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
Fake it till you make it? Acting like an extravert for a week makes most people feel happier – unless you’re an introvert | Continue reading
Monsters once inhabited the mysterious fringes of the known world. In our human-dominated present, can they still be found? | Continue reading
Fake it till you make it? Acting like an extravert for a week makes most people feel happier – unless you’re an introvert | Continue reading
In today’s world, web developers have it all: money, perks, freedom, respect. But is there value in what we do? | Continue reading
Here on Earth, volcanoes have a reputation for creation and destruction, regularly spewing out our planet’s molten innards as a consequence of plate tectonics. Nearby in the solar system, however, volcanism seems to have gone extinct, leaving behind the Moon's darkened, basaltic … | Continue reading
A world segregated into male and female categories feels suffocating. Nonbinary identity is a radical escape hatch | Continue reading
Without their own state, Jews’ identity was not a Judaism of the heavens or the heart but structured around the Jewish body | Continue reading
A New Cretaceous is not the new normal: the Holocene was a gift that humanity took for granted and is now helping to bury | Continue reading
‘Maybe next year we’ll have less stories to tell.’Pumpkin Movie opens with the Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari, blue-lit in front of her laptop, in a shadowy room festooned with Halloween lights and a black-and-white horror film on TV. This mix of the mundane and the eerie is th … | Continue reading
The British honours system has outlived the Empire it was designed to foster. Does it have a role in the world today? | Continue reading
A New Cretaceous is not the new normal: the Holocene was a gift that humanity took for granted and is now helping to bury | Continue reading
City life is a constant, maddening hum. Only in a place like the Sahara can we hear the nothingness that revives | Continue reading
During the Second World War, the Soviet Air Force initially barred women from serving in combat. That was until October 1941 when the pilot Marina Raskova personally convinced Joseph Stalin to deploy the world's first all-female air force units to fight against Axis powers. Prima … | Continue reading
Virtual reality is not a modern-day empathy machine – and this is why it’s dangerous to think otherwise | Continue reading
Elephants might have the necessary capacities for personhood – we just need to help them acquire the cognitive scaffolding | Continue reading
The discovery of quantum mechanics at the start of the 20th century shook the very foundations of physics, forcing scientists and philosophers to reexamine everything from particles upward. But as this short animation from MinutePhysics explains, the quantum revolution was jumpst … | Continue reading
Estranged but not alienated, devout but not obedient, philosophical but not a systematiser, Simone Weil defies conventions | Continue reading
Elephants might have the necessary capacities for personhood – we just need to help them acquire the cognitive scaffolding | Continue reading
Living with hallucinations is a mental-health challenge – but it also offers valuable possibilities for positive growth | Continue reading
The French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) was at the height of her influence after she published her landmark feminist treatise The Second Sex (1949) and her acclaimed novel The Mandarins (1954). In the wake of the the Second World War, alongside Albert Camus … | Continue reading
What the archives of mental-health asylums reveal about the history of human heredity and the evolution of genetics | Continue reading
After his father died in 2011, Jay Wilde inherited his family’s small beef farm in the English county of Derbyshire, and quickly found himself in an excruciatingly difficult position. A vegetarian for more than 25 years, his deep concern for animals only increased as he spent end … | Continue reading