Viruses are active agents, existing within rich lifeworlds. A safe future depends on understanding this evolutionary story | Continue reading
A biological trick or a meaningful pursuit? How philosophers from Buddha and Schopenhauer to Simone de Beauvoir saw love | Continue reading
For Hegel, human nature strives through history to unchain itself from tradition. But is such inner freedom worth the cost? | Continue reading
Security is one thing to a Black mother in a favela, another to a politician keen on law and order. They should be the same | Continue reading
Security is one thing to a Black mother in a favela, another to a politician keen on law and order. They should be the same | Continue reading
Near Area 51 in Nevada, UFO enthusiasts gather in their hundreds, seeking meaning and connection – human or otherworldly | Continue reading
The Harrisons’ eco-art told stories about the apocalypse, pointing to a future where we’d all have to be survival artists | Continue reading
Against the capitalist creeds of scarcity and self-interest, a plan for humanity’s shared flourishing is finally coming into view | Continue reading
Once used to hide subversive messages, the Renaissance technique of anamorphosis proved everything is a matter of perspective | Continue reading
A generation of pagan bureaucrats amassed wealth and status while Roman emperors Christianised the world around them | Continue reading
Ten-year-old Pien – small, industrious and fighting to survive – finds kinship with the honeybees she keeps | Continue reading
The language of touch binds our minds and bodies to the broader social world. What happens when touch becomes taboo? | Continue reading
Vanessa and Virginia – intimates in art, adversaries in love. Can we ever transcend the primal envy of the sisterly bond? | Continue reading
War hero or entitled opportunist? An alternative history of Winston Churchill combines claymation and biting iconoclasm | Continue reading
Against the capitalist creeds of scarcity and self-interest, a plan for humanity’s shared flourishing is finally coming into view | Continue reading
How a friendship between a straight psychology professor and her gay student busted the myth of homosexuality as an illness | Continue reading
Cancer is part of multicellular life. Now the riotous growth of crested cacti show how humans might adapt to live with it | Continue reading
The Western canon has no shortage of fascists. But can the far-Right make ‘literature’ worthy of the name? | Continue reading
‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to make contact with another civilisation?’ Carl Sagan’s 1977 lecture on how to message aliens | Continue reading
‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to make contact with another civilisation?’ Carl Sagan’s 1977 lecture on how to message aliens | Continue reading
The Western canon has no shortage of fascists. But can the far-Right make ‘literature’ worthy of the name? | Continue reading
From book critiques to music choices, computation is changing aesthetics. Does increasingly average perfection lie ahead? | Continue reading
Hannah Arendt enjoyed her solitude, but she believed that loneliness could make people susceptible to totalitarianism | Continue reading
Psychological science can now measure and nurture wisdom, superseding the speculations of philosophy and religion | Continue reading
Born of a collaboration between people, time and microbes, fermentation is a spiritual matter for the food writer Sandor Katz | Continue reading
Psychological science can now measure and nurture wisdom, superseding the speculations of philosophy and religion | Continue reading
A cityscape built from colourful blocks of sound: see how a person with synaesthesia experiences John Coltrane’s music | Continue reading
Biology’s next great horizon is to understand cells, tissues and organisms as agents with agendas (even if unthinking ones) | Continue reading
A cityscape built from colourful blocks of sound: see how a person with synaesthesia experiences John Coltrane’s music | Continue reading
Biology’s next great horizon is to understand cells, tissues and organisms as agents with agendas (even if unthinking ones) | Continue reading
Once seen as the work of genius, how did creativity become an engine of economic growth and a corporate imperative? | Continue reading
Once seen as the work of genius, how did creativity become an engine of economic growth and a corporate imperative? | Continue reading
‘The Selfish Gene’ gets individualism and selfishness wrong: the philosopher Mary Midgley takes on Richard Dawkins | Continue reading
Once seen as the work of genius, how did creativity become an engine of economic growth and a corporate imperative? | Continue reading
The Ik – among the poorest people on Earth – have been cast as exemplars of human selfishness. The truth is much more startling | Continue reading
The fear of becoming a meal is a powerful evolutionary force that shapes brains, behaviour and entire ecosystems | Continue reading
Written while awaiting execution, the Consolation of Philosophy poses questions about human reason that remain urgent today | Continue reading
Written while awaiting execution, the Consolation of Philosophy poses questions about human reason that remain urgent today | Continue reading
How Andrew Wyeth envisioned a new American philosophy in his painting ‘Christina’s World’, channelling Thoreau and Emerson | Continue reading
The fear of becoming a meal is a powerful evolutionary force that shapes brains, behaviour and entire ecosystems | Continue reading
The antics in postwar Nordic children’s books left propaganda and prudery behind. We need this madcap spirit more than ever | Continue reading
A master animator evokes the sea-salty delights of a daytrip to the beach using only found objects and ocean sounds | Continue reading
The antics in postwar Nordic children’s books left propaganda and prudery behind. We need this madcap spirit more than ever | Continue reading
The Ik – among the poorest people on Earth – have been cast as exemplars of human selfishness. The truth is much more startling | Continue reading
A staircase, two strangers and the surprising connection that forms as they climb up the steep, sleepy streets of Lisbon | Continue reading
The Ik – the poorest people on Earth – have been cast as exemplars of human selfishness. The truth is much more startling | Continue reading
Spinoza helps diagnose the bad ideas and sad passions that preclude us from a finer relationship with the natural world | Continue reading
It’s not just that Hegel and Rousseau were racists. Racism was baked into the very structure of their dialectical philosophy | Continue reading