Society
essay
History of technology
Care from afar
For over a century telemedicine has promised healthcare for all. But will it ever replace seeing a human being in person?
Jeremy A Greene
essay
History of ideas
Sleepwalk to the gift shop
Romanticism once radically challenged conventional pieties. Now it’s little more than marketable schlock. What happened?
Fiona Sampson
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Cities
The haunted city
The city, for all its mechanical speed, artificial light and industrialisation, is the most uncanny of human habitats
Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel
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Thinkers and theories
Philosopher of the apocalypse
From the ashes of the Second World War, Günther Anders forecast a new catastrophe: technology would overwhelm its creators
Audrey Borowski
video
Childhood and adolescence
When Paradise, California burned, its teens became instant climate refugees
23 minutes
video
Demography and migration
In 1980, two feuding professors bet on the fate of humanity. Who won?
5 minutes
essay
Global history
The power of water
Far more potent than oil or gold, water is a stream of geopolitical force that runs deep, feeding crops and building nations
Giulio Boccaletti
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Nations and empires
East of Zionism
In 1900 my grandfather’s generation imagined a modernising Arab world, multireligious and progressive. What happened?
Ussama Makdisi
essay
Beauty and aesthetics
Can culture degenerate?
Tempting it might be, but the idea that culture has become vacuous and banal comes with unsavoury implications
Christy Wampole
essay
Neurodiversity
After neurodiversity
We live in a world that must move beyond identity politics and embrace new models of the mind. Enter psydiversity
Bonnie Evans
essay
Nations and empires
The road from Rome
The fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t a tragedy for civilisation. It was a lucky break for humanity as a whole
Walter Scheidel
essay
Nations and empires
Brand India
How a country used myth and mystique to tempt global investors – and seeded a toxic Hindu nationalism in the process
Ravinder Kaur
video
Work
The last of her kind, Gricel regales Cuban cigar-rollers with readings and good humour
10 minutes
essay
History of ideas
The subjective turn
For Hegel, human nature strives through history to unchain itself from tradition. But is such inner freedom worth the cost?
Jon Stewart
essay
History of ideas
The rise and rise of creativity
Once seen as the work of genius, how did creativity become an engine of economic growth and a corporate imperative?
Steven Shapin
essay
Economic history
Thirty glorious years
Postwar prosperity depended on a truce between capitalist growth and democratic fairness. Is it possible to get it back?
Jonathan Hopkin
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History
Repetition and rupture
Reinhart Koselleck, the last great theorist of history, sought in the apparent chaos of events a science of experience
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
video
Technology and the self
A curtain that twitches as people walk by creates a delightful paradox of privacy
3 minutes
video
Progress and modernity
Modern policing was set up to protect the powerful from a ‘criminal underclass’
22 minutes
essay
Cities
Money and modern life
Sociologist Georg Simmel diagnosed the character of modern city life: finance, fashion and becoming strangers to one another
Daniel Lopez
essay
Economic history
Tea and capitalism
The China tea trade was a paradox: a global, intensified industry without the usual spectacle of factories and technology
Andrew Liu
video
Travel
Postcards from Vladimirskoye – the sleepy town near the ‘Russian Atlantis’
9 minutes
essay
Political philosophy
The theorist of belonging
Judith Shklar fled Nazis and Stalinism before discovering in African-American history the dilemma of modern liberalism
Samantha Ashenden & Andreas Hess
video
Work
A cabbie’s tour of his Welsh hometown where the jobs are gone but the stories remain
10 minutes