Essays
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Consciousness and altered states
Seeing and somethingness
An evolutionary approach to consciousness can resolve the ‘hard problem’ – with radical implications for animal sentience
Nicholas Humphrey
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Evolution
Fortune favours the shrewd
Attaining and maintaining power lies at the heart of almost all animal societies. And it’s as devious as human politicking
Lee Alan Dugatkin
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Subcultures
The utopian machine
For children like me, growing up in an utopian community, life was a bewildering chaos of freedom and indoctrination
Susanna Crossman
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Human rights and justice
Exhuming the truth
Thousands of victims of political executions lie in anonymous graves. Forensics offers hope for the ‘forgotten’ ones
Nicole Iturriaga
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Subcultures
Life in the buff
Naturists believed nudity was profoundly beneficial to society. In order to spread the message, they took to photography
Annebella Pollen
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Addiction
Why we crave
The neuroscientific picture of addiction overlooks the psychological and social factors that make cravings so hard to resist
Zoey Lavallee
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Thinkers and theories
Democracy or apocalypse
Eric Voegelin and Hans Kelsen fled the Nazis. In the US, they clashed over the nature of modernity and government
David Dyzenhaus
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History of technology
Care from afar
For over a century telemedicine has promised healthcare for all. But will it ever replace seeing a human being in person?
Jeremy A Greene
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Animals and humans
Happy the person
She has deep emotions, complex social needs and a large, elephant brain. Her legal personhood should be recognised too
Lori Marino
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Religion
Sisters in dharma
In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, Parwati Soepangat pioneered a Buddhist feminist theology with deep roots
Jack Meng-Tat Chia
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Ethics
Collective wrongs
Even when individual perpetrators and victims are dead, states and institutions have a responsibility to make restitutions
Joshua Stein
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Religion
The Calvinist conquest
In the 17th century, Dutch proselytisers set out for Asia, Africa and the Americas. The legacy of their travels endures
Charles H Parker