Essays
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Subcultures
The great regression
To understand why so many adults are acting just like children, don’t blame Millennials – look to Japan in the 1990s
Matt Alt
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Animals and humans
Semiotics of dogs
In all its baroque and sometimes cruelly overbred forms, the dog is a paramount symbol of both human hopes and foibles
Katrina Gulliver
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Politics and government
What lies beneath government
Buka Town in Bougainville shows how bureaucratic states could be reimagined, not as concrete buildings but as living gardens
Gordon Peake & Miranda Forsyth
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Religion
The meaning of Purgatory
Think less of a holding pen for Heaven and more as a flow of love from the living, and the weirdness starts making sense
Magnus Course
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Computing and artificial intelligence
The people of the cloud
Hot, strenuous and unsung. There is nothing soft and fluffy about the caretaking work that enables our digital lives
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate
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Environmental history
Dancing with water
As storms, droughts and floods become more intense, what can the world learn from Japan’s profoundly wet history?
Giulio Boccaletti
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History of ideas
Reasons to be cheerful
A cheery mood, you might think, is a terribly self-absorbed response to serious times. But history tells us otherwise
Timothy Hampton
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Meaning and the good life
You’re astonishing!
Life can be better appreciated when you remember how wonderfully and frighteningly unlikely it is that you exist at all
Timm Triplett
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Love and friendship
The right person
Contemporary wisdom says that happiness is the measure of a marriage. But is that a harmful way of judging relationships?
Joshua Coleman
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Demography and migration
The ungreat replacement
Workers in the West have indeed been repressed – but not by immigrants. The policies of their own governments are to blame
John Rapley
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Thinkers and theories
Why read Fichte today?
Inspired by Kant, Fichte launched a radical philosophical system based on subjectivity and aspiring to freedom for all
Gabriel Gottlieb
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Mathematics
Imaginary numbers are real
These odd values were long dismissed as bookkeeping. Now physicists are proving that they describe the hidden shape of nature
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan