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
Hume believed we were nothing more or less than human: that’s why he’s the amiable, modest, generous philosopher we need now | Continue reading
Is it ever worth making someone feel bad in order to push them towards success? If so, what’s the cost of this strategy? | Continue reading
The music of Ancient Greece is no longer a mystery; recreating their songs reveals the roots of the Western tradition | Continue reading
Hume believed we were nothing more or less than human: that’s why he’s the amiable, modest, generous philosopher we need now | Continue reading
Is it ever worth making someone feel bad in order to push them towards success? If so, what’s the cost of this strategy? | Continue reading
For big pharma, the perfect patient is wealthy, permanently ill and a daily pill-popper. Will medicine ever recover? | Continue reading
Optimists believe in good luck, pessimists in bad. But if it’s all a matter of perspective, does luck even exist? | Continue reading
What stands in the way of all-powerful AI isn’t a lack of smarts: it’s that computers can’t have needs, cravings or desires | Continue reading
The Georgia Archives building, also known as the ‘White Ice Cube’ for its pale hue, windowless facade and modernist shape, was a prominent feature of Atlanta's cityscape before the building's controlled implosion in March 2017. Standing beside the State Capitol since 1965, it sto … | Continue reading
Optimists believe in good luck, pessimists in bad. But if it’s all a matter of perspective, does luck even exist? | Continue reading
Is religion a common feature of every human culture, or an academic invention? On the radical divinity scholar J Z Smith | 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
What stands in the way of all-powerful AI isn’t a lack of smarts: it’s that computers can’t have needs, cravings or desires | Continue reading
Why you shouldn’t feel bad about feeling sad, or how experiencing negative feelings can promote psychological wellbeing | Continue reading
A staple of American cinema since the release of the silent film The Great Train Robbery in 1903, the Western arguably became its defining genre with the release of Stagecoach in 1939 – the first of nine Western collaborations between the iconic duo of director John Ford and acto … | Continue reading
We have an ethical obligation to relieve individual animal suffering, just as we do with individual human suffering | Continue reading
It began as a whim: talk to a physicist, $50 per 20 minutes. But those ‘crackpots’ taught me something about my subject | Continue reading
Note: English subtitles for this video are available by clicking the ‘CC’ button on the bottom right of the video player.As the Second World War fades further into the past, the passage of time can make firsthand accounts told by its survivors and participants feel less like thei … | Continue reading