essay
Political philosophy
Democracy entails conflict
Democracy is a system of politics that has disagreement at its heart. But how do we stop conflicts becoming destructive?
Rochelle DuFord
essay
Sleep and dreams
The dreams of animals
The psychic lives of nonhuman dreamers reveal colours, harmonies and beauties of which we had little inkling until now
David M Peña-Guzmán
essay
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Bad therapy
Some psychotherapeutic approaches are not only ineffective, they’re actively harmful. We’re now starting to identify them
Yevgeny Botanov, Alexander Williams & John Sakaluk
essay
Thinkers and theories
Philosopher of the apocalypse
From the ashes of the Second World War, Günther Anders forecast a new catastrophe: technology would overwhelm its creators
Audrey Borowski
essay
Earth science and climate
A new Earth rises
How did the planet replace the nation-state to become the prime political object of the 21st century?
Erik Isberg
essay
Mood and emotion
When hope gets in the way
Hope is usually seen as a positive agent of change that spares us from pain. But it can also undermine healing and growth
Santiago Delboy
essay
Human rights and justice
Breakfast with the Panthers
It wasn’t all young men and guns: the Black Panther Party’s programs fed more hungry kids than the state of California
Suzanne Cope
essay
Animals and humans
Against human exceptionalism
In a tight spot, you’d probably intuit that a human life outweighs an animal’s. There are good arguments why that’s wrong
Jeff Sebo
essay
Biology
The split-body problem
Why we need to stop thinking about parents, offspring and sex when we try to understand how life reproduces itself
Gunnar O Babcock
essay
The environment
The power of shit
Our excrement is a natural, renewable and sustainable resource – if only we can overcome our visceral disgust of it
Lina Zeldovich
essay
Computing and artificial intelligence
AI’s first philosopher
Alan Turing was a pioneer of machine learning, whose work continues to shape the crucial question: can machines think?
Sebastian Sunday Grève
essay
Anthropology
Primitive communism
Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong
Manvir Singh