Elon Musk and the rise of Silicon Valley’s strange trickle-down science | Continue reading
Beyond ‘Banality’ – a rare interview with Hannah Arendt from 1964 captures her making as an intellectual giant | Continue reading
Abolition in Africa brought longed-for freedoms, but also political turmoil, economic collapse and rising enslavement | Continue reading
Eccentrics, artists and Luddites find community in Scoraig, an off-the-grid settlement on a peninsula in northwest Scotland | Continue reading
How Ivy Litvinov, the English-born wife of a Soviet ambassador, seduced America with wit, tea and soft diplomacy | Continue reading
Physics as we know it is elegant and exquisitely accurate. It tells almost nothing about the deepest riddles of the Universe | Continue reading
‘This is me! Look around’: putting words into pictures to show how the mental and the physical interact in the rooms we call home | Continue reading
She was a French revolutionary and a politician’s wife. But Manon Roland should be remembered for her philosophical writings | Continue reading
A museum, but also a crime palace: why the artist Michael Rakowitz makes ghosts of looted artefacts to haunt Western museums | Continue reading
Imagination is a powerful tool, a sixth sense, a weapon. We must be careful how we use it, in life as on stage or screen | Continue reading
Infinite forms built on strict rules – why NASA engineers are borrowing from origami artists in the hunt for exoplanets | Continue reading
Growing up in the shadow of a serial killer I came to understand that danger within a locked house might exceed that without | Continue reading
Each human brain possesses a unique, intricate pattern of 86 billion neurons. If science can map it, immortality beckons | Continue reading
Each human brain possesses a unique, intricate pattern of 100 trillion neurons. If science can map it, immortality beckons | Continue reading
‘Give a hoarse breath like the buzz of an insect’: a playful tribute to words our grandparents used – but we can’t pronounce | Continue reading
The search for dolphin intelligence and the quest for alien life have moved in historical lockstep. What does the future hold? | Continue reading
On a regular cycle, the Nias islanders of Indonesia would retreat into enforced seclusion. What can we learn from them? | Continue reading
‘Here it’s not a life’: the miserable existence of Senegalese migrants selling souvenirs in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower | Continue reading
From termite queens to the carbon cycle, nature knows how to avoid network collapse. Human designers should pay heed | Continue reading
‘There he lay’: an ancient telling of the assassination of Julius Caesar is vivid with tense plotting and chaotic violence | Continue reading
Saturated with rites and symbols, psychology feeds a deep human need once nourished by mythology | Continue reading
Reconciling Einstein with quantum mechanics may require abandoning the notion that cause always precedes effect | Continue reading
The pioneers of social genetics were racists and eugenicists: should we give up on the science they founded altogether? | Continue reading
Pastoralists are experts in managing extreme variability. In a volatile world economy, bankers should learn how they do it | Continue reading
Spacewalks above, pandemic below – how the NASA astronaut Jessica Meir experienced 2020 on the International Space Station | Continue reading
The pioneers of social genetics were racists and eugenicists: should we give up on the science they founded altogether? | Continue reading
Do deathbed regrets give us a special insight into what really matters in life? There are good reasons to be sceptical | Continue reading
‘Henk is my homeland’: how the challenges and rewards of moving abroad for your partner intermingle feelings of love and home | Continue reading
Democracy is not a torch passed from ancient Athens but a globally common form of government with much to teach us today | Continue reading
It damages memory and cognition, and brings no lasting relief. Why is ‘electroshock’ therapy still a mainstay of psychiatry? | Continue reading
‘It’s a different type of beauty that’s hard for humans to make on their own’: generating art by ‘crossbreeding’ images | Continue reading
Do deathbed regrets give us a special insight into what really matters in life? There are good reasons to be sceptical | Continue reading
On a regular cycle, the Nias islanders of Indonesia would retreat into enforced seclusion. What can we learn from them? | Continue reading
A brief history of melancholy: how philosophers, poets and scientists across the ages shaped our understanding of sadness | Continue reading
It damages memory and cognition, and brings no lasting relief. Why is ‘electroshock’ therapy still a mainstay of psychiatry? | Continue reading
Exquisite armour, long-dormant burial object, astounding archeological discovery: the many lives of the ‘Sutton Hoo helmet’ | Continue reading
When established medicine can offer no relief from lifelong gut issues, a biohacker embarks on a radical self-experiment | Continue reading
How a flawed logic of economic scarcity and social climbing spurred witch hunts in early modern Germany | Continue reading
Happiness is not the same as a sense of meaning. How do we go about finding a meaningful life, not just a happy one? | Continue reading
Does mathematics have a ‘beauty’ problem? Sabine Hossenfelder explains why searching for elegance in nature stifles progress | Continue reading
A devastating loss can shatter the façade we put up for others, exposing our deepest, rawest self. A work of art can do the same | Continue reading
Does mathematics have a ‘beauty’ problem? Sabine Hossenfelder explains why searching for elegance in nature stifles progress | Continue reading
Christine Korsgaard argues that we can extend a Kantian moral framework to include other animals. But her argument fails | Continue reading
The ethical life means being good to ourselves, to others, and to the world. But how do you choose if these demands compete? | Continue reading
How a country used myth and mystique to tempt global investors – and seeded a toxic Hindu nationalism in the process | Continue reading
The theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli sits by the fire with Hazda hunter-gatherers, pondering our evolutionary past | Continue reading
To respect exiles as real and important political actors, we should get over casting them as saints, threats or victims | Continue reading
A poignant reflection on celebrity, mourning and Kobe Bryant’s death, crafted from just a few intimate words among family | Continue reading