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Society

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

Indexing the information age

Over a weekend in 1995, a small group gathered in Ohio to unleash the power of the internet by making it navigable

Monica Westin

Black-and-white photo of a man and a woman, seen from behind, on the deck of a boat, looking out to shore
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Philosophy of language

Metaphors make the world

Woven into the fabric of language, metaphors shape how we understand reality. What happens when we try using new ones?

Benjamin Santos Genta

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video

Thinkers and theories

‘My art is oratory, Socrates.’ An ancient warning on the power and peril of rhetoric

4 minutes

A measure for depth of water stands upright in a dried up landscape that was formerly a lake
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Information and communication

Beware climate populism

The most ardent deniers of anthropogenic climate change today will become the climate conspiracy theorists of tomorrow

Ákos Szegőfi

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Information and communication

How to hate

The manifesto was always a hotheaded call to arms. Then it got a slick, digital makeover in the cause of coldblooded hate

Tyler Thier

A black and white shot shows three men sitting on a sea wall and seen from a diminishing perspective such that they represent a scale of size
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essay

Philosophy of language

The geometry of other people

Some friends are ‘close’. Others are ‘distant’. But our spatial descriptions of social life are more than just metaphors

David Borkenhagen

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Information and communication

To converse well

A good conversation bridges the distances between people and imbues life with pleasure and a sense of discovery

Paula Marantz Cohen

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essay

Art

The art of rules

Conceptual art often confounds. The key is to understand the rules of the artwork and the aesthetic experiences they yield

Sherri Irvin

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Information and communication

Mapping data visualisation’s meteoric rise from Victorian London to today

6 minutes

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History of technology

Who owns history? How remarkable historical footage is hidden and monetised

18 minutes

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History of technology

The long-awaited arrival of TV to Shetland sparks debate in this vintage clip

9 minutes

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Global history

The famed medieval map that stretched beyond Earth to heaven, history and myth

5 minutes

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essay

History of technology

We’ve always been distracted

Worried that technology is ‘breaking your brain’? Fears about attention spans and focus are as old as writing itself

Joe Stadolnik

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video

History of science

Bat-people on the Moon – what a famed 1835 hoax reveals about misinformation today

8 minutes

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The ancient world

What did the Rosetta Stone’s inscription actually communicate?

17 minutes

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Art

The revolutionary artist who propelled the Black Panther movement with imagery

8 minutes

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The ancient world

Why did the Romans create a massive, entirely impractical map of their empire?

7 minutes

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Politics and government

Is mass media still ‘manufacturing consent’ in the internet age?

5 minutes

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History of technology

Master cartography and mythical creatures – the world according to the Catalan Atlas

8 minutes

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Mood and emotion

A century of letters captures the emotions of life in a new city, far from home

21 minutes

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Technology and the self

Adaptive technologies have helped Stephen Hawking, and many more, find their voice

5 minutes

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Information and communication

From mental image to sketch – how memories and emotions conjure up a face

23 minutes

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Travel

A postcard from Mumbai, where there’s poetry in getting from A to B

5 minutes

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History of technology

Reading the strings and knots that keep the secrets of the Inka Empire

9 minutes