essay
Film and visual culture
The risk of beauty
W Eugene Smith’s photos of the Minamata disaster are both exquisite and horrifying. How might we now look at them?
Joanna Pocock
video
Ageing and death
We’re not the only animals that appear to grieve. What are the implications?
6 minutes
video
Archaeology
How researchers finally solved the puzzle of the oldest known map of the world
18 minutes
essay
History of ideas
Philosophy of the people
How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest
Joseph M Keegin
essay
Nature and landscape
Laughing shores
Sailors, exiles, merchants and philosophers: how the ancient Greeks played with language to express a seaborne imagination
Giordano Lipari
video
Art
A prisoner in Guantánamo finds some escape in building intricate model ships
6 minutes
essay
Political philosophy
Citizens and spinning wheels
For Indians to be truly free, Gandhi argued they must take up traditional crafts. Was it a quixotic hope or inspired solution?
Benjamin Studebaker
essay
Political philosophy
C L R James and America
The brilliant Trinidadian thinker is remembered as an admirer of the US but he also warned of its dark political future
Harvey Neptune
essay
Progress and modernity
The great wealth wave
The tide has turned – evidence shows ordinary citizens in the Western world are now richer and more equal than ever before
Daniel Waldenström
video
Making
Forging a cello from pieces of wood demands its own form of virtuosity
27 minutes
essay
Neuroscience
The melting brain
It’s not just the planet and not just our health – the impact of a warming climate extends deep into our cortical fissures
Clayton Page Aldern
video
Education
Scenes from a school year paint a refreshingly nuanced portrait of rural America
25 minutes
essay
Home
Falling for suburbia
Modernists and historians alike loathed the millions of new houses built in interwar Britain. But their owners loved them
Michael Gilson
essay
Computing and artificial intelligence
Mere imitation
Generative AI has lately set off public euphoria: the machines have learned to think! But just how intelligent is AI?
Deepak P
essay
Anthropology
Your body is an archive
If human knowledge can disappear so easily, why have so many cultural practices survived without written records?
Helena Miton
video
Art
Watch as Japan’s surplus trees are transformed into forest-tinted crayons
4 minutes
essay
Illness and disease
Empowering patient research
For far too long, medicine has ignored the valuable insights that patients have into their own diseases. It is time to listen
Charlotte Blease & Joanne Hunt
video
Meaning and the good life
‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’
2 minutes
essay
Nations and empires
The paradoxes of Mikha’il Mishaqa
He was a Catholic, then a rationalist, then a Protestant. Most of all, he exemplified the rise of Arab-Ottoman modernity
Peter Hill
essay
Nature and landscape
Land loneliness
To survive, we are asked to forget that our lands and bodies are being violated, policed, ripped up, silenced, sacrificed
Kelsey Day
video
Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
essay
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Decolonising psychology
At times complicit in racism and oppression, psychology has also been a fertile ground for radical and liberatory thought
Rami Gabriel
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
essay
Politics and government
Governing for the planet
Nation-states are no longer fit for purpose to create a habitable future for humans and nature. Which political system is?
Jonathan S Blake & Nils Gilman