The Oscar-nominated short Butterfly (Papillon) finds beauty, pain and poetry in the extraordinary life of the Algerian-born Jewish French swimmer Alfred Nakache (1915-83), who competed at the 1936 ...

Pompeii is famous for being destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, which buried the once-thriving ancient Roman city under some 5 m of volcanic debris. With a dark irony, it was this ...

In the US, long-term solitary confinement is still widely practised, with an estimated 122,000 people isolated in small prison cells for 22 to 24 hours a day. This persists despite movements across ...

is assistant professor of Classics at Cornell University in Ithaca, US. She is working on a book titled Bad Readers and Ancient Rome. A 3rd-century Egyptian fragment of Sappho’s poetry from papyri ...

In the early 1960s, quantum physics was regarded as one of the most successful theories of all time. It explained a wide range of phenomena to an unprecedented level of accuracy, from the structure of ...

Should owning an idea be treated the same way as owning a physical object, or are these two forms of property rights ultimately incomparable? How should societies balance incentivising new ideas with ...

For the vast majority of human history, we’ve relied on the Sun to tell time – a reliably unreliable method, given the body’s tendency to disappear behind clouds and the horizon. This animation from ...

is professor of early modern British history at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She is the author of The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France (2023). Yet Descartes was not ...

The American philosopher David Lewis is remembered for defending modal realism: the view that non-actual possible worlds are as real as the actual world. But among those who knew him, he was as well ...

How is it that we live in an era of apparently unprecedented choice and yet almost every film and TV series, as well as a good many plays and novels, have exactly the same plot? We meet the ...

Created to accompany an exhibition at the Computer History Museum in California, this nifty explainer from the video essayist Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown) helps to demystify how large language ...

The art of ‘being for another’ – following, listening to and making sense of another person’s world – has been practised for millennia. Humans have always discussed their lives, their values and their ...