“Our minds are made up of all the same atoms and molecules as everything else in nature – the architecture of our brains was born from the same energy principles, the same pure mathematics that happens in flowers, and jellyfish…
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How good are we at understanding each other? Other people are complicated, so when we try to guess what they’re thinking we often get it wrong. Even with our partners! Research suggests that partners are hardly any better (and sometimes…
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In a globalised market economy, even nations have been branding themselves. ‘Cool Britannia’, Brazil a vibrant world class player, Italy the nation of high fashion and great food are just some examples. Can rebranding really maintain, extend, or even reconstitute…
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The abiding rhetoric of US foreign policy is ‘freedom and democracy’: “We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom.”…
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To ensure their future food security, rich countries are buying up land in poor countries. Ah, that’s China, you may think! But as Stefano Liberti, author of Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism, explains to Craig Barfoot, China is a…
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The financial and ecological costs of driving, and the time we waste sitting in traffic jams, is leading many people to think about a more ‘walkable’ city. The man who has thought and written most widely on this is city…
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“I began to see some of the high profile, very dramatic experiments in social psychology of the 1950s and 60s, as what they were – metaphors. We invest them with a truth and authority that often goes way beyond what…
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Since the end of the Cold War, American military superiority has been an undeniable fact. But this superpower dominance is not the norm in world affairs. With the rise of China as a ‘peer rival’ of the US, are we…
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For the last twenty years of his life, Marcel Duchamp was working secretly in a studio in New York to construct an installation called Étant Donnés, Things Given. In this, the final part of our series, Seeing is Believing: the Politics of…
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‘Due to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled’ was the title of a famous 1971 TV documentary about how the world was walking towards ecological disaster with its eyes shut. In this, the fourth installment of our series Seeing is Believing: the Politics…
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