Society
essay
Teaching and learning
Learning styles don’t exist
A teaching approach that is based on students’ preferences sounds laudable. But this misunderstands how learning happens
Carl Hendrick
essay
Animals and humans
Goodbye Pixel
Although it felt more like bereavement for a person than the loss of a thing, the death of a pet isn’t exactly like either
Julian Baggini
video
The future
What’s the healthiest way to handle a creeping feeling that the world is ending?
15 minutes
essay
Gender and identity
Disarming transphobia
‘Rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ is a popular weapon in the anti-trans arsenal. It is nothing but unscientific bunk
Quinnehtukqut McLamore
essay
The ancient world
The other Cleopatra
Daughter of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, she became the influential queen of a mysterious, abundant North African kingdom
Jane Draycott
video
Archaeology
From Roman pots to glass eyes, the shore of the river Thames teems with surprises
8 minutes
video
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Pondering the peculiar one-sided intimacy of the client-therapist relationship
3 minutes
essay
Global history
It never existed
The idea of a ‘precolonial’ Africa is theoretically vacuous, racist and plain wrong about the continent’s actual history
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
video
History of science
Bat-people on the Moon – what a famed 1835 hoax reveals about misinformation today
8 minutes
essay
Music
Enter the conductrice
Will a new generation of women on the podium perpetuate the tyrannical charisma of their male predecessors or overturn it?
Xenia Hanusiak
video
Human rights and justice
Thirty years after one teenager shot another, is it time to forgive?
28 minutes
essay
Economic history
The golden fuel
Asia’s rise to economic power and food security has been powered not by rice but by American maize, the ultimate flex-crop
Peter A Coclanis
essay
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy’s blindspot
Education has long been ignored by contemporary philosophers. That is a myopic view that must change
David Bakhurst
essay
History
Women at the barricades
The transgressions of working-class women formed the revolutionary heart of the 1871 Paris Commune
Carolyn Eichner
essay
History
The politics of pain
Medical science can only tell us so much. To understand pain, we need the cultural tools of history, philosophy and art
Rob Boddice
video
Medicine
What is it like to be a paramedic, navigating human emergency?
17 minutes
essay
Archaeology
Finding the First Americans
Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans first arrived in the Americas. That’s good science and here’s why
Jennifer Raff
essay
Self-improvement
Many wisdoms
There are no transcendent insights that rise above human difference. Yet wisdom exists if we look in the right places
Avram Alpert
essay
The environment
Our contaminated future
In Fukushima, communities are adapting to life in a time of permanent pollution: a glimpse of what’s to come for us all
Maxime Polleri
essay
Nature and landscape
Home and the birdsong
In the dark, sylvan villages of medieval England, people named places after the birds that filled the night with music
Michael J Warren
video
Demography and migration
How the world’s harshest lockdown hit India’s millions of migrant workers
27 minutes
essay
Archaeology
The pharaoh’s trumpet
The truly wondrous treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb are not made of gold. They are the mundane things of everyday life
Toby Wilkinson
video
Art
Edward Hopper came of age with cinema. As an artist, he left a lasting mark on it
12 minutes
essay
History of science
Where God dwelt
For hundreds of years, Christians knew exactly where heaven was: above us and above the stars. Then came the new cosmologists
Stephen Case