
To the core
A devastating loss can shatter the façade we put up for others, exposing our deepest, rawest...

Sabine Hossenfelder: searching for beauty in mathematics
Does mathematics have a ‘beauty’ problem? Sabine Hossenfelder explains why searching for elegance in nature stifles...

Philosophers and other animals
Christine Korsgaard argues that we can extend a Kantian moral framework to include other animals. But...

A small antelope horn
The theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli sits by the fire with Hazda hunter-gatherers, pondering our evolutionary pastBy...

Exiles on Main Street
To respect exiles as real and important political actors, we should get over casting them as...

Conor and Kobe
A poignant reflection on celebrity, mourning and Kobe Bryant’s death, crafted from just a few intimate...

Reading John Gray in war
As a soldier, I was hard-wired to seek meaning and purpose. Gray’s philosophy helped me unhook...

The right right thing to do
The ethical life means being good to ourselves, to others, and to the world. But how...

How Big Tech betrayed us
Surveillance capitalism tracks everything we do and say, and sells that data. To save ‘free markets’,...


What Gordon Parks saw
Gentle, persuasive acts of protest: Gordon Parks used his camera as a ‘weapon’ for empathy with...

The abuses of Popper
A powerful cadre of scientists and economists sold Karl Popper’s ‘falsification’ idea to the world. They...


The penis: a life
Boned, spined, spiked, corkscrewed or double-headed: why did so much variety arise when a simple tube...

How vulnerable is the world?
Sooner or later a technology capable of wiping out human civilisation might be invented. How far...

Huntsville station
‘It’s a trip just being out’: at the local Greyhound bus station with newly released men...

Pause. Reflect. Think
Susan Stebbing’s little Pelican book on philosophy had a big aim: giving everybody tools to think...

The myth of Westernisation
Americans liked to believe that Japan was Westernising through the 20th century but Japan was vigorously...

Who decides how long a second is?
Oscillating atoms and international committees – the peculiar history of how we arrived at the standardised...

Beyond the !Kung
A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile...

Machine in the ghost
Can a robot pray? Does an AI have a soul? Advances in automata raise theological debates...

Do not split
Incredible cameraphone and drone footage from Hong Kong reveals the combustible, contested reality of street protestBy...

The play cure
In a clinical setting, playful activities are not distractions; they take patients deep into trauma –...

Nyctophobia
‘I am beside myself, beside the world’: what it’s like to slip into the acute unreality...

They are prisoners
Captive orcas are tormented by boredom and family separation, but they cannot be simply released. What’s...

Quantum fluctuations
Visualising the unseeable – awesome ‘moving paintings’ inspired by quantum weirdness at the Large Hadron ColliderBy...

Scientists for the people
Why the finest minds in 1930s Europe believed that scientists must engage with citizens or risk...


The tyranny of work
Jobs have become, for so many, a relentless, unsatisfying toil. Why then does the work ethic...

Gradations
Watch as commonplace visuals in a binary, hard-edged world melt and expand into a full-rainbow spectrum...

How to be a genius
I travelled the world and trawled the archive to unearth the hidden lessons from history’s most...

The problem with prediction
Cognitive scientists and corporations alike see human minds as predictive machines. Right or wrong, they will...

Gulf slave society
The glittering city-states of the Persian Gulf fit the classicist Moses Finley’s criteria of genuine slave...

The wolf dividing Norway
With fewer than 70 wolves left in Norway, the debate over their protection is dividing communitiesBy...

What makes a woman’s body
A pang of hunger, a stab of pain, a sense of dread – these experiences emerge...

The evolution of cynicism
Free like a street dog: cynicism evolved from ‘dog philosophers’ such as Diogenes who rejected materialism...

Natural and unnatural
‘Natural’ remedies are metaphysically inconsistent and unscientific. Yet they offer something that modern medicine cannotBy Alan...

Unreal city
The immersive exhibition populating London with surreal digital sculptures by Olafur Eliasson, KAWS, Cao Fei and...

The wisdom of surrender
Samuel Beckett turned an obscure 17th-century Christian heresy into an artistic vision and an unusual personal...

Turn off the gaslight
The skilful manipulator casts a shadow of doubt over everything that you feel or think. Therapy...

Kidnapper ants
How do ants that can’t chew their own food survive? They kidnap other ant species and...

The harms of gentrification
The exclusion of poorer people from their own neighbourhoods is not just a social problem but...

A concerto is a conversation
An intimate discussion between the pianist Kris Bowers and his grandfather Horace about ambition, race, success...

Sheanderthal
Not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’: half were women. What can archaeologists tell us about how they...

The peace of wild things
‘I come into the peace of wild things’ – how the poet Wendell Berry finds respite...

Evolution’s engineers
Organisms do not evolve blindly under forces beyond their control, but shape and influence the evolutionary...

The problem of now
The injunction to immerse yourself in the present might be psychologically potent, but is it metaphysically...