Centuries before Spinoza, there was Ḥiwi al-Balkhi, a Jewish freethinker for whom the Bible was too irrational for faith | Continue reading
In this interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the PBS series Closer to Truth, the UK philosopher, writer and retired neuroscientist Raymond Tallis offers his nuanced view of the extended mind thesis, proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998. Their paper ‘The Extended M … | Continue reading
As I near my 80th year, I have the meanings to my life, thanks to the combined powers that be of Darwin and Sartre | Continue reading
To answer whether the fundamental building blocks of reality are particles, fields or both means thinking beyond physics | Continue reading
Aki Sasamoto was feeling more out of control than usual, thanks to a kidney condition that prevented her from drinking and her unplanned pregnancy. The Japanese-born, New York-based artist embraced and channelled these feelings as best she knew how, meticulously crafting sculptur … | Continue reading
To answer whether the fundamental building blocks of reality are particles, fields or both means thinking beyond physics | Continue reading
Keynes was almost right about the 15-hour working week of the future: we could live as well even on half those hours | Continue reading
To embody a character, you have to lose yourself: how actors’ sense of self is changed profoundly by the roles they play | Continue reading
Keynes was almost right about the 15-hour working week of the future: we could live as well even on half those hours | Continue reading
Humans and chimps pass, elephants and dolphins apparently don’t. Is the mirror test a reliable mark of self-awareness? | Continue reading
Far from representing rationality and logic, capitalism is modernity’s most beguiling and dangerous form of enchantment | Continue reading
Ever since Albert Einstein supplanted the Newtonian model with his general theory of relativity in 1915, his revolutionary work has been the bedrock of modern physics. Some six decades after his death, many of his ideas, including gravitational waves and spacetime’s curvature bey … | Continue reading
Far from representing rationality and logic, capitalism is modernity’s most beguiling and dangerous form of enchantment | Continue reading
A large island nation off the eastern coast of Africa, Madagascar is at once resource rich, highly biodiverse and poverty stricken. It has more endemic species than the whole of Africa, but according to USAID, it is also 'the poorest non-conflict country on Earth, with 92 per cen … | Continue reading
To embody a character, you have to lose yourself: how actors’ sense of self is changed profoundly by the roles they play | Continue reading
A ragged curtain, a creaking attic, a dark cellar – what explains the architecture of creepiness, and its enduring appeal? | Continue reading
Our age reveres the specialist but humans are natural polymaths, at our best when we turn our minds to many things | Continue reading
The Laboratory for NeuroImaging of Coma and Consciousness (NICC) at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston studies the process of recovering consciousness after traumatic brain injuries. Using more than 100 hours of MRI scans of a human brain unaffected by neurological disease … | Continue reading
An ADHD diagnosis often means lifelong medication, even addiction. But there is another way: put that distraction to work | Continue reading
'You were too young to lose your mum. And we were too young to be organising a funeral.'When her friend's mother died, the UK filmmaker Alice Dunseath and her friend set out on an unplanned road trip through Yorkshire, mostly because they didn't know what else to do. The only des … | Continue reading
European colonisation put an abrupt end to political experiments towards a more equal, diverse and ecumenical Arab world | Continue reading
Our property signals who we are to others and reminds us who we are to ourselves: our things are part of our identity | Continue reading
What if, rather than mere props in the background of our lives, trees embody the history of all life on Earth? | Continue reading
Our property signals who we are to others and reminds us who we are to ourselves: our things are part of our identity | Continue reading
Visiting Wittgenstein’s home evokes the philosopher’s serious, ascetic mind (no doubt he would disapprove its restoration) | Continue reading
In August 2005, Alysia Burton Steele was just two months into her job as a photo editor on The Dallas Morning News when she decided to dispatch the photographer Irwin Thompson to New Orleans to document the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Her newspaper's bold journalistic work went … | Continue reading
Female friendship is central to much recent fiction and film. What can it say about the role of relationships in identity? | Continue reading
Over the past two decades or so, industries have sprung up to treat ‘addictions’ to everything from excessive eating or sex to video games. And colloquially, use of the word ‘addictive’ seems to have reached a peak, used in headlines and casual conversations to describe everythin … | Continue reading
There’s a paradox at the heart of laziness: it takes hard work to be idle – but the effort of doing nothing can pay off | Continue reading
'I dreamt I was the deafblind woman we visited ... And there was no information, nothing, just isolation.'Sensory experience, cultural differences and degrees of privilege collide in a meeting between two deafblind women: Dorte Eriksen from Denmark and Budhi Maya Gurung from Nepa … | Continue reading
There’s a paradox at the heart of laziness: it takes hard work to be idle – but the effort of doing nothing can pay off | Continue reading
The classic short film Powers of Ten (1977) propelled viewers on a journey from a Chicago park into deep space and then back down to the scale of a single proton. In The Super Zoom, the Brazil-based graphic designer Pedro Machado's visualisation dives even deeper into the realm o … | Continue reading
We need a radical new paradigm for thinking about blackness that recognises beauty’s potential to save lives | Continue reading
Older people face discrimination based on their chronological age. The solution seems obvious: allow legal-age change | Continue reading
Centuries before Spinoza, there was Ḥiwi al-Balkhi, a Jewish freethinker for whom the Bible was too irrational for faith | Continue reading
Older people face discrimination based on their chronological age. The solution seems obvious: allow legal-age change | Continue reading
Over the past two decades or so, industries have sprung up to treat ‘addictions’ to everything from excessive eating or sex to video games. And colloquially, use of the word ‘addictive’ seems to have reached a peak, used in headlines and casual conversations to describe everythin … | Continue reading
The sympathetic plot is a type of story, rich in tropes, which is universal to human cultures. With one, big, twist… | Continue reading
Theoretical physicists who say the multiverse exists set a dangerous precedent: science based on zero empirical evidence | Continue reading
In the early 1990s, ethnic tensions in the former Yugoslavia erupted into a series of wars across the Balkans. The 1,500-day Siege of Sarajevo was one of the conflicts’ most brutal episodes, as Serbian forces, supported by groups of ethnic Bosnian Serbs, attempted an ethnic clean … | Continue reading
We tend to favour our own, just like other primates do. Yet tolerance of outsiders has evolved into a human instinct too | Continue reading
Theoretical physicists who say the multiverse exists set a dangerous precedent: science based on zero empirical evidence | Continue reading
The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is an annual competition for the brainiest of high-school maths whizzes in the world. This animation from the US YouTuber Grant Sanderson, who creates maths videos under the moniker 3Blue1Brown, breaks down a question from the 2011 IM … | Continue reading
While you might fancy yourself far superior to the insects you inevitably crush underfoot, humans and ants have a humbling amount in common. Our similarities include complex societies, intricate divisions of labour, evolutionary success and a penchant for warfare. Indeed, when it … | Continue reading
Being ‘good’ need not take years of ethical analysis: just a few moments of gratitude can set you on the path to virtue | Continue reading
‘Yes, life will be richer, easier, healthier as space-age dreams come true.’In 1967, the Ford Motor Company (then known as Philco-Ford) released the short film 1999 AD, which imagined daily life for a US family in the not-so-distant future. Screened today, the film is a fascinati … | Continue reading
When you stare at your phone or use Uber to navigate your neighbourhood, you flatten the rich texture of urban life | Continue reading
The Lakota, like other groups, see themselves as a sovereign people. Can Indigenous sovereignty survive colonisation? | Continue reading