Society
video
Film and visual culture
‘Bags here are rarely innocent’ – how filmmakers work around censorship in Iran
8 minutes
video
Language and linguistics
Closed captions suck. Here’s one artist’s inventive project to make them better
8 minutes
video
Anthropology
Why are witchcraft accusations so common across human societies?
4 minutes
essay
History of technology
Indexing the information age
Over a weekend in 1995, a small group gathered in Ohio to unleash the power of the internet by making it navigable
Monica Westin
essay
Philosophy of language
Metaphors make the world
Woven into the fabric of language, metaphors shape how we understand reality. What happens when we try using new ones?
Benjamin Santos Genta
video
Thinkers and theories
‘My art is oratory, Socrates.’ An ancient warning on the power and peril of rhetoric
4 minutes
essay
Information and communication
Beware climate populism
The most ardent deniers of anthropogenic climate change today will become the climate conspiracy theorists of tomorrow
Ákos Szegőfi
essay
Information and communication
How to hate
The manifesto was always a hotheaded call to arms. Then it got a slick, digital makeover in the cause of coldblooded hate
Tyler Thier
essay
Philosophy of language
The geometry of other people
Some friends are ‘close’. Others are ‘distant’. But our spatial descriptions of social life are more than just metaphors
David Borkenhagen
essay
Information and communication
To converse well
A good conversation bridges the distances between people and imbues life with pleasure and a sense of discovery
Paula Marantz Cohen
essay
Art
The art of rules
Conceptual art often confounds. The key is to understand the rules of the artwork and the aesthetic experiences they yield
Sherri Irvin
video
Information and communication
Mapping data visualisation’s meteoric rise from Victorian London to today
6 minutes
video
History of technology
Who owns history? How remarkable historical footage is hidden and monetised
18 minutes
video
History of technology
The long-awaited arrival of TV to Shetland sparks debate in this vintage clip
9 minutes
video
Global history
The famed medieval map that stretched beyond Earth to heaven, history and myth
5 minutes
essay
History of technology
We’ve always been distracted
Worried that technology is ‘breaking your brain’? Fears about attention spans and focus are as old as writing itself
Joe Stadolnik
video
History of science
Bat-people on the Moon – what a famed 1835 hoax reveals about misinformation today
8 minutes
video
The ancient world
What did the Rosetta Stone’s inscription actually communicate?
17 minutes
video
Art
The revolutionary artist who propelled the Black Panther movement with imagery
8 minutes
video
The ancient world
Why did the Romans create a massive, entirely impractical map of their empire?
7 minutes
video
Politics and government
Is mass media still ‘manufacturing consent’ in the internet age?
5 minutes
video
History of technology
Master cartography and mythical creatures – the world according to the Catalan Atlas
8 minutes
video
Mood and emotion
A century of letters captures the emotions of life in a new city, far from home
21 minutes
video
Technology and the self
Adaptive technologies have helped Stephen Hawking, and many more, find their voice
5 minutes