Samuel Beckett turned an obscure 17th-century Christian heresy into an artistic vision and an unusual personal philosophy | Continue reading
Organisms do not evolve blindly under forces beyond their control, but shape and influence the evolutionary environment itself | Continue reading
The skilful manipulator casts a shadow of doubt over everything that you feel or think. Therapy can bring the daylight in | Continue reading
How do ants that can’t chew their own food survive? They kidnap other ant species and commit them to a life of servitude | Continue reading
The exclusion of poorer people from their own neighbourhoods is not just a social problem but a philosophical one | Continue reading
Not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’: half were women. What can archaeologists tell us about how they lived? | Continue reading
An intimate discussion between the pianist Kris Bowers and his grandfather Horace about ambition, race, success – and music | Continue reading
Not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’: half were women. What can archaeologists tell us about how they lived? | Continue reading
‘I come into the peace of wild things’ – how the poet Wendell Berry finds respite in the awesome now of nature | Continue reading
Organisms do not evolve blindly under forces beyond their control, but shape and influence the evolutionary environment itself | Continue reading
The injunction to immerse yourself in the present might be psychologically potent, but is it metaphysically meaningful? | Continue reading
‘If it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing.’ After traumatic upbringings, two septuagenarian sisters reclaim their childhoods | Continue reading
How a father’s mere curiosity about nature evolved during the Dutch Golden Age into the son’s focused scientific enquiry | Continue reading
‘Farcical situations’ and culture clashes: dispatches from Japan’s 1862 envoy to Europe following centuries of isolation | Continue reading
Rich nations with strong governments can no longer assume that political violence is a problem for other, poorer countries | Continue reading
Pre-Hispanic and colonial techniques come together with local materials in Mario’s exquisite, colourful Mexican artwork | Continue reading
No one with an interest in philosophy or debates about identity can afford to be ignorant of the work of Saul Kripke | Continue reading
The risk of nihilism is that it alienates us from anything good or true. Yet believing in nothing has positive potential | Continue reading
Philip K Dick used his religious experiences to stimulate his imagination, but were they simply signs of mental illness? | Continue reading
From Kentucky to Wales and all across the Atlantic, the enslaved and downtrodden got married – by leaping over a broom. Why? | Continue reading
‘He’s an amazing soul who happens to be in a dog body’: 10 tales of the bittersweet experience of loving an ageing dog | Continue reading
We live in a wake-centric world that devalues dreaming, yet we need to experience dreams to be our authentic selves | Continue reading
In the 1960s, NASA went to huge expense to contain possible pathogens from the Moon. What can we learn from the attempt? | Continue reading
Wooden sticks, cotton balls and electric motors articulate the tension between order and chaos in Zimoun’s art installations | Continue reading
In the 1960s, NASA went to huge expense to contain possible pathogens from the Moon. What can we learn from the attempt? | Continue reading
Plato travelled to the decadent strife-torn court of Syracuse three times, risking his life to create a philosopher-king | Continue reading
Above the rustle of rolling papers, Gricel entertains workers in a Cuban cigar factory with her readings and good humour | Continue reading
Plato travelled to the decadent strife-torn court of Syracuse three times, risking his life to create a philosopher-king | Continue reading
What shaped the thought of E P Thompson, the great historian of ordinary working people and champion of their significance? | Continue reading
All’s not well that ends well: the political philosopher Michael Sandel discusses Kant’s counterintuitive view of morality | Continue reading
When feeling good about ourselves matters more than filial duty, cutting off our parents comes to seem like a valid choice | Continue reading
In seeking a means to heal our wounded planet, we should look to the painstaking, cautious craft of art conservation | Continue reading
‘Your numbers, your manias, your endless baths’: an award-winning, animated tribute to a beloved uncle with OCD | Continue reading
In seeking a means to heal our wounded planet, we should look to the painstaking, cautious craft of art conservation | Continue reading
Nation-states came late to history, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest they won’t make it to the end of the century | Continue reading
Born in Turkey and living in the UK, Bircan Birol returns home to learn Kurdish – but will her grandmother Anik teach her? | Continue reading
From Kentucky to Wales and all across the Atlantic, the enslaved and downtrodden got married – by leaping over a broom. Why? | Continue reading
For Palaeolithic societies, art-making was both a tool for survival and a tactile, joyous exploration of the world | Continue reading
With my pen hovering over a form, there is no easy answer: better to provoke stigma with support, or resist classification? | Continue reading
Intertwining roads and never-ending high-rises blend into a trippy audiovisual symphony inspired by infinite regress | Continue reading
With my pen hovering over a form, there is no easy answer: better to provoke stigma with support, or resist classification? | Continue reading
Sitting in a videoconference is a uniformly crap experience. Instead of corroding our humanity, let’s design tools to enhance it | Continue reading
Join an eclectic cast of dumpster divers as they salvage the food that gets thrown out by Trader Joe’s in Brooklyn | Continue reading
From cobra to caterpillar, warning signals are a rich natural vocabulary shaped by the communicative dance of predator and prey | Continue reading
The phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty entwines us, via our own beating, pulsing, living bodies, in the lives of others | Continue reading
When it comes to possessions, humans are hard-wired to overvalue their possessions. Understanding the endowment effect | Continue reading
The phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty entwines us, via our own beating, pulsing, living bodies, in the lives of others | Continue reading
Urban ethnographers do more harm than good in speaking for Black communities. They see only suffering, not diversity or joy | Continue reading