From tools to language to brainpower, there’s no shortage of theories positing why humans went from the savannah to megacities, while, despite very similar DNA, other hominins have more or less stayed put. This video from NPR details an emerging theory of how human societies evol … | Continue reading
Was writing invented for accounting and administration or did it evolve from religious movements, sorcery and dreams? | Continue reading
Milagro Cunningham was 17 when he abducted, beat and raped an eight-year-old girl in Florida in 2005. He then placed her in a recycling bin, piled it with rocks, and left. Miraculously, she survived. If Cunningham had been 30, or even 19, we wo... | Continue reading
‘When will we have it better? Just like everyone else?’Sand Men is a distinctly different take on the artisan short-documentary genre. It follows Raj, Neculai and Aurel as they practise an unusual craft that has been passed around the Romanian immigrant community in London. With … | Continue reading
A new interpretation of a classic psychology experiment will change your view of perception, judgment – even human nature | Continue reading
In a recent Nature Sustainability paper, a team of scientists concluded that the Earth can sustain, at most, only 7 billion people at subsistence levels of consumption (and this Ju... | Continue reading
Aztec moral philosophy has profound differences from the Greek tradition, not least its acceptance that nobody is perfect | Continue reading
The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only aro... | Continue reading
This striking and almost entirely wordless video from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London beautifully conveys the work of Sachio Yoshioka, the fifth-generation owner of the Somenotsukasa Yoshioka dye workshop in Fushimi, southern Kyoto. Since taking over the business in 1988 … | Continue reading
Aztec moral philosophy has profound differences from the Greek tradition, not least its acceptance that nobody is perfect | Continue reading
The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only aro... | Continue reading
Neuroscience is in the midst of a revolution: aided by increasingly sophisticated brain-scanning technologies, it offers more insights into the inner working of our brains than we’ve ever had before. But as this animated short featuring the musings of the comparative neuroscienti … | Continue reading
Black life is world-making, born of gaps and dislocations, imaginative leavings and returns, generative escapes and arrivals | Continue reading
Many of our choices have the potential to change how we think about the world. Often the choices taken are for some kind of betterment: to teach us something, to increase understanding or to improve ways of thinking. What happens, though, when ... | Continue reading
After centuries searching for extraterrestrial life, we might find that first contact is not with organic creatures at all | Continue reading
The hacker ethos is wild and anarchic, indifferent to the trappings of success. Or it was, until the gentrifiers moved in | Continue reading
The glass of orange juice at the breakfast table tells a tale about what’s natural, what’s whole and what’s healthy for us | Continue reading
Despite dating from millennia ago, Sisyphus and his eternal plight, Narcissus and his lethal vanity, and Midas and his deadly golden touch are still familiar stories today. The Greek myths came out of a pagan belief system vastly different to today's dominant religions and though … | Continue reading
It seems indisputable that there are holes. For example, there are keyholes, black holes and sinkholes; and there are holes in things such as sieves, golf courses and doughnuts. We come into the world through holes, and when we die man... | Continue reading
The filmmaker Wes Hurley was born Vasili Naumenko in Vladivostok in the USSR, and affectionately called Little Potato by his mother Elena. His was a childhood of trauma and uncertainty: his father was violent; his emerging sexuality was forbidden; and his country was cracking apa … | Continue reading
More than a century of death notices have not diminished the achievements and the necessity of liberalism | Continue reading
Many societies suffer from the notion that women are less intelligent and capable than men. Even in more economically developed countries, where women have in the past two centuries won a variety of political and economic rights, prejudice agai... | Continue reading
The glass of orange juice at the breakfast table tells a tale about what’s natural, what’s whole and what’s healthy for us | Continue reading
Intrigued by the buzz around medical fasting, I tried it. A rollercoaster of boredom and energy ensued | Continue reading
Nyepi is an annual ‘Day of Silence’ on the Indonesian island of Bali. A time for quiet self-reflection, the widely observed Hindu tradition brings the region to a standstill as residents fast and meditate inside their homes for 24 hours. On the eve of the Nyepi, however, streets … | Continue reading
