essay
Biology
Memories without brains
Certain slime moulds can make decisions, solve mazes and remember things. What can we learn from the blob?
Matthew Sims
essay
Death
Freedom over death
Death is a certainty. But choosing how and when we depart is a modest opportunity for freedom – and dignity
Michael Cholbi
essay
Thinkers and theories
The French liar
René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, was furiously condemned by his contemporaries. Why did they fear him?
Sandrine Parageau
essay
Architecture
The replica and the original
Architectural copies of lost structures require reckoning with history and heritage. At what cost is the past rebuilt?
Elizabeth Kostina
essay
The future
Homo crustaceous
‘Everything becomes crab’ is more than an absurd meme. The crab is a deep symbol of our devil’s bargain with technology
Michael Garfield
essay
History of ideas
From scattered traces
How the ideas circulating among one noblewoman’s coterie in 16th-century Dubrovnik anticipated modern feminist thought
Luka Boršić
essay
Neurodiversity
Rethinking adult ADHD
The diagnostic category of adult ADHD is becoming more inclusive. That’s not the same as it being overdiagnosed
Margaret Sibley
essay
Design and fashion
Walk in these
Shoes are deeply personal, literally moulded to our lives. But they create our social lives as much as express them
Matthew McCormack
essay
Music
The beat of goombay
Diasporas are made of vast constellations of countless people, fused together through memory, meaning – and music
Salwa Halloway
essay
Virtues and vices
Awkward silences
What is it about lulls in conversation that make them so very uncomfortable? It has to do with how we connect with each other
Rebecca Roache
essay
Gender
Taliban bride
Women in Afghanistan are prisoners in their own homes. This is the story of Marjan, married at 12 to a Taliban fighter
Zala & Asad Nariman
essay
History of science
Injury and inhibition
The misunderstood story of Phineas Gage shows that we need a new way of understanding the experiences of brain injury survivors
Ben Platts-Mills