Bad friends
Even the best of friends can fill you with tension and make you sick. Why does friendship so readily turn toxic?
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Biology
Witness the majesty of moths taking flight at 6,000 frames per second
5 minutes
essay
Mood and emotion
Feeling, in situ
What if emotions are not universal and hardwired but exquisite acts of meaning-making specific to context and culture?
Elitsa Dermendzhiyska
essay
Cognition and intelligence
A theory of my own mind
Knowing the content of one’s own mind might seem straightforward but in fact it’s much more like mindreading other people
Stephen M Fleming
essay
Political philosophy
What is ‘the West’?
While the West belonged to a European geography, its name meant something. Now it is a vague invocation, laden with fear
Faisal Devji
essay
Oceans and water
Defend the deep
Instead of letting waves of exploitation sweep through the deep ocean, we could choose to protect this vast living realm
Helen Scales
video
Art
How a self-taught autistic artist mines creativity from life’s endless variations
11 minutes
essay
Film and visual culture
Fear not
You might think that horror movies are a delicious, trashy pleasure. But watching them has surprisingly wholesome effects
Mathias Clasen
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Nature and landscape
An afternoon with hobbyist diamond miners in Arkansas is a thing of rare beauty
16 minutes
essay
History of science
Healthcare workers of yore
Looking past conventional histories of medicine we see that women delivered much of medieval healthcare. Just as today
Sara Ritchey
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Knowledge
What can a Kurosawa classic tell us about reality, knowledge and truth?
5 minutes
essay
Physics
Why simplicity works
Does the existence of a multiverse hold the key for why nature’s laws seem so simple?
Johnjoe McFadden
essay
Mood and emotion
Feeling, in situ
What if emotions are not universal and hardwired but exquisite acts of meaning-making specific to context and culture?
Elitsa Dermendzhiyska
video
Biology
Witness the majesty of moths taking flight at 6,000 frames per second
5 minutes
essay
Nations and empires
Being Persian
To be Persian before nationalism was to belong to a generous, plural identity woven through language, kin and manners
Mana Kia
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Astronomy
Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars. The Nobel Prize went to her supervisor
16 minutes
essay
Architecture
Acoustic naturalism
Our movies and offices are engineered to sound natural based on what rang false in the theatres of 18th-century Paris
Joseph L Clarke
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Animals and humans
A bluesy ballad tells the story of Old Bet, the first circus elephant in the US
8 minutes
essay
Thinkers and theories
When hope is a hindrance
For Hannah Arendt, hope is a dangerous barrier to courageous action. In dark times, the miracle that saves the world is to act
Samantha Rose Hill
essay
History
Slavery en famille
The story of Marie Aymard and five generations of her family tells an intimate history of slavery in a small French town
Emma Rothschild
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Physics
In this 1975 lecture, the maglev train’s inventor deconstructs his ingenious design
19 minutes
essay
Biology
Enduring memory
How can animals whose brains have been drastically remodelled still recall their kin, their traumas and their skills?
Thomas R Verny
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Meaning and the good life
To know or not to know? Lillian weighs the costs of a life-changing genetic test
10 minutes
essay
Animals and humans
Creatures of the Popol Vuh
For the K’iche’ Mayans, animals were not lower beings but neighbours, alter egos and a way to communicate with the gods
Jessica Sequeira
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Information and communication
There are many ways to make a flat map of the world – each of them a unique distortion
10 minutes
essay
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Chairwork
It is a powerful, liberating therapy that lets you (literally) shift perspective on who you are, and who you could become
Scott Kellogg & Amanda Garcia Torres
essay
Human rights and justice
Asylum
Patients and psychiatrists at Saint-Alban in France fought against fascism side by side. What can we learn from them?
Ben Platts-Mills
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Chemistry
Liquid experiments show how beautiful things can happen when chemicals meet
6 minutes
essay
Cognition and intelligence
A theory of my own mind
Knowing the content of one’s own mind might seem straightforward but in fact it’s much more like mindreading other people
Stephen M Fleming