Freedom within boundaries
“The easy thing is just to conform. If you look at the history of intellectuals back to the earliest times, every society that I have ever heard of, the great mass of intellectuals tends to be subordinate…
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Hiding acoustically
Aren’t you excited about the party you’re at, what, with all the small talk and the mingling and the catching up on life and…
Interference and noise
Signals are information worth attending to. Noise is interference you ought to ignore. When I’m talking to you on the phone, the sound of…
Noises from the deep
Around the turn of the twentieth century, an Italian physics teacher and meteorologist named Tito Alippi undertook a curious piece of citizen science. He…
From Philosophy and you
News from nowhere: the myth of experience
We tend to assume that wisdom accumulates naturally with experience. Time passes, mistakes are made, lessons are learned, and judgment improves. This belief is…
Wisdom and philosophy
Wisdom is a word that features in book titles in the ‘Self-help’ section of bookshops, but not so much in the ‘Philosophy’ section (where…
Akin to mindfulness
Zan Boag: I want to start with your definition of wisdom and why you think wisdom matters in our lives from moment to moment.…
Winners of the 50 prizes for our 50th edition
To celebrate the publication of our 50th edition, we're giving away 50 prizes to subscribers, with first prize a 50-edition subscription (up to our…
Lessons from stupidity
It is unclear just how the “Man from Song” (Songren) acquired his reputation, but classical literature is replete with stories of his stupidity. These…
Learning not to die
It probably says something telling about human beings that the oldest surviving piece of literature is about our longing to overcome death. The Sumerian…
Word to the wise
The 21st century has created a whole range of new types of professional that we have never had before – or if not quite…
A clear look
“What we can know, and what we can understand, is so influenced by our location in time that it is impossible for us to…
Seen and unseen
There’s something deflating about the first time you spot a nebula through a telescope. You’re standing outside in the dark and the cold, squinting…
