is a social philosopher and author of History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity (forthcoming, July 2024). He is senior research fellow at the Centre for Eudaimonia and ...

My dad was an unhappy man. He used to complain about the slightest thing being out of place – a pen, the honeypot, his special knife with the fattened grip. By the time his health really started ...

Pompeii is famous for being destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, which buried the once-thriving ancient Roman city under some 5 m of volcanic debris. With a dark irony, it was this ...

Featuring an unforgettable opening motif – ‘dun dun dun duuun’ is just one of the myriad ways it’s been expressed in writing – Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No 5 in C minor, Op 6 (aka ‘Beethoven’s ...

is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and director of the Collective Computation Group at SFI. is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and ...

At Wat Doi Kham, my local temple in Chiang Mai in Thailand, visitors come in their thousands every week. Bearing money and garlands of jasmine, the devotees prostrate themselves in front of a small ...

In the US, long-term solitary confinement is still widely practised, with an estimated 122,000 people isolated in small prison cells for 22 to 24 hours a day. This persists despite movements across ...

In this 1976 clip from the long-running BBC children’s show Blue Peter, the UK presenter Valerie Singleton travels to the now-famous Amsterdam house where the teenage Anne Frank hid from Nazi ...

Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers. Since 2012, the video billboards in Times Square have synchronised each night – with the ...

Few scientific disagreements lead to public controversy. But there are times when the subject or the participants in a debate so capture the public imagination that otherwise dry, technical matters of ...

Political philosophy – a discipline we trace back to Plato and Aristotle – is reasoning about how we live together in political units. It is about states, government, laws, institutions and ...

Far from turning its back on the sea, the fate of Qing China was tied as much to tides and storms as to cavalry and walls ...