The Lakota, like other groups, see themselves as a sovereign people. Can Indigenous sovereignty survive colonisation? | Continue reading
Growing up can be toxic for autistic people forced to conform to social norms or risk trauma. This is one woman’s journey | Continue reading
If there’s one political idea most of us can agree on, it’s that we’re currently living through an age of immense ideological polarisation. Inspired by the hyperpartisan political climate in the US, the experimental social psychologist Peter Ditto at the University of California, … | Continue reading
How a chimpanzee named Clint trained a psychologist to question human exceptionalism and reconsider the intelligence of apes | Continue reading
Dreams of Dalí is an interactive 360° video. As it plays, click and drag your cursor on the video player to explore the scene. For the an optimal viewing experience, maximise the YouTube player to full screen, and set on the highest quality setting.Salvador Dalí’s painting Archeo … | Continue reading
Living with chronic illness is hard. But there are psychological techniques which make it possible to thrive even when ill | Continue reading
Small businesses enjoy an iconic status in modern capitalism, but what do they really contribute to the economy? | Continue reading
Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation is many things – revolutionary, elegant, mysterious – but, as it turns out, one thing we know for sure is that it’s not, well, universal. On the scale of our solar system, Newton’s observation – that objects attract one another with a f … | Continue reading
Look up, go outside, see what lies beyond: an ethic of wonder made Rachel Carson a philosopher as well as an environmentalist | Continue reading
Phenomenal consciousness is a fiction written by our brains to help us track the impact that the world makes on us | Continue reading
Alien lifeforms might be living right under our noses, but how can we find them if we don’t know what we’re looking for? | Continue reading
Phenomenal consciousness is a fiction written by our brains to help us track the impact that the world makes on us | Continue reading
Expensive celebrity mementos have an established historical precedent: throughout time, holy relics put heaven within reach | Continue reading
For decades, the idea of a language instinct has dominated linguistics. It is simple, powerful and completely wrong | Continue reading
Is a good philosopher also necessarily a good writer? Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre were both, each receiving a Nobel Prize in Literature. Other great thinkers, however, haven't impressed as much when it comes to the written word. Aristotle and Kant, two of the greatest p … | Continue reading
Good nurses are attuned to the lived experience of patients. Can the theory of phenomenology add more to their practice? | Continue reading
What happens if you stick your head in a particle accelerator? The Russian scientist Anatoli Bugorski did – and survived | Continue reading
Beautiful spies; cold femmes fatales; stooped babushkas: Western stereotypes of Russian women say more about the West than they do about anything else. But how do real Russian women view love? Against the backdrop of a harsh winter, this short documentary by the Indian director S … | Continue reading
If we took Aristotle seriously we would revolutionise our educational systems to enable citizens to learn throughout life | Continue reading
Economies are made up of people and politics, not immutable laws: economists should get over their physics envy | Continue reading
Being the same person over time is not about holding on to every aspect of your current self but about changing purposefully | Continue reading
In 1981, Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, set out to study the ancient meditation practices of Buddhist monks on the Tibetan Plateau. With the Dalai Lama’s blessing, Benson spent roughly a decade in remote regions of the Himalayas in northern India resear … | Continue reading
Independent, successful and hardworking – what’s not to like about the ‘strong woman’? Plenty, argued Simone de Beauvoir | 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
Independent, successful and hardworking – what’s not to like about the ‘strong woman’? Plenty, argued Simone de Beauvoir | Continue reading
Chris ‘Scarface’ Wilmore has spent much of his life in Virginia facing violence and jail time. Despite an early opiate addiction and running with gangs, he's made it to 40 years old. Many others haven’t been so lucky, getting caught up in small disputes that turned deadly. Hoping … | Continue reading
Modern zoos are proud of their contribution to animal conservation but will always be haunted by their cruel histories | Continue reading
Psychedelics offer a sense of expansive connectedness, just like astronauts have felt looking back to Earth from space | Continue reading
When Europeans colonised North Africa, they imposed their preoccupation with race onto its diverse peoples and deep past | Continue reading
The oldest spinning top ever discovered dates back some 5,500 years, meaning that we’ve been entranced by these toys for nearly as long as human civilisation has existed. And if there’s any doubt about the contemporary appeal of all things centrifugal, look no further than the re … | Continue reading
Psychedelics offer a sense of expansive connectedness, just like astronauts have felt looking back to Earth from space | Continue reading
Honouring the wishes of the dead to the letter can lead to serious economic injustice for the living | Continue reading
The ctenophore’s brain suggests that, if evolution began again, intelligence would re-emerge because nature repeats itself | Continue reading
A single statistic, or its misuse, can help upend a nation. Civic life depends on a basic level of statistical literacy | Continue reading
In 1981, Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, set out to study the ancient meditation practices of Buddhist monks on the Tibetan Plateau. With the Dalai Lama’s blessing, Benson spent roughly a decade in remote regions of the Himalayas in northern India resear … | Continue reading
A single statistic, or its misuse, can help upend a nation. Civic life depends on a basic level of statistical literacy | Continue reading
Consciousness is the greatest mystery in science. Don’t believe the hype: the Hard Problem is here to stay | Continue reading
We need a far richer appreciation of the kinds of creative thinking that inspire scientific practice | Continue reading
Most adults seem to agree that the older you get, the quicker time flies by. This feeling might, on its surface, seem like one of life’s more enigmatic qualities. But according to the US neuroscientist David Eagleman, there’s actually a pretty straightforward scientific explanati … | Continue reading
We need a far richer appreciation of the kinds of creative thinking that inspire scientific practice | Continue reading
The Classical world abounded with avians – and so birds took up in the human imagination, nesting in our language and art | Continue reading
In 2004, the European Space Agency (ESA) sent the Rosetta space probe to explore the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, located beyond the asteroid belt, more than five times the Earth’s distance from the Sun. In 2014, the orbiter finally reached the comet, and a lander touched down on … | Continue reading
The movement has good intentions, but it favours the high-functioning and overlooks those who struggle with severe autism | Continue reading
Hugh Everett blew up quantum mechanics with his Many-Worlds theory in the 1950s. Physics is only just catching up | Continue reading
Hugh Everett blew up quantum mechanics with his Many-Worlds theory in the 1950s. Physics is only just catching up | Continue reading
Words stand for things in the world, and they stand apart from it. Perhaps meaning is more sunken into words than we realise? | Continue reading
When clocks and calendars serve state ideology, we lose the poetics and significance of percolating, local timekeeping | Continue reading
In 1933, the US country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers died of tuberculosis. Just 35 years old and at the peak of his career, his demise left a legacy of a life and career unfinished. This instalment from the US animator Drew Christie’s Drawn & Recorded series, which tells litt … | Continue reading