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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

Any legal system that fails to compensate people for epistemic harm is unjust. Their damage must be named and remedied ...

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

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

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 ...