Thomas Jefferson founded a university believing it would safeguard republican freedom. Slavery was another matter altogether | Continue reading

Remarkable 20th-century footage is hidden behind paywalls. Unless those images can be set free, our history remains untold | Continue reading

The ‘selfish gene’ persists for the reason all good scientific metaphors do: it remains a sharp tool for clear thinking | Continue reading

Governments now answer to business, not voters. Mainstream parties grow ever harder to distinguish. Is democracy dead? | Continue reading

For the economist E F Schumacher, the ‘postwar miracle’ sowed the seeds of ruin. The solution? See that small is beautiful | Continue reading

Pilgrims have long sought in India’s holiest city an antidote to the modern West, but Varanasi is more dream than reality | Continue reading

Watching humans watching fish at a tropical fish shop in a gentrifying part of London is a low-key delight | Continue reading

The terms ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ are messy, harmful and distracting. We should get rid of them | Continue reading

The COVID-19 pandemic, like other catastrophes before it, got some of us hooked on phobic energy and terror. Why? | Continue reading

‘Long and tall and that’s not all’: why you’ve probably never heard of Lucy Harris, the only woman drafted into the NBA | Continue reading

‘Long and tall and that’s not all’: why you’ve probably never heard of Lucy Harris, the only woman drafted into the NBA | Continue reading

An exact mathematical concept, pixels are the elementary particles of pictures, based on a subtle unpacking of infinity | Continue reading

The astronomical breakthrough by a citizen scientist in the 1944 Tokyo bombings changed how we see the Sun, and science itself | Continue reading

What the United States and other settler societies can learn from South Africa’s push to create a nonracial democracy | Continue reading

Why a device that generates ‘meditation without meditating’ and could democratise enlightenment scares its inventors | Continue reading

Is there something special about the way women do philosophy or is that just another essentialist idea holding us back? | Continue reading

In our Universe, time seems to go from past to future, not in reverse. But what if time doesn’t even have a direction? | Continue reading

Louise’s Parkinsonism didn’t tamp her artistic drive, but exposed the link between perception, thought and creativity | Continue reading

A new form of trade is reshaping our world, and it’s driven by the movement of bits and bytes, not goods, around the globe | Continue reading

Statistics account for much of our information overload. Here’s how to wade through the ‘damn lies’ and find the truth | Continue reading

A new form of trade is reshaping our world, and it’s driven by the movement of bits and bytes, not goods, around the globe | Continue reading

What’s a viewer to make of underprivileged city kids learning to hunt for food? This vérité-style film casts no judgments | Continue reading

The five stages of grief can’t begin to explain it: grief affects the body, brain and sense of self, and patience is the key | Continue reading

Exaggerated make-up, elaborate costumes and stylised movement heighten the drama in Japan’s Edo period theatrical form | Continue reading