While the Romantic view of Vesuvius saw it as a unique phenomenon, a spectacle, for the scientists it was a specimen, a comparator for investigations into the nature of volcanic activity. Newtonian physics...
We may understand less about orcas than they do about us. The example of Twofold Bay suggests they are able to understand human desire and intention, at least when it overlaps with theirs.
Where Freudian orthodoxy called for analysts to work scrupulously against the effects of transference, Saul Newton and his colleagues taught their followers to do precisely the opposite, i.e. exploit the...
Peatlands are wetlands, the argument goes, and wetlands disturb us; they’re the abject backwaters of modernity – marginal and malarial, disavowed and despoiled. We’ve ruined them and now they’ll...
Europeans were eager for Native Americans to tell them the location of precious metals and the source of beaver pelts. But less practical Indigenous knowledge needed either to be assimilated into the existing...
It isn’t just that the story of the Enlightenment needs amending to reflect its true complexity, it’s that conventional approaches to global history are in need of profound recalibration. The Malagasy...
We’re increasingly comfortable with the idea of a book in virtual rather than physical form, but what happens when the content disappears too? Inevitably, we’re left looking at the frame around it....
It is one of the curious qualities of the lighthouse that while its raison d’être is to be visible, durable and stable in the most adverse conditions, it is often seen as a site of ambiguity and insecurity.
In ancient Egyptian culture, images and words were in a state of constant oscillation between letters, sounds and things. Hieroglyphic letters require as much typographical standardisation as the letters...
The postwar welfare state, with its implicit recognition of human need, produced public domains and clinical spaces in which the state was cast as maternal surrogate to a population of child citizens....
It wasn’t that Maria Montessori believed imagination served no purpose, but that its purpose was to bring about things that were real. Why did adults waste so much time getting children to imagine the...
The Yagwoia people, who live in the remote Angan region of Papua New Guinea, on the sparsely populated, forested fringes of the highlands, are notable among their neighbours for their staunch adherence...
Elif Batuman, Edna Bonhomme, Hazel V. Carby, Linda Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque,
New group chats have sprung up to share the latest intel on which spots are secretly open. The best coded advertisement was for a badminton gym: ‘Due to Covid restrictions, our gym is not open to the...
Silence is the defining quality of wealth. Private security operatives whisper into their fists while patrolling a zone of distrust. Silence repels unexplained outsiders who dare to trespass on the shaved...
EastEnders is not, or not only, a slice-of-life drama. Like all soap operas, like all operas, it repeatedly oversteps the limit. The idea of ‘digging the dirt’ is given a whole new meaning, as if the...
The demarcated ring on the grassy plateau was from its outset about heaven, in the sense of afterlife. Was it always also about the heavens, in the sense of sky-watching? Can we rediscover how Stonehenge’s...
‘Isn’t it dangerous?’ was always the first question you were asked by those who had never done it, but I don’t recall the issue ever coming up with fellow travellers. It was in everybody’s interest...