It seems indisputable that there are holes. For example, there are keyholes, black holes and sinkholes; and there are holes in things such as sieves, golf courses and doughnuts. We come into the world through holes, and when we die man... | Continue reading
The filmmaker Wes Hurley was born Vasili Naumenko in Vladivostok in the USSR, and affectionately called Little Potato by his mother Elena. His was a childhood of trauma and uncertainty: his father was violent; his emerging sexuality was forbidden; and his country was cracking apa … | Continue reading
More than a century of death notices have not diminished the achievements and the necessity of liberalism | Continue reading
Many societies suffer from the notion that women are less intelligent and capable than men. Even in more economically developed countries, where women have in the past two centuries won a variety of political and economic rights, prejudice agai... | Continue reading
The glass of orange juice at the breakfast table tells a tale about what’s natural, what’s whole and what’s healthy for us | Continue reading
Intrigued by the buzz around medical fasting, I tried it. A rollercoaster of boredom and energy ensued | Continue reading
Nyepi is an annual ‘Day of Silence’ on the Indonesian island of Bali. A time for quiet self-reflection, the widely observed Hindu tradition brings the region to a standstill as residents fast and meditate inside their homes for 24 hours. On the eve of the Nyepi, however, streets … | Continue reading
When I was at elementary school, my teacher told me that matter exists in three possible states: solid, liquid and gas. She neglected to mention plasma, a special kind of electrified gas that’s a state unto itself. We rarely encounter natural p... | Continue reading
The free-market arguments won’t wash: prostitution trades on the lives of the poor and marginalised – just like slavery | Continue reading
The Linsenmaier Chrysididae collection at the Natur-Museum Luzern in Switzerland features some 250,000 insect species – a small slice of the roughly 10 million species that scientists believe currently exist across the planet. In While Darwin Sleeps... what begins as a droning to … | Continue reading
What is the best way to help people who have dementia? Many interventions are aimed at enabling them to retain self-defining memories and beliefs. In reminiscence therapy, they... | Continue reading
What is meant by the philosophy of Mexicanness? An introduction to the ideas of Emilio Uranga | Continue reading
The United States faces an infrastructure crisis. Report after report warns that the nation’s networks are old, brittle and vulnerable. Systems that were once the envy of the world now suff... | Continue reading
Philosophers love to hate Ayn Rand. It’s trendy to scoff at any mention of her. One philosopher told me that: ‘No one needs to be exposed to that monster.’ Many propose that she’s not a philosopher at all and should not be taken seriously. The ... | Continue reading
The Chinese-born, Chicago-based artist Yuge Zhou’s series The Humors sets out to explore ‘urban behaviours and relationships, those of people and of the built environment itself’. In this instalment, Zhou presents a collage of overhead scenes of recreation and relaxation from Oak … | Continue reading
Philosophers love to hate Ayn Rand. It’s trendy to scoff at any mention of her. One philosopher told me that: ‘No one needs to be exposed to that monster.’ Many propose that she’s not a philosopher at all and should not be taken seriously. The ... | Continue reading
Individuals living with depersonalisation disorder bring vivid insight to the question of whether the self is an illusion | Continue reading
The ideal of religious tolerance has crippling flaws. It’s time to embrace a civic philosophy of reciprocity | Continue reading
In 1905, the young Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung received a collection of essays from none other than the founder of psychoanalysis himself, Sigmund Freud. When the two met in person a year later in Vienna, their first conversation lasted more than 13 hours, according to Jung's ac … | Continue reading
Individuals living with depersonalisation disorder bring vivid insight to the question of whether the self is an illusion | Continue reading
Protests are a time-honoured tradition on college campuses – memorably exemplified by the protests of 1968 by the grandparents of the current generation of students. They reflect the passionate energies of students discovering their own priorit... | Continue reading
The ideal of religious tolerance has crippling flaws. It’s time to embrace a civic philosophy of reciprocity | Continue reading
Protests are a time-honoured tradition on college campuses – memorably exemplified by the protests of 1968 by the grandparents of the current generation of students. They reflect the passionate energies of students discovering their own priorit... | Continue reading
After the success of the Standard Model, experiments have stopped answering to grand theories. Is particle physics in crisis? | Continue reading
Lampyridae, commonly known as fireflies, are a family of some 2,100 distinct types of insects known for their blinking bioluminescence at twilight. Most of the time, their lights are displayed to find mates. However, firefly love can quickly become a battlefield if a female of th … | Continue reading
