video
Engineering
How water-based clocks revolutionised the way we measure time
10 minutes
essay
Death
Freedom over death
Death is a certainty. But choosing how and when we depart is a modest opportunity for freedom – and dignity
Michael Cholbi
video
Anthropology
Margaret Mead explains why the family was entering a brave new world in this 1959 film
29 minutes
essay
Architecture
The replica and the original
Architectural copies of lost structures require reckoning with history and heritage. At what cost is the past rebuilt?
Elizabeth Kostina
essay
The future
Homo crustaceous
‘Everything becomes crab’ is more than an absurd meme. The crab is a deep symbol of our devil’s bargain with technology
Michael Garfield
video
Demography and migration
In California’s farmlands, immigrant workers share their stories of toil and hope
17 minutes
essay
History of ideas
From scattered traces
How the ideas circulating among one noblewoman’s coterie in 16th-century Dubrovnik anticipated modern feminist thought
Luka Boršić
essay
Design and fashion
Walk in these
Shoes are deeply personal, literally moulded to our lives. But they create our social lives as much as express them
Matthew McCormack
essay
Music
The beat of goombay
Diasporas are made of vast constellations of countless people, fused together through memory, meaning – and music
Salwa Halloway
video
Ecology and environmental sciences
Join endangered whooping cranes on their perilous migratory path over North America
6 minutes
essay
Gender
Taliban bride
Women in Afghanistan are prisoners in their own homes. This is the story of Marjan, married at 12 to a Taliban fighter
Zala & Asad Nariman
essay
Stories and literature
Merveilleux-scientifique
With brain swaps and death rays, a little-known French sci-fi genre explored science’s dark possibilities a century ago
Fleur Hopkins-Loféron
video
Home
Life moves slowly in a Romanian mountain village, shaped by care and the seasons
13 minutes
essay
Technology and the self
The unseen
Our crisis of work and technology is one in which too many people feel that nobody sees them as a fellow human being
Allison J Pugh
essay
Evolution
Empire of flight
They have big brains, long childhoods and sociable, curious minds. So why haven’t birds developed complex culture?
Antone Martinho-Truswell
video
Archaeology
At a prehistoric pigment mine, researchers glimpse our earliest moments in the Americas
25 minutes
essay
Political philosophy
The allure of autarky
Liberal thinkers are shocked that nations are once again isolating from the world. The real surprise would be if they didn’t
Ben Chu
essay
Animals and humans
Animals taught us culture
Prehistoric humans didn’t create art and architecture out of nothing. They took inspiration from the nonhuman world
Sarah Newman
video
Economics
A tour of New York’s gaudiest neighbourhood with the Marxist geographer David Harvey
13 minutes
video
Art
Defying classification, fantastical artworks reframe the racism of Carl Linnaeus
8 minutes
video
Engineering
Building a prosperous future demands bold ideas. These are some of the boldest
40 minutes
video
Environmental history
In Kazakhstan, ‘atomic lakes’ still scar the landscape decades after Soviet nuclear tests
13 minutes
essay
Archaeology
Deep time and the revenant
In enigmatic burials, crafted to bind the bodies within, we can see how truly ancient our fears of the undead must be
Rebecca Batley
essay
Oceans and water
An oceanic tempo
An appreciation of the immensity embedded in the ocean’s cycles offers a way to reimagine our relationship with time
James Bradley