In his Covers series, the German animator Henning M Lederer envisions a world where classic book covers spring to spectacular and satisfyingly geometric life. Lederer’s third instalment, Even More Covers, features midcentury editions of philosophy, science and logic classics, inc … | Continue reading
In his Covers series, the German animator Henning M Lederer envisions a world where classic book covers spring to spectacular and satisfyingly geometric life. Lederer’s third instalment, Even More Covers, features midcentury editions of philosophy, science and logic classics, inc … | Continue reading
Shamefaced: is shame an irrational moral delusion? Or does the feeling have nothing to do with ideals in the first place? | Continue reading
Philosophy was once a woman’s world, ranging across Asia, Africa and Latin America. It’s time to reclaim that lost realm | Continue reading
How Einstein’s early experience of Judaism may have coloured his understanding of reality | Continue reading
His name has become synonymous with egotistic political scheming, yet Machiavelli’s work is effectively democratic at heart | Continue reading
‘It feel like, I went to sleep at 18 and I woke up at 60.’In May 1975, 18-year-old Rickey Jackson was arrested in Cleveland, Ohio for a murder he didn’t commit. After being convicted, he spent two and a half years on Death Row and an additional 26 years in Ohio prisons, maintaini … | Continue reading
How Einstein’s early experience of Judaism may have coloured his understanding of reality | Continue reading
A pair of cognitive scientists, married for half a century, explain why two argumentative heads can be better than one | Continue reading
It can be easy to simply accept algorithms as indisputable mathematic truths. After all, who wants to spend their spare time deconstructing complex equations? But make no mistake: algorithms are limited tools for understanding the world, frequently as flawed and biased as the hum … | Continue reading
Once parents felt children needed a little fear to grow up well. Today they are desperately protective. What went wrong? | Continue reading
The Inka empire was open-ended, oral and loosely institutionalised, leaving it vulnerable to the Spanish conquistadores | Continue reading
In China and Japan, temples may be rebuilt and ancient warriors cast again. There is nothing sacred about the ‘original’ | Continue reading
Before KHIL was pulled off the air by its new owners in October 2018, the radio station for Willcox in Arizona had been broadcasting classic country music to the small town's residents and passersby for more than half a century. While much of the United States has moved on from s … | Continue reading
Is it possible to love unconditionally, and if so, is it rational to do so? On the mathematics of love, with equations | Continue reading
His name has become synonymous with egotistic political scheming, yet Machiavelli’s work is effectively democratic at heart | 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
In her short documentary Jonah Stands Up, the US director Hannah Engelson profiles her friend Jonah Bascle: a creative, defiant spirit and New Orleans native who is dealing with a terminal heart condition related to his muscular dystrophy. The setup might sound familiar, but the … | Continue reading
The ‘age of reason’ cliché needs to die – Enlightenment thinkers had a much more nuanced understanding of the passions | Continue reading
Planarians are small flatworms that live in wet and humid areas around the globe. Although these creatures are relatively simple, their small, soft bodies possess one of the most amazing secrets in the animal kingdom. Cut a planarian into as many as 279 pieces and, within a few w … | Continue reading
The conversation about trans identities has been riven by bitter divisions. Two philosophers offer radically different perspectives | Continue reading
When we pit ourselves against machines, the game can only end in tears. It is in our gift to imagine another way | Continue reading
Every culture dances. Moving our bodies to music is ubiquitous throughout human history and across the globe. So why is this ostensibly frivolous act so fundamental to being human? The answer, it seems, is in our need for social cohesion – that vital glue that keeps societies fro … | Continue reading
What becomes of the brokenhearted? In relationship anarchy, they get on with their lives, among all their other loved ones | 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
Copyrights, patents and trademarks are all important, but the term ‘intellectual property’ is nonsensical and pernicious | Continue reading
In most of the world, logging is now largely the work of massive machinery. But in the steeply sloped woods above Lake Ägeri in Switzerland, a combination of chainsaws, jacks, muscles and gravity is still the most effective means of bringing down trees for lumber. Once every four … | Continue reading
Copyrights, patents and trademarks are all important, but the term ‘intellectual property’ is nonsensical and pernicious | Continue reading
The Sufi philosopher who forged Islam from Plato: on Al-Farabi and the Hellenic ideas behind Islam’s representational taboo | Continue reading
The US photographer and filmmaker Ralph Steiner (1899-1986) is widely considered to be a pioneer of both media, celebrated for his century-spanning work in modernist photography and documentary and avant-garde film. H₂O (1929), his debut short and one of the earliest US art films … | Continue reading
What if fairness is not about equity but about no one getting more than you? On spite and the evolution of punishment | Continue reading
On China’s state-controlled internet, live-streaming fills a role similar to YouTube in the United States, allowing young people to keep up with, and even interact with, their favourite internet personalities. It’s also boomed into a multibillion dollar industry, driven by ‘gifts … | Continue reading
We still live in the long shadow of Man-the-Hunter: a midcentury theory of human origins soaked in strife and violence | Continue reading
Forget memory. Kill desire. Open up in the moment to unleash creativity, intuition, and even political transformation | Continue reading
Forget memory. Kill desire. Open up in the moment to unleash creativity, intuition, and even political transformation | Continue reading
Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers. ‘What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape when no one is observing it, and then when someone looks at it again, changes back? But one … | Continue reading
How a widowed queen became a rebel warrior, defying Roman patriarchy, and leading her people to glory even in defeat | Continue reading
My odious handiwork: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was about the dangers of art and creation, not of science and discovery | Continue reading
If there was ever a time when critical thinking was a moral imperative, and credulity a calamitous sin, it is now | Continue reading
Far from pure recollections of the past, human memories are imperfect, emotional and inevitably intertwined with our habits and learned behaviours. Based on her understanding of memories as fundamentally alterable, the Dutch clinical psychologist Merel Kindt has developed an expe … | Continue reading
If there was ever a time when critical thinking was a moral imperative, and credulity a calamitous sin, it is now | Continue reading
The philosophy that improves you by mocking your beliefs: Alan Jay Levinovitz introduces the Zhuang Zi | Continue reading
New research puts us on the cusp of brain-to-brain communication. Could the next step spell the end of individual minds? | Continue reading
Confused, inferior and philosophically unsound: the Greco-Roman critique of the Old Testament could have been written today | Continue reading
‘John is very, very big. And Michael was very, very small. They lived in a group home, they grew up together and they are very good friends.’In her award-winning short John and Michael (2004), the Israeli-born Canadian filmmaker Shira Avni tells a touching love story of two men w … | Continue reading
The whip was not the only device of control slaveholders used: they were masters of manipulation too | Continue reading
Swedish-born Sven Engholm owns and operates a dogsledding tour company in the extreme north of Norway, far above the Arctic Circle. In Vargsamtal, this prizewinning elite dogsledder tells the Swedish filmmaker Axel Byrfors how he took a group of stray dogs along with his dogsled … | Continue reading
The trances and healing powers of shamans are so widespread that they can be counted a human universal. Why did they evolve? | Continue reading