Society

The bloodstained leveller

Throughout history, plagues and wars have left greater equality in their wake. Can we get there again without bloodshed?

Walter Scheidel

The strange story of inventing the ‘bastard’ in medieval Europe

Sara McDougall

The courage and determination that fuelled Wendell Scott, NASCAR’s first black driver

3 minutes

The Nazis as occult masters? It’s a good story but not history

Peter Staudenmaier

The scalp from Sand Creek

Even after museums return human remains pillaged from a massacre in 1864, can repatriation heal the wounds of history?

Chip Colwell

Conspicuous consumption is over. It’s all about intangibles now

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

What is a cult?

Cults are exploitative, weird groups with strange beliefs and practices, right? So what about regular religions then?

Tara Isabella Burton

For centuries European aristocrats proudly claimed foreign ancestry

Blake Smith

Let’s delete sex-identity from birth certificates

Heath Fogg Davis

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

How men continue to interrupt even the most powerful women

Tonja Jacobi & Dylan Schweers

Albania built 750,000 bunkers for a war that never came. Now what?

24 minutes

American dreaming 3.0

Embrace dreams as a counter to the naive realism of politics today, and they could become a potent democratic force

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

The Malmedy trial: how the truth trumped fake torture stories

Steven P Remy

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

The farmer turned human rights activist who breaks France’s laws to defend its values

25 minutes

Marriage should not come with any social benefits or privileges

Vicki Larson

Democracy needs politeness

Autocrats shouted, cursed, and bullied, while American revolutionaries used politeness as a tool of radical politics

Steven Bullock

Platonically irrational

How much did Plato know about behavioural economics and cognitive biases? Pretty much everything, it turns out

Nick Romeo

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

What happens at the all-night corner shop before sunrise

7 minutes

Farming in the middle of the Motor City – a patch of green in the Rust Belt

12 minutes

The taboo of menstruation

All around the world, and throughout history, women have been shamed, sequestered, and medicalised for bleeding regularly

Janie Hampton

How Robert Nozick put a purple prose bomb under analytical philosophy

Brad Baranowski

When faced with so-called ‘progressive business’, stay skeptical

Christian O Christiansen

Monks with guns

Westerners think that Buddhism is about peace and non-violence. So how come Buddhist monks are in arms against Islam?

Michael Jerryson

In the murky waters of climate change, native fishers are among the most vulnerable

7 minutes

Caste lives on, and on

Indian society deludes itself that caste discrimination is a thing of the past, yet it suffuses the nation, top to bottom

Prayaag Akbar

Age of sincerity

In politics, as in militant religion, the performance of sincerity is everything, no matter whether right or wrong

Faisal Devji

Pride, poverty and rapture in an Appalachian mining community where the jobs are gone

25 minutes