We keep chasing happiness, but true clarity comes from depression and existential angst. Admit that life is hell, and be free | Continue reading
The Canadian author, artist and naturalist Bill Mason (1929-1988) was celebrated for his films exploring his country’s vast wilderness. Perhaps his best-known work is a trio of films about wolves – Death of a Legend (1971), Cry of the Wild (1972) and Wolf Pack (1974) – aimed at e … | Continue reading
We keep chasing happiness, but true clarity comes from depression and existential angst. Admit that life is hell, and be free | Continue reading
In polyphonic overtone singing, vocalists manipulate their tongue, mouth and throat to produce two tones at once. While the technique has emerged in disparate societies, it is thought to have originated in (and is most commonly associated with) Mongolian culture. For this video, … | Continue reading
It seemed Darwin had banished biological essences – yet evolution would fail without nature’s library of Platonic forms | Continue reading
Philosophy will thrive if we model debate on the playful exchanges of friends, not the adversarial arguments of a tribunal | Continue reading
Jesuits knew the miserable truth of European empire in India and Brazil, yet their writings rendered it grandiose and sacred | Continue reading
On the inner life of molecules and electrons: or why panpsychism is highly likely to be true, even if it sounds crazy | Continue reading
The US artist Ed Ruscha has created a celebrated body of work inspired by the iconic seediness of Los Angeles – its cars, billboards, gas stations and low-slung houses all strung out in a seemingly endless sprawl. This short film combines photos from the Getty Research Institutes … | Continue reading
Are we part of a dying reality or a blip in eternity? The value of the Hubble Constant could tell us which terror awaits | Continue reading
Against absolutist thinking: to navigate life, we must appreciate nuance, understand complexity and embrace flexibility | Continue reading
It’s no secret that the biggest gains in the growing global economy are reaped by the extremely wealthy. And from philanthropy to tech initiatives, plenty of the world's billionaires claim to have solutions to combat the escalating inequality. But while members of the winning cla … | Continue reading
The challenge of chess – learning how to hold complexity in mind and still make good decisions – is also the challenge of life | Continue reading
Ghostly hallucinations and other unusual experiences can be therapeutic – we should be careful not to overpathologise them | Continue reading
History is full of sorrowful knights, sobbing monks and weeping lovers – what happened to the noble art of the manly cry? | Continue reading
A man gets off a boat, walks into a restaurant, orders albatross soup, takes one bite, and pulls out a gun and kills himself. Why did he do it? The classic riddle (from the family of lateral thinking puzzles) gets a trippy animated adaptation in this inventive and darkly delightf … | Continue reading
Flying reindeer? Gifts delivered by a jolly, all-seeing man via chimney? Was someone tripping on mushrooms when they thought up Santa Claus? Well... maybe. As is usually the case with myths, Santa’s origins are hard to pin down. However, researchers such as Carl Ruck, a classicis … | Continue reading
In 1965 at the University of Cambridge, two of the foremost American intellectuals were challenged with the question: ‘Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?’ From William F Buckley’s highly stylised posturing and pointing, to James Baldwin’s m … | Continue reading
Consciousness is neither a spooky mystery nor an illusory belief. It’s a valid and causally efficacious biological reality | Continue reading
Does moral grandstanding do any good? Or are we simply trying to convince others that we ourselves are the good ones? | Continue reading
You know that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you see a cute kitten or join a demo? Well, now it has a name: kama muta | Continue reading
You know that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you see a cute kitten or join a demo? Well, now it has a name: kama muta | Continue reading
History shows that tumult is a companion to democracy and when ordinary politics fails, the people must take to the streets | Continue reading
Consciousness is the ‘hard problem’, the one that confounds science and philosophy. Has a new theory cracked it? | Continue reading
Today, the philosophical treatise known as the Ethics (1677) by Baruch Spinoza is widely considered a masterwork of philosophy. But at the time of its publication, Spinoza's radical vision of God as synonymous with nature was enough for the Portuguese-Jewish congregation of Amste … | Continue reading
Personality traits such as patience and risk-aversion are not innate but a product of the type of society you’re born into | Continue reading
‘There are many ways of being wounded, yet many ways of being cured.’The documentary The Lady and the Owl (1975) highlights the work of Kay and Larry McKeever, a retired Canadian couple who dedicated themselves to caring for orphaned, injured and starving owls. From their home in … | Continue reading
Why therapy works is still up for debate. But, when it does, its methods mimic the attachment dynamics of good parenting | Continue reading
When we strip away the myths, such as his princely youth in a palace, a surprising picture of this enigmatic sage emerges | Continue reading
Artificial-womb technology promises to free women from childbearing. But does that necessarily help the feminist cause? | Continue reading
Jürgen Habermas offers a framework for action on climate change – justice and deliberation are as important as the science | Continue reading
In polyphonic overtone singing, vocalists manipulate their tongue, mouth and throat to produce two tones at once. While the technique has emerged in disparate societies, it is thought to have originated in (and is most commonly associated with) Mongolian culture. For this video, … | Continue reading
When we strip away the myths, such as his princely youth in a palace, a surprising picture of this enigmatic sage emerges | Continue reading
Flying reindeer? Gifts delivered by a jolly, all-seeing man via chimney? Was someone tripping on mushrooms when they thought up Santa Claus? Well... maybe. As is usually the case with myths, Santa’s origins are hard to pin down. However, researchers such as Carl Ruck, a classicis … | Continue reading
Consciousness is neither a spooky mystery nor an illusory belief. It’s a valid and causally efficacious biological reality | Continue reading
True modesty is not to be timid or meek but a way of being in the world that means you don’t get in the way of your life | Continue reading
Our evolution as social animals has equipped most of us with an acute ability to read and recognise human faces. However, people with prosopagnosia, commonly called ‘face blindness’, have difficulty distinguishing one face from another. Because the disorder isn't widely known, pe … | Continue reading
How past, present and future collide in a flowerbed, enticing gardeners to lose themselves in the pleasures of ‘flow’ | Continue reading
A year after reaching the legal drinking age, and before transitioning to female later on, the Canadian writer and filmmaker Vivek Shraya summoned the courage to enter the Roost, the most popular gay bar in her hometown of Edmonton. But while she found excitement within the Roost … | Continue reading
Ancient Athenian and Greek practices afford us insights into how and why to maintain real accountability in public life | Continue reading
One can only imagine how much nobler and more decent the world might be if it took more notice of Isaiah Berlin | Continue reading
True modesty is not to be timid or meek but a way of being in the world that means you don’t get in the way of your life | Continue reading
Cracking a political joke could land a person in the Gulag – but it could also make life under Stalin more bearable | Continue reading
One can only imagine how much nobler and more decent the world might be if it took more notice of Isaiah Berlin | Continue reading
There are two ways of seeing order in the world: as a spontaneous system or as an intentional project. Which way lies freedom? | Continue reading
‘To be men, they have to learn to silence women. I don't think we've entirely got over that.’From philosophy and politics to literature and art, the Western world has inherited much from Ancient Greece. But one disturbing cultural legacy is the enduring view of women as lesser be … | Continue reading
There are two ways of seeing order in the world: as a spontaneous system or as an intentional project. Which way lies freedom? | Continue reading
The world’s last climate crisis demonstrates that surviving is possible if bold economic and social change is embraced | Continue reading