When I was at elementary school, my teacher told me that matter exists in three possible states: solid, liquid and gas. She neglected to mention plasma, a special kind of electrified gas that’s a state unto itself. We rarely encounter natural p... | Continue reading
The free-market arguments won’t wash: prostitution trades on the lives of the poor and marginalised – just like slavery | Continue reading
The Linsenmaier Chrysididae collection at the Natur-Museum Luzern in Switzerland features some 250,000 insect species – a small slice of the roughly 10 million species that scientists believe currently exist across the planet. In While Darwin Sleeps... what begins as a droning to … | Continue reading
What is the best way to help people who have dementia? Many interventions are aimed at enabling them to retain self-defining memories and beliefs. In reminiscence therapy, they... | Continue reading
What is meant by the philosophy of Mexicanness? An introduction to the ideas of Emilio Uranga | Continue reading
The United States faces an infrastructure crisis. Report after report warns that the nation’s networks are old, brittle and vulnerable. Systems that were once the envy of the world now suff... | Continue reading
Philosophers love to hate Ayn Rand. It’s trendy to scoff at any mention of her. One philosopher told me that: ‘No one needs to be exposed to that monster.’ Many propose that she’s not a philosopher at all and should not be taken seriously. The ... | Continue reading
The Chinese-born, Chicago-based artist Yuge Zhou’s series The Humors sets out to explore ‘urban behaviours and relationships, those of people and of the built environment itself’. In this instalment, Zhou presents a collage of overhead scenes of recreation and relaxation from Oak … | Continue reading
Philosophers love to hate Ayn Rand. It’s trendy to scoff at any mention of her. One philosopher told me that: ‘No one needs to be exposed to that monster.’ Many propose that she’s not a philosopher at all and should not be taken seriously. The ... | Continue reading
Individuals living with depersonalisation disorder bring vivid insight to the question of whether the self is an illusion | Continue reading
The ideal of religious tolerance has crippling flaws. It’s time to embrace a civic philosophy of reciprocity | Continue reading
In 1905, the young Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung received a collection of essays from none other than the founder of psychoanalysis himself, Sigmund Freud. When the two met in person a year later in Vienna, their first conversation lasted more than 13 hours, according to Jung's ac … | Continue reading
Individuals living with depersonalisation disorder bring vivid insight to the question of whether the self is an illusion | Continue reading
Protests are a time-honoured tradition on college campuses – memorably exemplified by the protests of 1968 by the grandparents of the current generation of students. They reflect the passionate energies of students discovering their own priorit... | Continue reading
The ideal of religious tolerance has crippling flaws. It’s time to embrace a civic philosophy of reciprocity | Continue reading
Protests are a time-honoured tradition on college campuses – memorably exemplified by the protests of 1968 by the grandparents of the current generation of students. They reflect the passionate energies of students discovering their own priorit... | Continue reading
After the success of the Standard Model, experiments have stopped answering to grand theories. Is particle physics in crisis? | Continue reading
Lampyridae, commonly known as fireflies, are a family of some 2,100 distinct types of insects known for their blinking bioluminescence at twilight. Most of the time, their lights are displayed to find mates. However, firefly love can quickly become a battlefield if a female of th … | Continue reading
After the success of the Standard Model, experiments have stopped answering to grand theories. Is particle physics in crisis? | Continue reading
I was shaken and transfixed in the aftermath of the shootings at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Like most of those in the United States, prevention was on my mind. According to partial psychiatric records obtaine... | Continue reading
The late US filmmaker DeWitt Beall was a prolific chronicler of Chicago during the tumultuous 1960s and early '70s, amid the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and the rise of street gangs. His documentary Lord Thing (1970), which screened at the prestigious Venice and Canne … | Continue reading
Individual transgender lives track a wider cultural history of surgery, hormones and revolutionised gender identities | Continue reading
In 1928 Jacob Levy Moreno, a Vienna-trained psychiatrist who had recently emigrated to New York, developed an innovative way of identifying ‘at risk’ children. He analysed social patterns at the State Training School for Girls and the Riverdale... | Continue reading