Fake it till you make it? Acting like an extravert for a week makes most people feel happier – unless you’re an introvert | Continue reading
Fake it till you make it? Acting like an extravert for a week makes most people feel happier – unless you’re an introvert | Continue reading
Monsters once inhabited the mysterious fringes of the known world. In our human-dominated present, can they still be found? | Continue reading
In today’s world, web developers have it all: money, perks, freedom, respect. But is there value in what we do? | Continue reading
Here on Earth, volcanoes have a reputation for creation and destruction, regularly spewing out our planet’s molten innards as a consequence of plate tectonics. Nearby in the solar system, however, volcanism seems to have gone extinct, leaving behind the Moon's darkened, basaltic … | Continue reading
Without their own state, Jews’ identity was not a Judaism of the heavens or the heart but structured around the Jewish body | Continue reading
A world segregated into male and female categories feels suffocating. Nonbinary identity is a radical escape hatch | Continue reading
A New Cretaceous is not the new normal: the Holocene was a gift that humanity took for granted and is now helping to bury | Continue reading
‘Maybe next year we’ll have less stories to tell.’Pumpkin Movie opens with the Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari, blue-lit in front of her laptop, in a shadowy room festooned with Halloween lights and a black-and-white horror film on TV. This mix of the mundane and the eerie is th … | Continue reading
A New Cretaceous is not the new normal: the Holocene was a gift that humanity took for granted and is now helping to bury | Continue reading
The British honours system has outlived the Empire it was designed to foster. Does it have a role in the world today? | Continue reading
City life is a constant, maddening hum. Only in a place like the Sahara can we hear the nothingness that revives | Continue reading
During the Second World War, the Soviet Air Force initially barred women from serving in combat. That was until October 1941 when the pilot Marina Raskova personally convinced Joseph Stalin to deploy the world's first all-female air force units to fight against Axis powers. Prima … | Continue reading
Virtual reality is not a modern-day empathy machine – and this is why it’s dangerous to think otherwise | Continue reading
Elephants might have the necessary capacities for personhood – we just need to help them acquire the cognitive scaffolding | Continue reading
The discovery of quantum mechanics at the start of the 20th century shook the very foundations of physics, forcing scientists and philosophers to reexamine everything from particles upward. But as this short animation from MinutePhysics explains, the quantum revolution was jumpst … | Continue reading
Estranged but not alienated, devout but not obedient, philosophical but not a systematiser, Simone Weil defies conventions | Continue reading
Living with hallucinations is a mental-health challenge – but it also offers valuable possibilities for positive growth | Continue reading
Elephants might have the necessary capacities for personhood – we just need to help them acquire the cognitive scaffolding | Continue reading
The French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) was at the height of her influence after she published her landmark feminist treatise The Second Sex (1949) and her acclaimed novel The Mandarins (1954). In the wake of the the Second World War, alongside Albert Camus … | Continue reading
What the archives of mental-health asylums reveal about the history of human heredity and the evolution of genetics | Continue reading
After his father died in 2011, Jay Wilde inherited his family’s small beef farm in the English county of Derbyshire, and quickly found himself in an excruciatingly difficult position. A vegetarian for more than 25 years, his deep concern for animals only increased as he spent end … | Continue reading
There’s no such thing as hard or easy sciences – only hard or easy questions. How what we ask limits our understanding | Continue reading
Confused, inferior and philosophically unsound: the Greco-Roman critique of the Old Testament could have been written today | Continue reading
After the global financial crisis, CEOs should have been seen as the fall guys. So why do we still revere them as heroes? | Continue reading
In the early 20th century, Newtonian physics was upended by experiments that revealed a bizarre subatomic universe riddled with peculiarities and inconsistencies. Why do photons and electrons behave as both particles and waves? Why should the act of observation affect the behavio … | Continue reading
After the global financial crisis, CEOs should have been seen as the fall guys. So why do we still revere them as heroes? | Continue reading
The question of whether time moves in a loop or a line has occupied human minds for millenia. Has physics found the answer? | Continue reading
The question of whether time moves in a loop or a line has occupied human minds for millenia. Has physics found the answer? | Continue reading
Artistic success takes a mysterious mix of talent, luck and timing. But could algorithms now predict and produce the hits? | Continue reading
When anticipation is half the fun: how schizophrenia can help us better understand the temporal experience of pleasure | Continue reading
Quarrels over honour in duelling cultures can enlighten us today and demonstrate why some insults are intolerable | Continue reading
The pragmatist philosopher William James had a crisp and consistent response when asked if life was worth living: maybe | Continue reading
In the dance between siblings, competition can drive enmity; when our competitor is more distant, goodwill has a chance | Continue reading
The Yiwu International Trade City in China is the world’s largest wholesale market for consumer goods, stretching some five miles and featuring roughly 75,000 vendors. The Chinese-American filmmaker Jessica Kingdon’s observational documentary Commodity City employs static shots o … | Continue reading
In the dance between siblings, competition can drive enmity; when our competitor is more distant, goodwill has a chance | Continue reading
Artistic success takes a mysterious mix of talent, luck and timing. But could algorithms now predict and produce the hits? | Continue reading
Since the early 20th century, a number of curious (and sometimes ethically dubious) psychological studies have tried to figure out if we can communicate with great apes using language. In the 1970s, the answer was reported to be an unequivocal ‘yes’ after Koko, a female western l … | Continue reading
Disagreeing about simple facts is one thing. But deep disagreements have social identity at stake: there’s no middle ground | Continue reading
From the foreskin of Jesus to the scarf of Elvis: why humans cannot resist the magical potency of charismatic objects | Continue reading
With a flood of dark memes and viral horror stories, the internet is mapping the contours of modern fear | Continue reading
Drunk on genocide: among the Nazi death squads alcohol was a reward for murder and a lubricant for male bonding | Continue reading
Learning another language has pragmatic, cultural, and neurological benefits | Continue reading
Mathematical ideas are some of the most transformative and beautiful in history. So why do they get so little attention? | Continue reading
Mathematical ideas are some of the most transformative and beautiful in history. So why do they get so little attention? | Continue reading
After meeting a potential romantic partner – ‘the nicest guy in the world’– while on vacation, the Canadian filmmaker Andrea Dorfman had a difficult time reconciling everything she liked about him with her judgment of his work as a plastic surgeon. Although most of his work was r … | Continue reading
Mathematical ideas are some of the most transformative and beautiful in history. So why do they get so little attention? | Continue reading
Proof of life: what evidence would it take to convince you that alien intelligence had been found? | Continue reading