Russian forces during the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from … | Continue reading
The existentialist philosophies of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon offer important insights into the nature of prejudice | Continue reading
How I heard the chants of the monks in the hum of the bees and felt the sting of awareness in the welts on my skin | Continue reading
Truth is neither absolute nor timeless. But the pursuit of truth remains at the heart of the scientific endeavour | Continue reading
Between raging hormones and awkward, uncontrollable physical changes, puberty tends to be a stage of life most people would like to forget. In this animated short, the Finnish director Laura Lehmus offers a playful, sympathetic reminder of what it’s like to feel strange in your o … | Continue reading
Truth is neither absolute nor timeless. But the pursuit of truth remains at the heart of the scientific endeavour | Continue reading
A world of surprisingly porous borders: how Islam spread through the medieval Middle East via relationships with non-Muslims | Continue reading
That the world is not solid but made up of tiny particles is a very ancient insight. Is it humanity’s greatest idea? | Continue reading
Monsters once inhabited the mysterious fringes of the known world. In our human-dominated present, can they still be found? | Continue reading
Gravity retained a somewhat mystifying quality, even after the Newtonian revolution: how could one object affect another from great distances? The same could be said about light, heat and magnetism, which all seemed to jump through empty space. It wasn’t until the 19th century th … | Continue reading
Reasonableness in law is neither purely statistical nor purely prescriptive, but rather a mixture of the two elements | Continue reading
Don’t throw in the day job to follow your dream. Join the bifurcators who juggle work-for-pay and their work-for-love | Continue reading
When a father bought a baby chick as a plaything for the two cats in his small Mumbai apartment, he expected the bird to be dead within a week. Instead, over the next six months, it became an iron-willed rooster and ‘a full-blown terror in the house’, dominating both animals and … | Continue reading
How can I logically manage to deceive myself? Buddhist thought offers a way out of the philosophical paradox | Continue reading
For Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, much of philosophy was mere nonsense. Then came Frank Ramsey’s pragmatic alternative | Continue reading
How the world became cognitively samey: the scientific, humanistic and ethical implications of global WEIRDing | Continue reading
To learn from collapses and extinctions, and prevent more of them, we need to recover the power of complex storytelling | Continue reading
From the tornadoes of the Great Plains to the hurricanes of the Gulf Coast, the United States has some of the world’s most notoriously destructive and volatile weather. But while somewhat hard to grasp on local, week-to-week scales, the nation’s weather is characterised by notice … | Continue reading
To learn from collapses and extinctions, and prevent more of them, we need to recover the power of complex storytelling | Continue reading
Don’t throw in the day job to follow your dream. Join the bifurcators who juggle work-for-pay and their work-for-love | Continue reading
The writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton embodied a paradox, chasing both the purity of silence and the need to break it | Continue reading
There is another aspect to the gender pay-gap difference: women negotiate higher salaries with female bosses than with male | Continue reading
In the wake of the Silicon Valley tech boom, a massive housing affordability crisis has left thousands of lower-income residents unable to pay skyrocketing rents. These conditions have led to a steep rise in homelessness and the emergence of makeshift housing in the shadows of so … | Continue reading
The writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton embodied a paradox, chasing both the purity of silence and the need to break it | Continue reading
There is another aspect to the gender pay-gap difference: women negotiate higher salaries with female bosses than with male | Continue reading
Cosmopsychism might seem crazy, but it provides a robust explanatory model for how the Universe became fine-tuned for life | Continue reading
The Universe might be full of symmetry, but it’s only when the pattern breaks that interesting things start to happen | Continue reading
Among our close animal relatives, only humans have involved and empathic fathers. Why did evolution favour the devoted dad? | Continue reading
Philosophy, public debate and the ‘Overton window’: on the ethics of making previously unthinkable ideas become mainstream | Continue reading
‘What they should have sent was poets...’Launched in December 1968, Apollo 8 was the first manned flight to reach the Moon, orbit it and return to Earth. The primary goal of the mission was to prepare for an eventual lunar landing, however, the flight is now best remembered for t … | Continue reading
Philosophy, public debate and the ‘Overton window’: on the ethics of making previously unthinkable ideas become mainstream | Continue reading
From elevators to iPhones, the rise of pushbuttons has provoked a century of worries about losing the human touch | Continue reading
It’s perhaps not startling to learn that the expectations of others have a significant impact on us. Over the past century, however, scientists have been surprised to observe just how forcefully expectations can nudge the abilities of people – and rats – in one direction or anoth … | Continue reading
Among our close animal relatives only humans have involved and empathic fathers. Why did evolution favour the devoted dad? | Continue reading
From elevators to iPhones, the rise of pushbuttons has provoked a century of worries about losing the human touch | Continue reading
Erik Erikson, the psychoanalyst who coined the term ‘identity crisis’, saw conflict and change at every phase of life | Continue reading
A Serb, a Croat and a Bosnian walk into a bar: do they speak different languages – or dialects? The answer is pure linguistics | Continue reading
What does compliance with political tyranny do to us? On the concept of ‘ketman’ and the lessons of Cold War Poland | Continue reading
Experimental psychology is providing concrete answers to some of the great philosophical debates about art and its meaning | Continue reading
The popular Primitive Technology YouTube channel features an anonymous man in Far North Queensland in Australia fashioning tools and structures using only naturally occurring, found materials. In this installment, following the deterioration of his A-frame hut, he builds what he … | Continue reading
Is the adversarial approach in the humanities to blame for our toxic online culture – and do historians have the answer? | Continue reading
Experimental psychology is providing concrete answers to some of the great philosophical debates about art and its meaning | Continue reading
On the sociology of suicide: how the famed individualism of Protestant religion contributes to a higher rate of suicide | Continue reading
Sleepwalking is a survival mechanism gone awry, selected through human evolution to help us flee fast when threatened | Continue reading
Picking winners in science is expensive, biased and a waste of time. Let’s do a random draw to decide who gets funded | Continue reading
In his short documentary Baby Brother, the US filmmaker Kamau Bilal offers a bit of vérité filmmaking at its most refreshing, transforming the mundanity of his younger brother's return to their parents' Missouri home into a funny and poignant exploration of the weirdness of young … | Continue reading
On the sociology of suicide: how the famed individualism of Protestant religion contributes to a higher rate of suicide | Continue reading