After the success of the Standard Model, experiments have stopped answering to grand theories. Is particle physics in crisis? | Continue reading
I was shaken and transfixed in the aftermath of the shootings at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Like most of those in the United States, prevention was on my mind. According to partial psychiatric records obtaine... | Continue reading
The late US filmmaker DeWitt Beall was a prolific chronicler of Chicago during the tumultuous 1960s and early '70s, amid the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and the rise of street gangs. His documentary Lord Thing (1970), which screened at the prestigious Venice and Canne … | Continue reading
Individual transgender lives track a wider cultural history of surgery, hormones and revolutionised gender identities | Continue reading
In 1928 Jacob Levy Moreno, a Vienna-trained psychiatrist who had recently emigrated to New York, developed an innovative way of identifying ‘at risk’ children. He analysed social patterns at the State Training School for Girls and the Riverdale... | Continue reading
At least one in three Europeans and untold millions in Asia died. What was the source of this brutal, lethal efficiency? | Continue reading
‘Sometimes life forces you to do some things...’For Raïmberdi Mamatumarov, life in Tajikistan has meant ceaselessly adapting to new realities and overcoming challenge after challenge. After a nomadic life during his younger years, Mamatumarov witnessed the modernisation of his sm … | Continue reading
‘For all of the stories of those who rose above it, who fought it and reclaimed their lives, there are stories of those who are broken.’In Nach Am Leben (I'm Still Alive), the Australian animator and illustrator Anita Lester reflects on the harrowing and tragic life of her late g … | Continue reading
If you watch kids at a local playground, sooner or later one of them will run around and fall face-first to the ground. For a moment, there’s likely to be silence. Then the child will look around, catch a glimpse of their parent, and fina... | Continue reading
Imperial Chinese conscription shows how ordinary people exercise influential political skills, even in a repressive state | Continue reading
‘Sometimes life forces you to do some things...’For Raïmberdi Mamatumarov, life in Tajikistan has meant ceaselessly adapting to new realities and overcoming challenge after challenge. After a nomadic life during his younger years, Mamatumarov witnessed the modernisation of his sm … | Continue reading
Throughout history, people found truth at holy places. Now we build courts, labs and altars to be truth spots too | Continue reading
The Inka Empire (1400-1532 CE) is one of few ancient civilisations that speaks to us in multiple dimensions. Instead of words or pictograms, the Inkas used khipus – knotted string devices – to communicate extraordinarily complex mathem... | Continue reading
The solider in battle is confronted with agonising, even impossible, ethical decisions. Could studying philosophy help? | Continue reading
My son Aaron, aged nine, has Down syndrome. If you look at photos of our family, his disability might not be readily apparent. He wears glasses, and he likes to pull his baseball cap down low over his forehead, which makes the characteristic al... | Continue reading
Psychologists and philosophers – not to mention pet owners – have long wondered whether we can ever get past the constraints of the human mind to truly know what it’s like to be another animal. The US neuroscientist Gregory Berns, however, believes that the problem of animal cons … | Continue reading
Max Weber’s famous text The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is surely one of the most misunderstood of all the canonical works regularly taught, mangled and revered in universities across the globe. This is not to ... | Continue reading
In Indonesia, high ritual power is held by those whose identity goes beyond female and male. The West is just catching up | Continue reading
In Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) we learn that Sherlock Holmes used the most effective memory system known: a memory palace. Although imagined memory palaces are still used by memory champions and the f... | Continue reading
The small city of Ypres, located in the west of Belgium, played a pivotal role in the First World War, and has since become widely associated with the destruction and immense suffering caused by the conflict. With much of the the rest of the country overrun by German soldiers, Yp … | Continue reading
On Paul Gauguin, authenticity and the midlife crisis: how the philosopher Bernard Williams dramatised moral luck | Continue reading
My son Aaron, aged nine, has Down syndrome. If you look at photos of our family, his disability might not be readily apparent. He wears glasses, and he likes to pull his baseball cap down low over his forehead, which makes the characteristic al... | Continue reading
In 1826, at the age of 20, John Stuart Mill sank into a suicidal depression, which was bitterly ironic, because his entire upbringing was governed by the maximisation of happiness. How this philosopher clambered out of the despair generated by ... | Continue reading