volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Politics & Government Even the ancient Greeks thought their best days were history Johanna Hanink
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Stories & Literature So I exaggerate a little – am I wrong to jazz up my stories? Andrea Askowitz
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Cognition & Intelligence How totalism works The brainwashing methods of isolation, engulfment and fear can lead anyone to a cult. I should know – I was in one Alexandra Stein
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Cognition & Intelligence Had a good think lately? Not busy-work, ticking off to-do lists or keeping-up-with-stuff. Just sitting. And thinking. Is it so hard? André Spicer
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Economics Conspicuous consumption is over. It’s all about intangibles now Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Subcultures What is a cult? Cults are exploitative, weird groups with strange beliefs and practices, right? So what about regular religions then? Tara Isabella Burton
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/History For centuries European aristocrats proudly claimed foreign ancestry Blake Smith
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Cognition & Intelligence We could all do with learning how to improvise a little better Stephen T Asma
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/History Why the Tudors still rule The Tudors are always good box office, but their melodramatic lives distract from a much deeper legacy of civic nationhood Anna Whitelock
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Stories & Literature The truth about tarot Whether divining ancient wisdoms or elevating the art of cold reading, tarot is a form of therapy, much like psychoanalysis James McConnachie
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/History Resist or collaborate? The Nazis have occupied France. It’s easy to condemn the collaborators. But be honest: what would you really do? Robert Gildea
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Space Exploration Space exploration is still the brightest hope-bringer we have Earle Kyle
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Consciousness & Altered States The mathematics of mind-time The special trick of consciousness is being able to project action and time into a range of possible futures Karl Friston
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Cognition & Intelligence What know-it-alls don’t know, or the illusion of competence Kate Fehlhaber
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Fairness & Equality Marriage should not come with any social benefits or privileges Vicki Larson
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Economics Platonically irrational How much did Plato know about behavioural economics and cognitive biases? Pretty much everything, it turns out Nick Romeo
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Values & Beliefs How ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ inspired Victorian hedonists Roman Krznaric
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Ethics Moral grandstanding: there’s a lot of it about, all of it bad Justin Tosi & Brandon Warmke
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Economics What is human capital? Human capital theory was invented as an ideological weapon in the Cold War. Now it is helping to Uberise the world of work Peter Fleming
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Internet & Communication What’s so new about news? The interesting thing about news has never been its truth or falsehood but how it explodes our sense of onrushing time Arthur Asseraf
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Sports & Games Rules of ascent For mountaineers, it’s not enough to get to the top – it must be done a certain way. But why is the harder way better? Paul Sagar
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/War & Conflict Wars are not won by military genius or decisive battles Cathal J Nolan
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/History of Science The cosmology of Poe Drawing on intuition, Edgar Allan Poe offered some remarkably prescient ideas about the universe in his poem 'Eureka' Paul Halpern
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Cognition & Intelligence Our world outsmarts us Social problems are fantastically complex, while human minds are severely under-engineered. Is democracy doomed? Robert Burton
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/History The taboo of menstruation All around the world, and throughout history, women have been shamed, sequestered, and medicalised for bleeding regularly Janie Hampton
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Politics & Government How Robert Nozick put a purple prose bomb under analytical philosophy Brad Baranowski
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Wellbeing If money can make you happy, does debt make you sad? Cassondra Batz
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Automation & Robotics Science has outgrown the human mind and its limited capacities Ahmed Alkhateeb
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Computing & Artificial Intelligence Quantum cryptography is unbreakable. So is human ingenuity Joshua Holden
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Politics & Government Age of sincerity In politics, as in militant religion, the performance of sincerity is everything, no matter whether right or wrong Faisal Devji