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
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