May 2021

The evolution of mass raids from group raids happened tens of millions of years ago...

The Starship cabin is not ultimately intended for trips “under an hour,” but in fact for journeys of multiple months...

The ancient Greek world did not have an understanding of what is now understood by international law, but there were unwritten norms regarding warfare...

Especially for antiquarian and other independent booksellers, there exists a tension between sharing knowledge and running a business...

Just like the nuclear revolution, the possible ramifications of the quantum revolution reach far beyond the spheres of academia and may become instrumental in security and warfare...

In this era of intersecting crises, conservationists and others will be more and more motivated by a sense of multispecies solidarity...

Women writers have often used a style of domestic realism – reflecting the family homes in which they have laboured and nurtured. But in the 1970s and 80s they also took up science fiction, fantasy or historical fiction to explore gender relations on an epic scale...

Whether or not The Trespasser helped Woolf shape Night and Day, there may be glints of Lawrence’s novel in To the Lighthouse...

Sons and Lovers emerged with astonishing vividness, like an island from off which the mist has suddenly lifted...

The metaphor retains the paradoxical power to unveil the truth by veiling it...

Arguments against free will go back millennia, but the latest resurgence of scepticism has been driven by advances in neuroscience during the past few decades...

The almost subconscious fear that we could be soulless machines manipulated by other powers poses a profound philosophical conundrum pondered since ancient times...

New boxers move among the outlines of those who fought before them, escaping nothing...

A student of René Girard’s while at Stanford in the late 1980s, Peter Thiel would go on to report that Girard is his greatest intellectual inspiration...

How collaborative are ruler personality cults?

The novel is an extremely flexible form. It can come out in countless shapes, include infinite content, and end up almost any length...

The standard laws of physics — such as quantum theory, general relativity, even Newton’s laws — are formulated in terms of trajectories of objects and what happens to them given some initial conditions. But there are some phenomena in nature that you can’t quite capture in terms of trajectories...

Robert Walser found a context, a context of beauty for the many voices that surfaced in his awareness...