Library

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?

• 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

• 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?

• 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

• 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

• For the wanderers who became the Aztecs, history was a chorus of voices
• Learning Nahuatl, the flower song, and the poetics of life
• Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion
• Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
• The Nature of Mexica Ethics

• 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?

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• We are at a crossroads in the search for a new physics
• Can retrocausality solve the puzzle of action at a distance?
• Time is not an illusion. It’s an object with physical size
• Time Regained: Volume 1: Symmetry and Evolution in Classical Mechanics
• The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time

• 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

• 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?

• 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

• Yacob and Amo: Africa’s precursors to Locke, Hume and Kant
• How academic philosophy can become truly diverse and global
• “But what are you really?”
• African-American philosophy, race, and the geography of reason
• Audio: Africana philosophy

• What four months on Mars taught me about boredom
• Antarctica: a place of wide horizons and fragile selves
• How to be resilient
• How to complete an impossible challenge

• 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

• How to cope with an existential crisis
• Why do we love?
• Video: Simone de Beauvoir on love, jealousy, women and marriage (1959)
• Video: Why Sartre believed that the person in love could never be free

• Why philosophy needs myth
• The well-educated person
• Many wisdoms
• Video: A monk interviews Martin Heidegger

• The paradoxes that sit at the very core of physics
• How many dimensions are there, and what do they do to reality?
• There’s more maths in slugs and corals than we can think of