Library
A curated set of reading and video resources for those who want to delve deeper into each event

What are friends for?
Treasure your friends, the top of your love hierarchy
How stories of female friendship construct a sense of self
For Beauvoir, its friendship that lets us become truly ourselves
How to make new friends when you’re busy with adulthood
When a friend ghosted me, I faced my childhood abandonment
Too many men lack close friendships. What’s holding them back?

Are our minds wild enough?
- The tradeoffs of savanna restoration in a tree crazed world
- The wilderness fetish is bad for people and for the planet
- How one modest shrub entrapped humans in its service
- Nature is out of balance but its still worth saving
- Video: How our developing understanding of plants changed our knowledge of life itself
- Video: The grassroots project that’s restoring an endangered Hawaiian ecosystem

The wisdom of history
- History is always political, and contest over it is a good thing
- Far-distant days: the past has a dizzying power to ground us
- If history was more like science, would it predict the future?
- Dare we compare American slavery to the Holocaust?
- The role of history in a society afflicted by short-termism
- How should you interpret historical analogies in the popular press?

Feminist futures
- Feminists never bought the idea of a mind set free from its body
- We need the toolkit of utopian thinking now more than ever
- What Frankenstein’s creature can really tell us about AI
- Why is the language of transhumanists and religion so similar
- Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo
- The future of humanism from Toni Morrison to Nick Bostrom

The limits of civility
- When the state is unjust, citizens may use justifiable violence
- Most protests fail. What are activists doing right when they win
- Restoring respect is the first step towards a better society
- Judgment is an exercise in discretion circumstances are everything
- We are witnessing just how fragile liberal democracy is

Listening to the language of the brain
- Brain scans look stunning but what do they actually mean?
- Is deep brain stimulation for better health worth the risk?
- It takes neuroscience and poetry to map the tributaries of touch
- Mapping the brain’s connective structure could unlock immortality
- How might telepathy actually work outside the realm of sci-fi?
- Video: Can a tiny slice of mouse brain help us understand the complex human mind?

How to be long-minded
- The role of history in a society afflicted by short-termism
- To imagine our own extinction is to be able to answer for it
- Trees of deep time are a portal to the past and the future
- Feeling overwhelmed in the present? Try mental time travel
- Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo
- Deep time’s uncanny future is full of ghostly human traces
- Video: From sky charts to atomic clocks, time is a mysterious story that humans keep inventing

Free your attention
- Can meditation really make the world a better place?
- What is the self if not that which pays attention
- Mindfulness is loaded with (troubling) metaphysical assumptions
- How to find the mindfulness practice that works for you
- Meditation is like mountaineering: approach it with care
- Video: A Zen Buddhist priest voices the deep matters he usually ponders in silence

What’s wrong with death
- In a secular age what does it mean to die a good death?
- We might agree that death is bad – but why exactly?
- Altered states can help us face death with serenity and levity
- More radical and practical than stoicism – discover shugendo
- Video: Demystifying death – a palliative care specialist’s practical guide to life’s end
- Video: How an end of life doula found her vocation as a companion for the dying

Insight or illusion?
- Is psychedelics research closer to theology than to science?
- Psychedelics work by violating our models of self and the world
- New psychedelics research is on a knife edge of meaning
- Psychedelics can’t be tested using conventional clinical trials
- The power of insight: Psychedelics and the emergence of false beliefs
- The insights psychedelics give you aren’t always true

Friends, foes and family
- How families and feelings built human culture
- Why childhood and old age are key to our human capacities
- How trance states forged human society through transcendence
- Social darwinism is back but this time its a good thing
- There really is no natural or right way to be a parent
- Video: Evolution is not only about competition: the cellular origins of a very big idea

The philosophy you already have
- What can we learn from John Rawls’s critique of capitalism?
- Reports of the demise of liberalism are greatly exaggerated
- Discovering Judith Shklars skeptical liberalism of fear
- Reciprocity not tolerance is the basis of healthy societies
- How should you choose the right right thing to do?
- Video: To build a fair society, we must first be able to envision it. John Rawls can help

Does play make us human?
- What was it like to grow up in the last ice age?
- Why have humans evolved to have a long journey to adulthood?
- Children today are suffering a severe deficit of play
- The art of ice age children offers a tactile sense of the past
- Imagination is such an ancient ability it might precede language
- Video: Children at play provide a rare glimpse into the imagination, ours and theirs

Can we imagine power without violence?
- Writing and righting: Literature in the age of human rights
- Political violence is not just for poor countries anymore
- For Arendt, hope in dark times is no match for action
- Do human beings have an instinct for waging war
- Video: ‘What’s essential is, I must understand’: a rare candid interview with Hannah Arendt
- Video: Ten million people around the world are stateless. Is citizenship a human right?

Sagas of the Icelanders
- Saga Land
- The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies
- Within and without family in the Icelandic sagas
- The inspired vengeance of mythic Icelandic women
- In Viking sagas, the ‘truth’ is a tangle of history and fiction
- Video: A Viking axe struck a Newfoundland tree in the year 1021. Here’s how scientists proved it

The meaning of time
- Is time a linear arrow or a loopy repeating circle?
- The C-theory of time asks if time really has a direction
- What Albert Einstein owes to David Hume’s notion of time
- Why doesn’t physics help us to understand the flow of time?
- Video: Time is fundamental, space is emergent – why physicists are rethinking reality