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
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
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
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
After the success of the Standard Model, experiments have stopped answering to grand theories. Is particle physics in crisis? | 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
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
Individual transgender lives track a wider cultural history of surgery, hormones and revolutionised gender identities | 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
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
On Paul Gauguin, authenticity and the midlife crisis: how the philosopher Bernard Williams dramatised moral luck | 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
Intelligence has always been used as fig-leaf to justify domination and destruction. No wonder we fear super-smart robots | Continue reading
Mauritania, on the northwest coast of Africa, is characterised by arid desert plains that make most of the country non-arable. Beneath the surface, however, the land is rich in the iron ore that sustains the Mauritanian economy. Since 1963, the Mauritania Railway, running 704 kil … | Continue reading
There is a meme that speaks directly to the hearts and minds of the overly self-conscious. Perhaps you’ve seen it; it goes something like this: ‘Brain: “I see you are trying to sleep. May I offer you a selection of your most embarra... | Continue reading
Mothers – in nature and in human societies – are typically thought to have some sort of essential 'maternal instinct'. Enter the irrepressible Italian artist, writer and actress Isabella Rossellini, who asks, 'But is this true? What is this trait, this characteristic, common to a … | Continue reading
After centuries searching for extraterrestrial life, we might find that first contact is not with organic creatures at all | 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 an ... | Continue reading
Is politics driven by pragmatic self-interest or by identities and ideals? The self-harming voter offers a clue | Continue reading
Today, there is a crisis of trust in science. Many people – including politicians and, yes, even presidents – publicly express doubts about the validity of scientific findings. Meanwhile, scientific institutions and journals express their concerns... | Continue reading
Thought eugenics died with the Nazis? Think again: the eugenic programme of sterilising the ‘unfit’ continues even today | Continue reading
‘More and more I have come to admire resilience...’A collaboration between the US poet Jane Hirshfield, the US animator Kelli Anderson, and Bulgarian-born, US-based writer Maria Popova, Optimism is a brief yet powerful celebration of ‘the persistence of life against all odds’. In … | Continue reading
‘If you build it, they will come.’ It’s a Latin saying – Si tu id aeficas, ei venient – but it’s probably more recognisable because it sounds like what that disembodied voice says to Kevin Costner in the film Field of Dreams (1989). And in the fil... | Continue reading
Thought eugenics died with the Nazis? Think again: the eugenic programme of sterilising the ‘unfit’ continues even today | Continue reading
‘Life,’ Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in a typical mood in 1818, ‘is deeply steeped in suffering, and cannot escape from it; our entrance into it takes place amid tears, at bottom its course is always tragic, and its end is even more so.’ He is popularly known as the world’s greatest … | Continue reading
A few years ago, I proposed that the feeling of cold in one’s spine, while for example watching a film or listening to music, corresponds to an event when our vital need for cognition is satisfied. Similarly, I have shown that chills are not solel... | Continue reading
Lovers crave intensity, Buddhists say craving causes suffering. Is it possible to be deeply in love yet truly detached? | Continue reading
'We'll go wash windows in heaven so that heaven is clean.'Dangling from the towering buildings that mark Chicago’s iconic skyline, three men wash windows for a living when they're not on construction jobs. Sergio and Jaime Polanco from the Mexican state of Zacatecas and their US- … | Continue reading