A Costly Misconception
Now that glyphosate has become a national-security issue, it’s time to revisit the source of misinformation about this controversial herbicide.
Geoffrey C. Kabat
· 10 min read
Rohmer at Camelot
Éric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978) vividly recreates the imaginative world in which the people of the Middle Ages lived inside their heads.
Charlotte Allen
· 22 min read
Doomscrolling into Adulthood
Reflections on the crisis of meaning afflicting not only Gen Z but all of us who are too online.
Iona Italia
· 7 min read
Love and Theft
Luc Besson’s romantic adaptation of the Dracula story owes an unacknowledged debt to Eiko Ishioka, the visionary designer of Francis Cord Coppola’s 1992 classic.
Yuki Zeman
· 11 min read
AI Is Not About To Become Sentient
Most of today’s “artificial intelligence” is better described as artificial autocomplete than artificial mind.
Peter L. Levin
· 5 min read
The Innovation Trap
The central risk of AI is not that machines will become malevolent. It is that human incentive structures, amplified by scalable technology, outrun our ability to govern them.
Carlton Bell
· 13 min read
The Edifice Complex
Monuments don’t create legacy; they merely memorialise it.
Timothy Devinney
· 6 min read
The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026)
The contributions of Robert Trivers belong in the special category of ideas that are obvious once they are explained, yet eluded great minds for ages; simple enough to be stated in a few words, yet with implications that have busied scientists for decades.
Steven Pinker
· 15 min read
Parallel Kingdom
Nick Cave’s beautiful and tragic music brings redemptive catharsis to a grief-stricken city.
Mark Mordue
· 10 min read
James Cameron Goes Native
‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ is a Rousseau-esque oikophobic fantasy of evil humans and noble savage aliens.
William Barker
· 7 min read
The Original Ladies of Letters
A new book by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann examines the female poets and literary critics who challenged seventeenth-century England’s male literary establishment.
Joan Smith
· 17 min read
On Truth and Beauty
Why art and science serve different ends.
Megan Gafford
· 10 min read
The Soft Disinformation Contagion
How we learned to reason poorly with accurate data.
Jorge Iniesta Cases
· 7 min read
Out on the Wily, Windy Moors...
Emerald Fennell’s misbegotten adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’ destroys the very structure of Emily Brontë’s classic story.
Charlotte Allen
· 20 min read
Arrest and Moral Pageantry
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Mick Jagger, and the theatre of degradation.
Julia Friedman
· 8 min read