If history was more like science, would it predict the future?
Historians believe that the past is irreducibly complex and the future wildly unpredictable. Scientists disagree. Who’s right?
«he identified two repeating patterns as crucial to making sense of political history: secular sociodemographic cycles and father-son cycles.»
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Dogs are symbolic containers of human hopes, desires and vices
In all its baroque and sometimes cruelly overbred forms, the dog is a paramount symbol of both human hopes and foibles
«As a rising middle class started to focus on their own family trees, creating an ‘elite’ from new money, so dogs started to be classified too.»
How imaginary numbers describe the fundamental shape of nature
These odd values were long dismissed as bookkeeping. Now physicists are proving that they describe the hidden shape of nature
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How to Make a Monster
Ideas about monstrosity were fundamental to ancient and medieval debates about the nature of humanity, and the rhetoric of monstrosity was widely used to dehumanize certain groups in medieval Europe.
What was it like to grow up in the last Ice Age?
With the help of new archaeological approaches, our picture of young lives in the Palaeolithic is now marvellously vivid
Do we need a better understanding of 'progress'?
A growing and influential intellectual movement aims to understand why human progress happens – and how to speed it up. Garrison Lovely investigates.
The Problematic Myth of Florence Nightingale
“No matter whether this treatment is carried out by sorcerers, priests, doctors, or old women, we find examples of the historic ancestry of modern nursing and the earliest forms of the art.” –Lavin…
Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World
An irony of studying history is that we often know exactly how a story ends, but have no idea where it began. Here’s an example. What caused the financial crisis? Well, you have to understand the…
«The greatest innovation of the last generation has been the destruction of information barriers that used to keep strangers isolated from one another.»
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