Essays
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Nations and empires
East of Zionism
In 1900 my grandfather’s generation imagined a modernising Arab world, multireligious and progressive. What happened?
Ussama Makdisi
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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
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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
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Gender
Are men animals?
Diagnosing men as violent and oversexed beasts is tempting but it’s a regressive idea built on dubious analogies
Matthew Gutmann
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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
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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
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Psychiatry and psychotherapy
The humane asylum
As a society we are failing people with severe, persistent mental illness. It’s time to reimagine institutional care
Madeleine Ritts & Daniel Rosenbaum
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Gender and identity
George Sand’s boots
How the rebellious novelist left behind her provincial self to learn about life, charging around Paris dressed as a man
Belinda Jack
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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
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Palaeontology
This riotous life
There’s no rhythm to mass extinctions, no pattern to evolutionary recovery. Life bursts forth, in cacophonous adaptation
Riley Black
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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
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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