Is time a property of the Universe? Yes, if you conceive of it as heat: a mind-boggling yet oddly comforting perspective ...

Rising far above the desert, the walls of these magnificent hills carry the ancient story of humanity’s creative spark ...

It was a rust bucket, sure, but this car delivered the most precious good to a group of friends in 1980s Poland: freedom ...

While their stories are distinct, overlapping themes of loneliness, agony and elaborate mental escapes run throughout. Beyond making a forceful case against the use of solitary confinement, the film ...

Light is one aspect of the Universe that, for most people, holds a deep and noticeable value in everyday life, helping them ...

In Japanese philosophy, unlike the atomised Western self, we are ‘ningen’ (人間), each enmeshed with other humans and nature ...

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 ...

The traditional dwellings of the Batammariba people in Koutammakou, on the border of Togo and Benin in West Africa, are at once ‘a work of art, a home, and a place of worship’. These striking mud ...

At the turn of the 20th century, two Swedish sisters – Ingeborg and Gunborg Elfving – dreamt of an existence free from male oppression. In her will, Gunborg requested that a house be built in their ...

In Nigeria’s oil fields, international giants have pumped crude for decades – yet the country struggles to develop its own refineries or high-tech industries. In Mexico, global car companies churn out ...

is professor of early modern British history at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She is the author of The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France (2023). Yet Descartes was not ...

The American philosopher David Lewis is remembered for defending modal realism: the view that non-actual possible worlds are as real as the actual world. But among those who knew him, he was as well ...