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

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

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 ...

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

It’s not just that Hegel and Rousseau were racists. Racism was baked into the very structure of their dialectical philosophy ...

Laws of nature are impossible to break, and nearly as difficult to define. Just what kind of necessity do they possess?

We can all be inconsistent. Philosophy illuminates a bigger puzzle: how do we hold contradictory beliefs at the same time?

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 ...