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Society

Essays and videos on social issues, history, political life and the future

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Black-and-white photo of a woman holding her child on a stone pier, with small wooden boats and a shoreline in the background.

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

An ancient, broken clay tablet with a circular design and various inscriptions, displayed on a dark background.

video

Archaeology

How researchers finally solved the puzzle of the oldest known map of the world

18 minutes

Painting of two men sitting in a barn, one on a bench and the other on a chair, with a horse and pumpkins in the background.

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

Fresco fragment with geometric borders framing curved shapes representing waves crashing upon the shore, partially damaged.

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Nature and landscape

Laughing shores

Sailors, exiles, merchants and philosophers: how the ancient Greeks played with language to express a seaborne imagination

Giordano Lipari

Wooden model of a sailing ship with multiple masts and detailed rigging on a white background.

video

Art

A prisoner in Guantánamo finds some escape in building intricate model ships

6 minutes

Photo of a light beige woven fabric with black and red borders on the sides, frayed edges at the bottom, and a black background.

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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

Black-and-white photo of a man in a suit and hat grabbing another man by his collar in front of a bar with bottles.

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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

A suburban street with mountains in the background, featuring a girl on a bike, parked cars, and old furniture on the sidewalk in front of a house.

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

A person in a workshop uses a tool to smooth wood. Wood shavings are scattered on the workbench.

video

Making

Forging a cello from pieces of wood demands its own form of virtuosity

27 minutes

Silhouette of a person walking through a spray of water at sunset with cars and buildings in the background.

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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

Children climbing on monkey bars, photographed from below, against a clear blue sky.

video

Education

Scenes from a school year paint a refreshingly nuanced portrait of rural America

25 minutes

A brick house with a tiled roof, surrounded by a well-maintained garden with bushes and colourful flowers.

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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

Close-up of a person’s hand using a smartphone in a dimly lit room with blurred lights in the background. The phone screen shows the text ‘How can I help you today?’ and a text input field.

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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

A black-and-white photo of a person riding a horse in, with a close-up of another horse in the foreground under bright sunlight.

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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

Five differently coloured triangular wax crayon bars standing upright on a white surface.

video

Art

Watch as Japan’s surplus trees are transformed into forest-tinted crayons

4 minutes

Person in a wheelchair with a laptop, wearing a monitoring cap, and a doctor in a lab coat standing nearby in a clinical setting.

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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

A walking figure made of black shapes, with a pink ticket for “The Moviegoer” by Walker Percy as its body, on a yellow background.

video

Meaning and the good life

‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’

2 minutes

Photochrom image of a narrow street lined with Middle-Eastern buildings; people are walking down the middle of the street and some are holding umbrellas.

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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

Aerial view of a large pipeline construction site with machinery and vehicles cutting through green fields and hills under a partly cloudy sky.

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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

Residential street with terraced houses and power plant cooling towers in the background, one of which has a mural depicting a sun and mountains.

video

Food and drink

Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border

14 minutes

A black-and-white photo of soldiers in uniform checking documents of several men standing outdoors, with laundry hanging in the background.

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

Weather map showing temperature, cloud cover, and other meteorological data across Ireland, the UK, and part of mainland Europe. Isobars are also depicted.

video

War and peace

A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster

6 minutes

Aerial view of an industrial site emitting smoke, surrounded by snow-covered buildings and landscape, under a clear blue sky with birds flying overhead.

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