John Locke took part in administering the slave-owning colonies. Does that make him, and liberalism itself, hypocritical? | Continue reading
How industrialisation and individualism corroded social and communal ties, leading to a new language of loneliness | Continue reading
Fake miniatures depicting Islamic science have found their way into the most august of libraries and history books. How? | Continue reading
In Orgesticulanismus, the Belgian animator Mathieu Labaye pays tribute to his late father Benoît Labaye, who had limited mobility due to multiple sclerosis before he died in 2006. What starts out quietly, with a recording of Benoît’s personal manifesto on the intersection of move … | Continue reading
We are neither angels above bodily pleasures nor beasts slavishly following them, but bring body and soul to everything we do | Continue reading
Fake miniatures depicting Islamic science have found their way into the most august of libraries and history books. How? | Continue reading
Know thyself is not the only advice from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: also be noble, hope, and don’t look down on others | Continue reading
Sicily’s mafia sprang from the growing global market for lemons – a tale with sour parallels for consumers today | Continue reading
The Daytona Beach Drive-In Christian Church has been offering worshippers in Florida Sunday services in the convenience of their cars for more than 60 years. Operating much like a drive-in movie theatre, the congregation parks and tunes in on the radio for Bible readings and serm … | Continue reading
How an impossibly flat expanse of absofreakinglutely nothing inspires creativity and transformation at Burning Man | Continue reading
There are more microbial species on Earth than stars in the Universe: what can we learn from this incredible biodiversity? | Continue reading
The idea that millions of sperm are on an Olympian race to reach the egg is yet another male fantasy of human reproduction | Continue reading
Though it’s rather more ordinary than its Jack and the Beanstalk cousin, the kidney bean in this timelapse video puts on quite a performance as it sprouts, breaks through the soil’s surface and springs upward into a plant. Just as enchanting is its development below ground, where … | Continue reading
Know thyself is not the only advice from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: also be noble, hope, and don’t look down on others | Continue reading
In Lay Bare, the UK experimental filmmaker and animator Paul Bush assembles thousands of close-up photographs of some 500 people – young and old, from around the globe – into a transfixing stop-motion style animation, which he describes as ‘a composite portrait of humanity’. Each … | Continue reading
Say you could make a thousand digital replicas of yourself – should you? What happens when you want to get rid of them? | Continue reading
We know music is pleasurable, the question is why? Many answers have been proposed: perhaps none are quite right | Continue reading
If other humans are beyond our comprehension, what hope is there for understanding the minds of animals, aliens or AI? | Continue reading
Sicily’s mafia sprang from the growing global market for lemons – a tale with sour parallels for consumers today | Continue reading
One emotion inspired our greatest achievements in science, art and religion. We can manipulate it – but why do we have it? | Continue reading
Are the mysteries of reality within the grasp of science? Or does a strictly empirical, Western materialist approach fail to properly consider the role of humans as observers? In this video from the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth (ICE), the US theoretica … | Continue reading
We know music is pleasurable, the question is why? Many answers have been proposed: perhaps none are quite right | Continue reading
Drugs quell pain, boost focus, and enable euphoria, but they also occlude agency and compromise self-development | Continue reading
Since Instagram launched in 2010, its visual filters have allowed users to alter scenes from their everyday lives with increasing sophistication and processing power. For his short video Outside, the Russian graphic illustrator and motion designer Vladimir Tomin was inspired by I … | Continue reading
The fantasy of living forever is just a fig leaf for the fear of death – and comes at great personal cost | Continue reading
Twin sisters Wei and Yan and their younger brother Won are left on their own when their father is imprisoned for manslaughter. Like other children from poor families in China whose parents have ended up in prison or executed, the Zhang siblings face a bleak future. The children o … | Continue reading
Want to build an elevator into space? Look to the bounty of biological life for tips on mechanical engineering | Continue reading
The idea that nature is a humming, complex, clockwork machine has been around for centuries. Is it due for a revival? | Continue reading
Wittgenstein analysed the way we use language. Marcuse declared his work politically irrelevant. Is it? | Continue reading
Too many depictions of autistic people rely on tired clichés. The neurotypical world needs to take note of our own voices | Continue reading
Want to build an elevator into space? Look to the bounty of biological life for tips on mechanical engineering | Continue reading
Environmental scientists say the Earth is near its human carrying-capacity limit. But is there still room for optimism? | Continue reading
The idea that millions of sperm are on an Olympian race to reach the egg is yet another male fantasy of human reproduction | Continue reading
Change the world, not yourself: or what Henry David Thoreau got wrong about civil disobedience (and Hannah Arendt got right) | Continue reading
Too many depictions of autistic people rely on tired clichés. The neurotypical world needs to take note of our own voices | Continue reading
It takes a lifetime of preparation to grieve as the Stoics did – without weeping and wailing, but with a heart full of love | Continue reading
It takes a lifetime of preparation to grieve as the Stoics did – without weeping and wailing, but with a heart full of love | Continue reading
All the big questions about our world that can be answered at all can be answered by science | Continue reading
The ethical formation of citizens was once at the heart of the US elite college. Has this moral purpose gone altogether? | Continue reading
As the Bard said: to thine own self be true. But how, or more accurately when, do we get a real sense of authenticity? | Continue reading
The idea that nature is a humming, complex, clockwork machine has been around for centuries. Is it due for a revival? | Continue reading
Why you shouldn’t feel bad about feeling sad, or how experiencing negative feelings can promote psychological wellbeing | Continue reading
Life is always more than the living: so if we could make life in a lab, would it change our understanding of it? | Continue reading
Geometry is perhaps the most obviously aesthetic branch of mathematics, and marvellously suited to visual play – a property that the German animator Henning M Lederer explores to great effect in this short video. Inspired by the blog Geometry Daily, in which the German graphic de … | Continue reading
Life is always more than the living: so if we could make life in a lab, would it change our understanding of it? | Continue reading
This instalment of the People in Order series, by the UK directors Lenka Clayton and James Price, presents 73 homes arranged in descending order of household income, from £400,000 to £3,240 (or roughly US $733,945 to $5,945 at the rate of exchange in 2006). As the fascinating seq … | Continue reading
The ethical formation of citizens was once at the heart of the US elite college. Has this moral purpose gone altogether? | Continue reading
Just as the groundwork for the internet was laid decades before its widespread use, many scientists believe the technologies that will usher in the era of human customisation and augmentation are being developed in labs today. Moving far beyond the prevention of genetic illness a … | Continue reading