Audio
essay
Mood and emotion
The meaning of anger
Is anger like energy, forever changing form but never dissipating, or part of our repertoire of desires, the cry of a need unmet?
Josh Cohen
essay
Design and fashion
The Waste Age
Recognising that waste is central, not peripheral, to everything we design, make and do is key to transforming the future
Justin McGuirk
essay
Sex and sexuality
Idealising the predator
How did certain French intellectuals get away with preying upon young girls, shamelessly, in public and over decades?
Lily Dunn
essay
Nations and empires
East of Zionism
In 1900 my grandfather’s generation imagined a modernising Arab world, multireligious and progressive. What happened?
Ussama Makdisi
essay
Philosophy of science
The beautiful experiment
Science has become extraordinarily technocratic and complex. Is the simple and decisive experiment still a worthy ideal?
Milena Ivanova
essay
Economic history
How we became weekly
The week is the most artificial and recent of our time counts yet it’s impossible to imagine our shared lives without it
David Henkin
essay
Architecture
Being in a building
One of the great buildings of the Renaissance reminds us that buildings are made to be explored, smelled and even tasted
David Karmon
essay
Animals and humans
Promethean beasts
Far from being hardwired to flee fire, some animals use it to their own ends, helping us understand our own pyrocognition
Ivo Jacobs
essay
Sleep and dreams
Inside your dreamscape
Dream-hacking techniques can help us create, heal and have fun. They could also become tools of commercial manipulation
Adam Haar Horowitz, Robert Stickgold & Antonio Zadra
essay
Palaeontology
This riotous life
There’s no rhythm to mass extinctions, no pattern to evolutionary recovery. Life bursts forth, in cacophonous adaptation
Riley Black
essay
Bioethics
We are all frail
We should be able to acknowledge that disabilities can cause pain and suffering without disabled people feeling dehumanised
Tom Shakespeare
essay
Future of technology
Learn from machine learning
The world is a black box full of extreme specificity: it might be predictable but that doesn’t mean it is understandable
David Weinberger