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Dog-races, football pools, Woolworth’s, the pictures, Gracie Fields, Wall’s ice cream, potato crisps, Celanese stockings, dart-boards, pin-tables, cigarettes, cups of tea, and Saturday evenings in the four ale bar.[1] This rapid-fire enumeration of distinctive features of Englishness, one of George Orwell’s recurring party-tricks, seems today a tall order. What is it to be English? Those like Tory MP Robert Jenrick rely on inane tautologies: English identity is simply English

Art has been part of our being for millions of years—possibly even before the beginning of our genus Homo—without being understood as what we now call art. From the beginning, it was simply another way of knowing, probably our first, of coping with what confronted us in our environment as a necessary way of surviving in it and sharing that knowledge with others. It sprang from an emotional reaction to what existed outside of us and how we translated that feeling to pass it on

Carved into the stone of the ancient temple of Apollo at Delphi was the injunction to ‘know thyself’. Without such knowledge we are tossed this way and that by forces we neither suspect nor understand. Knowing ourselves helps explain our predicament; and doing so is greatly aided by understanding an aspect of the way in which the brain constructs the world.   I believe we have adopted a limited vision of a very particular type, and precisely because it is limited we cannot se

In our society and social theory, there is a fine line between a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ decision. While society uses moral justifications...

There exists a fine line that sociologists—and all social scientists—must tread as they try to knit together empirical, objective[1]...

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values are prestigious gatherings of globally renowned scholars across the humanities and the sciences. This year’s lectures addressed the questions of Providing for a nation’s health, in a global context , where philosophers, economists, a physician and a social psychologist offered their take on different aspects of the healthcare response to global pandemics. In this piece, students, research fellows, and visiting fellows currently at Clare Ha

Acknowledgements I would like to begin by acknowledging that the land within which I wrote this research paper is Mi’Kma’ki, the...

In the 1967 gangster road movie Bonnie and Clyde , the often-horrific events of the real-life story are cut with ingenuous humour and...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to more than 176 million confirmed cases and over 3.8 million confirmed deaths. These numbers are likely dwarfed by the true rates of infection and death, which will remain unknown well into the future and will likely never be fully elucidated.[1] During this time, several countries have vied for the unhappy honour of being the worst affected by the pandemic, including Italy in early 2020, the United States through 2020 and early 2021, and most r

The origins and definition of the word ‘Americanitis’ are opaque at best. It is generally believed to have appeared in medical journals of the late nineteenth century, describing a particular nervous ailment found in the inhabitants of the United States of America. Thought to cause disease, heart attack, nervous exhaustion, and even insanity, Americanitis was seen as a serious threat to the American public. In fact, in 1925, Time  Magazine reported that Americanitis was respo

For far too long, Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades  (2004) has maintained its status as an Indian cinema cult classic. It is a film about a...

Introduction   This article sets out the case for taking future generations seriously through our political institutions. We make three central claims. First, future people matter, and political institutions ought to reflect this. We make this case by appealing to the importance of broad political enfranchisement, and then to the more general moral significance of future people. Second, our political institutions do not yet take the interests of future generations sufficientl

Fig 1. Sacred and Profane Love (Titian 1514, oil on canvas). Wikimedia Commons. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tiziano_-_Amor_S...