What is a German museum doing with a Kikuyu artefact it doesn’t know anything about? A journey to Kenya for some answers ...

How did Robert Frost so perfectly capture a moment of timelessness? Discover the hidden craft in this classic’s simplicity ...

Since Plato, a dominant strain of Western philosophy has understood human beings primarily as rational thinkers, a view typified by René Descartes’s conclusion: cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I ...

is an economist at a financial institution in Hong Kong. He has degrees in philosophy and economics from the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He writes and illustrates a series of ...

An intricate system of roads connected the furthest reaches of the Roman Empire, which at its height in the 2nd century CE spanned modern-day Algeria, Egypt, Turkey and England. A collaboration ...

‘There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.’ From Prejudices (1920) by H L Mencken There has never been a problem facing mankind more complex than ...

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Elephant families are matriarchal, inclusive and caring. But when environmental scarcity hits, everything changes ...

Scientific motherhood’ promised to create high standards for child-rearing. But it’s really a system designed to police women ...

Not long ago, in a room very like this one (the setting of most of these stories is both familiar and vague), I was looking for the origin of a video game. Polybius was a coin-operated arcade ...

The internet is full of wild-eyed insinuation. Seemingly accidental events are not actually accidental. A few powerful people have hatched plots to bring about certain outcomes, usually with the goal ...

Created to accompany an exhibition at the Computer History Museum in California, this nifty explainer from the video essayist Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown) helps to demystify how large language ...