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Essays

Fine writing on philosophy, psychology, science, history and the arts
Eugene V Debs making a speech from a stage on which several other men, women and a young girl are seated behind him; also shows 48-star flags of the United States hanging at the back of the stage
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Political philosophy

In the interests of all

How Eugene V Debs turned American republicanism against the chiefs of capitalism – and became a true crusader for freedom

Tom O’Shea

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Knowledge

The ends of knowledge

Academics need to think harder about the purpose of their disciplines and whether some of those should come to an end

Rachael Scarborough King & Seth Rudy

A flock of birds fly over a wide expanse of marshland and a river at dusk.
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Biography and memoir

Flat places

Whenever I stand in a flat landscape, I feel myself becoming weightless, taken out of my childhood full of painful nothing

Noreen Masud

A close up picture of hands playing a silver brass flute with a shallow depth of field such that the foreground fingers and keys are more in focus
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Music

To the tune of dystonia

One day, my hand stopped speaking to my brain. As a doctor and flute player, I had to understand this strange affliction

Lynn Hallarman

An older man stands proudly in front of his house near Leipzig, east Germany after reunification in 1990. A German flag hangs from a ground floor window.
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Economic history

Deservingness

In post-communist eastern and central Europe, history is intensely personal and economics is saturated with moral feeling

Till Hilmar

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Nations and empires

Dream of the Russian tropics

Imperial Russia had little access to the bountiful tropics that other empires enjoyed. So it created its own in the Caucasus

Oleksandr Polianichev

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Stories and literature

Vergil’s secret message

Long derided as mere coincidences, acrostics in ancient poetry are finally being taken seriously – with astonishing results

Julia Hejduk

Rubens painting Venus and Cupid reimagined with Venus on the left gazing in a mirror at her mastectomized breast. A cherub like Cupid to the right holds the mirror
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Illness and disease

More than pink

The culture around breast cancer is full of positivity and femininity. But it comes at the expense of the marginalised

Philippa Hetherington

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Work

Freedom at work

There is always a demand for more jobs. But what makes a job good? For that, Immanuel Kant has an answer

Tyler Re

Two Asian film actors are fighting kung-fu style on the beach dressed in 1970s style casual clothes
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Film and visual culture

Fighting kung fu

From chopsocky films to disco earworms, Asian caricatures have proliferated since the 1970s. Can Hollywood kick the habit?

Stephanie Wong

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Philosophy of language

Quantum poetics

How Borges and Heisenberg converged on the notion that language both enables and interferes with our grasp of reality

William Egginton

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Human rights and justice

Beyond obscenity

A century after the trial against ‘Ulysses’, we must revisit the civil liberties arguments of its defender, Morris Ernst

Brett Gary