Essay/Ethics Kids? Just say no You don’t have to dislike children to see the harms done by having them. There is a moral case against procreation David Benatar
Essay/Politics & Government Treat people as citizens How a generation of political thinkers has underestimated the abilities of ordinary people and undermined democracy Nicholas Tampio
Essay/Architecture & Landscape Intimate spaces In his Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard created a philosophy of at-homeness, rich in emotion and memory Gillian Darley
Essay/History of Science Does science need mavericks? Staid and conformist, science risks losing its creative spark. Does it need more mavericks, or are they part of the problem? Adrian Currie
Essay/Philosophy of Language The death of languages Endangered languages have sentimental value, it's true, but are there good philosophical reasons to preserve them? Rebecca Roache
Essay/Education An unlikely triumph In its first century the American higher-education system was a messy, disorganised joke. How did it rise to world dominance? David Labaree
Essay/Love & Friendship Why women stray Evolutionary theory says men stray to increase offspring, but what motivates women? Enter the mate-switching hypothesis David Buss
Essay/War & Conflict The battlefield is dead The traditional arena of war is no more. Will it give way to a perpetual continuum of military and paramilitary violence? Antoine Bousquet
Essay/Cosmology Universe in a bubble Maybe we don’t have to speculate about what life is like inside a bubble. It might be the only cosmic reality we know J Richard Gott
Essay/History The last sacred kings The veneration which surrounds the world’s last sacred kings shows how secular most of political life has become Alan Strathern
Essay/Neuroscience The kindled brain If each bout of depression, bipolar disorder or PTSD makes another more likely, should sufferers stay on medication for life? Elizabeth Svoboda
Essay/Politics & Government Why nation-states are good The nation-state remains the best foundation for capitalism, and hyper-globalisation risks destroying it Dani Rodrik
Essay/History Spoiling for a fight Short of a battlefield, the most violent place in medieval England was Oxford. Why did Brits stop beating each other up? Jim Sharpe
Essay/Computing & Artificial Intelligence Art by algorithm From book critiques to music choices, computation is changing aesthetics. Does increasingly average perfection lie ahead? Ed Finn
Essay/Rituals & Celebrations Mrs Myself Self-marriage promises love and fulfilment – but is it a radical act or a depressing concession to self-absorption? Polina Aronson
Essay/Political Philosophy Is taxation theft? The assumption that you own the contents of your pay-packet, although almost universal, is demonstrably confused Philip Goff
Essay/Stories & Literature Readers of the world unite How markets, Marx, and provincial elites created world literature to fight both empire and nationalism Martin Puchner
Essay/Philosophy of Mind Change becomes you Being the same person over time is not about holding on to every aspect of your current self but about changing purposefully Kevin Tobia
Essay/History Les Anglo-Saxons Not just American or British, the Anglo-Saxon is a mirror to Frenchness: the country’s alter-ego and most feared enemy Emile Chabal
Essay/Cultures & Languages Talking gibberish The study of languages has long been prone to nonsense. Why is linguistics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots? Gaston Dorren
Essay/War & Conflict Don’t look away Photography came of age amid the wars and atrocities, as well as the humanitarian aspirations, of the modern world Jeremy Adelman
Essay/Neuroscience Where pain lives Fixing chronic back pain is possible only when patients understand how much it is produced by the brain, not the spine Cathryn Jakobson Ramin
Essay/Human Evolution Imagination is ancient Our imaginative life today has access to the pre-linguistic, ancestral mind: rich in imagery, emotions and associations Stephen T Asma
Essay/Stories & Literature The coming-of-age con How can you go about finding ‘who you really are’ if the whole idea of the one true self is a big fabrication? Cody Delistraty
Essay/History The Irish diaspora There are 70 million people around the world who claim Irish ancestry. What shaped and made the great Irish emigration? Kevin Kenny
Essay/Wellbeing The healing power of nature The idea that immersing yourself in forests and nature has a healing effect is far more than just folk wisdom Rebecca Lawton
Essay/Cities Return of the city-state Nation-states came late to history, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest they won’t make it to the end of the century Jamie Bartlett
Essay/Data & Information The bit bomb It took a polymath to pin down the true nature of ‘information’. His answer was both a revelation and a return Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni
Essay/Stories & Literature Mata Hari uncovered Dancer, courtesan, spy: on the centenary of her execution, how much do we really know about the woman behind the legend? Julie Wheelwright
Essay/History Ideas were not enough Locke, Spinoza and Voltaire were all brilliant, but religious freedom in Europe was driven by statecraft not philosophy Mark Koyama