Growing up in countercultural California, ‘enlightenment’ had real glamour. But decades of practice have changed my mind ...

What are the largest shapes in the Universe? The answer might be found in the most unassuming places here on Earth ...

The systems that make people unfree are deeply intertwined. This prison abolitionist dares to envision real alternatives ...

Dissonance and harmony might seem straightforward, but a deep dive into the physics reveals their delightful complexity ...

It’s so toxic, curators can’t handle it without gloves – but drinking wine from this cup was once a popular wellness trend ...

Interpreting the emotional lives of animals requires a subtler and more nuanced understanding of anthropomorphism ...

Life is complicated. In Cameroon, initiated diviners read the messages of spiders to untangle possible futures ...

For centuries, a little Belgian town has treated the mentally ill. Why are its medieval methods so successful?

What does it mean to be Mexican? Meet the artist who forged Mexico’s identity in the brushstrokes of his landscape paintings ...

is a research fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg. His books include A Partial Enlightenment: What Modern Literature and Buddhism Can Teach Us About Living Well Without Perfection (2021) and The ...

To approach the space of possible alien languages, we must first consider the building blocks from which a language is constructed – and how these can differ. A language can be thought to contain four ...

In this tech-vexed age, our life on screens prevents us from experiencing the mysteries and transformative wonder of life ...