From scoreboards to trackers, games have infiltrated work, serving as spies, overseers and agents of social control | Continue reading
Proof of life: what evidence would it take to convince you that alien intelligence had been found? | Continue reading
From scoreboards to trackers, games have infiltrated work, serving as spies, overseers and agents of social control | Continue reading
Can we be held morally responsible for our actions? Yes, says Daniel Dennett. No, says Gregg Caruso. Reader, you decide | Continue reading
Your balcony fell off? Chabuduo. Vaccines are overheated? Chabuduo. How China became the land of disastrous corner-cutting | Continue reading
Like pseudoscience, pseudolaw presents a dangerous farrago of fact and fantasy, leading to bankruptcies and worse | Continue reading
The oil painting Militia Company of District II Under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (1642), better-known as The Night Watch, is probably Rembrandt’s most famous work. Its status and critical acclaim, though, have little to do with its subject matter: a civic-guard gr … | Continue reading
While evangelicals provided the votes, Catholics contributed the brains for the religious Right in the United States | Continue reading
What is the task of the translator – to be a servant to the source or to create a new work of illuminated meaning? | Continue reading
‘When you work with a horse, you are a herd of two.’Growing up in a small Swiss village, Caroline Wolfer found herself much more at ease around horses than people. Now working as a horse tamer in Patagonia, she has developed an understanding of horses based on what she describes … | Continue reading
How the Marxist ideas of a British historian ended up on the bookshelves of Indian civil servants and Brazilian housewives | Continue reading
Saudade: the untranslatable Portuguese word that names the presence of absence and takes melancholy delight in what’s gone | Continue reading
Coding is seen as fun and glamorous, but that’s a sales pitch. In reality, it’s complicated, both technically and ethically | Continue reading
Silk from orb-weaving spiders is versatile and valuable. But, unfortunately for us, spiders are territorial and cannibalistic, so farming them is out. However, the US molecular biologist Randy Lewis has spun a clever solution: genetically engineering goats to deliver the silky go … | Continue reading
Psychotherapy is not harmless: 100 therapists reveal that 43 per cent of clients have unwanted side effects from CBT | Continue reading
Orwell’s predicted it: citizens willingly buy for entertainment the very screens that can be used against us | Continue reading
Tech flourished in communist Bulgaria and so did a body of science fiction asking vital philosophical questions | Continue reading
‘More lands have been lost to Native peoples probably through mapping than through physical conflict.’Maps have been used not only to encroach on Native Americans lands, but to diminish their cultures as well. With every Spanish, French or English placename that eclipses a Native … | Continue reading
Can we be held morally responsible for our actions? Yes, says Daniel Dennett. No, says Gregg Caruso. Reader, you decide | Continue reading
‘Consolation philosophy’ understands the human being as a unity of feeling and reason, in a cosmos rich with primal emotion | Continue reading
Mary Shelley foresaw that artificial intelligence would be made monstrous, not by human hubris but by human cruelty | Continue reading
Interestingness, like pleasurableness, is not an objective feature of something but rather a feature of our experience of it | Continue reading
Mary Shelley foresaw that artificial intelligence would be made monstrous, not by human hubris but by human cruelty | Continue reading
How a sunbeam split in two became physics’ most elegant experiment, shedding light on the underlying nature of reality | Continue reading
The Austrian art historian Alois Riegl first discussed how past experience shapes our enjoyment of – contempt for, or boredom with – a work of art. In 1900, he introduced the idea, later called the ‘beholder’s share’, that a viewer brings personal meanings to a work, and this int … | Continue reading
A true definition of civilisation is about extended moral community, and has little to do with monuments and memorials | Continue reading
How a sunbeam split in two became physics’ most elegant experiment, shedding light on the underlying nature of reality | Continue reading
The DNA helix gave 20th-century biology its symbol. But the more we learn, the more life circles back to an older image | Continue reading
In this excerpt from the film Downside Up (1984) by the UK director Tony Hill, a camera orbits at 90 degrees over a country picnic, with the perspective eventually flipping upside down before disappearing into the ground. What follows is a merry-go-round of quotidian scenes – pig … | Continue reading
Why did the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church call the philosopher of nonreligious Christianity? | Continue reading
The pragmatist philosopher William James had a crisp and consistent response when asked if life was worth living: maybe | Continue reading
Students are frequently told to be passionate about schooling, but self-belief may be more important | Continue reading
Are you a multispecies mix of human and microbial bits – or is there a fuzzy boundary between you and your tiny companions? | Continue reading
Some 400 million years ago, humanity’s ancient sea-dwelling ancestors made a giant leap to land, sprouting weight-bearing fins that would eventually carry us out of the water forever. So what precipitated this evolutionarily pivotal change of terrain? According to recent research … | Continue reading
More like walking a tightrope than following a guide to etiquette: decorum is an unfashionable word with a radical core | Continue reading
Is it possible that, in the new millennium, the mathematical method is no longer fundamental to philosophy? | Continue reading
Created somewhere between the late-2nd and early 3rd century CE, the Mosaic of the Epiphany of Dionysus depicts the Greek god of wine, fertility, theatre and ecstasy in a striking scene amid panthers and centaurs. The portrait was discovered by archeologists in 1987 at the site o … | Continue reading
Created somewhere between the late-2nd and early 3rd century CE, the Mosaic of the Epiphany of Dionysus depicts the Greek god of wine, fertility, theatre and ecstasy in a striking scene amid panthers and centaurs. The portrait was discovered by archeologists in 1987 at the site o … | Continue reading
‘Consolation philosophy’ understands the human being as a unity of feeling and reason, in a cosmos rich with primal emotion | Continue reading
It’s one of the most successful, and in some ways unlikely, interfaith movements in the modern world | Continue reading
Are you a multispecies mix of human and microbial bits – or is there a fuzzy boundary between you and your tiny companions? | Continue reading
Dial-a-Ride is a UK community transport service assisting people – largely the elderly – when ordinary public transport is either unsuitable or unavailable. In this short documentary, the UK filmmakers George Cowie and Tom Huntingford spend two weeks on a Dial-a-Ride bus as it tr … | Continue reading
We need religion not to tell us what to think but to help us feel: it has evolved to manage human emotions | Continue reading
Is language produced by the mind? Romantic theory has it otherwise: words emerge from the cosmos, expressing its soul | Continue reading
In 1903, Mark Twain defended his friend and fellow author Helen Keller against charges of plagiarism, writing in a letter: ‘The kernel, the soul – let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances – is plagiarism.’ Of cour … | Continue reading
Who wants more civility when democratic government thrives on civil disobedience? On Jürgen Habermas and the public sphere | Continue reading
Is it possible that, in the new millennium, the mathematical method is no longer fundamental to philosophy? | Continue reading
Some of our greatest cultural and technological achievements took place between 1945 and 1971. Why has progress stalled? | Continue reading