Under capitalism, the argument goes, it’s every man for himself. Through the relentless pursuit of self-interest, everyone benefits, as if an invisible hand were guiding each of us toward the common ...

is the author of the novels Old Border Road (2010) and Mysterium (2018). She lives in Seattle and New York City. Pedestrian: a word fitted to the most drab, tedious and monotonous moments of life. We ...

is political philosopher at the University of California, Davis. He is currently working on his fifth book, called The Unbearable Resilience of Illiberalism. He lives in Sacramento. But to understand ...

Many people believe that chemicals, particularly the man-made ones, are highly dangerous. After all, more than 80,000 chemicals have been synthesised for commercial use in the United States, and many ...

In 1969, the British writer Philip Pullman was walking down the Charing Cross Road in London, when his consciousness abruptly shifted. It appeared to him that ‘everything was connected by similarities ...

In rare interviews, Russians speak candidly about their lives in the presence of war – animated to protect their identities ...

In a town park in Portugal, prizes dangle just out of reach up a greasy pole. How will the local teens manage to get them?

What if Adolf Hitler’s paintings had been acclaimed, rather than met with faint praise, and he had gone into art instead of politics? Have you ever wondered whether John F Kennedy would have such a ...

In 1913 the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein fled the interruptions and distractions of Cambridge to live as a hermit in Norway. No one knew him there, and he could focus on his work on logic in ...

A slight shift in Cleopatra’s beauty, and the Roman Empire unravels. You miss your train, and an unexpected encounter changes the course of your life. A butterfly alights from a tree in Michoacán, ...

What is music? There’s no end to the parade of philosophers who have wondered about this, but most of us feel confident saying: ‘I know it when I hear it.’ Still, judgments of musicality are ...

is a psychiatrist and philosopher. He is a fellow of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford, and his most recent book is Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions (2020). What, ...