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Art
Out of the fog
It’s a ‘failed painting’ that obscures the profound power of German Romanticism. Why do we love the ‘Wanderer’ so much?
Gianluca Didino
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Ethics
Moral refuge
You can believe in border control yet protect those fleeing to safety. So what is our ethical obligation to refugees?
Bradley Hillier-Smith
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Neuroscience
The entangled brain
The brain is much less like a machine than it is like the murmurations of a flock of starlings or an orchestral symphony
Luiz Pessoa
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Illness and disease
Permission to be ill
It took months for my functional neurological disorder to finally be diagnosed. It’s a condition that must be recognised
Kevin Aho
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Cities
Cars beneath the ground
The explosion of automobiles shaped cities and lives. But an enduring problem remains: where to put them when they’re parked
Alfie Robinson
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Stories and literature
Our narrative prison
The three-act ‘hero’s journey’ has long been the most prominent kind of story. What other tales are there to tell?
Eliane Glaser
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Religion
Demonology
By turns benign and malign, powerful and vulnerable, earthbound and aerial, daimons across the world resemble one another
David Gordon White
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Philosophy of language
Extraterrestrial tongues
Imagining how aliens might communicate prepares us for first contact and illuminates the nature of our own languages
Nikhil Mahant
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Art
The ecstatic swoon
As Stendhal knew, the reason for art is to make you feel. Do not try to grasp the artwork: allow it to grasp you instead
Robert D Zaretsky
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Demography and migration
The vanishing of youth
The precipitous decline of birthrates throughout the world poses a serious threat to humanity. What is to be done?
Victor Kumar
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Global history
Vikings on the Silk Roads
The Norse ravaged much of Europe for centuries. They were also cosmopolitan explorers who followed trade winds into the Far East
Neil Price
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Information and communication
Methodical banality
Like today’s large language models, 16th-century humanists had techniques to automate writing – to the detriment of novelty
Hannah Katznelson