Millions are preparing for doomsday, not together, but by closing the hatch. It’s a logical response to a hollowed-out state A family of six pulls up to the Be Prepared Expo in Farmington, Utah. They ...

When I was at high school in Peru, I was required to read Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). I was told that it was not only a classic piece of literature, but also that it ...

Since becoming infatuated with microbes during a college course, the Warsaw-based microscopist James Weiss has built his own tiny universe around these tiny creatures, co-creating a successful YouTube ...

So, two old guys in their 70s clambered onto a chairlift at the base of a mountain on the Wyoming-Idaho border. My companion and I had decided to ride to the top rather than hike, though we were both ...

Have you ever experienced a space that made you feel uneasy or stressed? Perhaps it was a noisy and crowded shopping mall, with its neon signs, patterned tilework and boldly painted walls in franchise ...

From traits like extraversion to specific habits, there are many ways a couple can match. New research tests whether it helps Do birds of a feather flock together? Or do opposites attract? Folk wisdom ...

If you’re like most people, you probably have at least one insecurity or past experience that you keep close to the vest, something you wouldn’t want most people to know. It might be a memory of when ...

A few years before he died in exile from Nazism, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil delivered a lecture in Vienna, ‘On Stupidity’ (1937). At its heart was the idea that stupidity was not mere ...

In the first chapter of the ancient Daoist masterpiece the Zhuangzi (attributed to Zhuang Zhou, c369-286 BCE) there is a parade of marvellous animals and plants: a fish named Roe, measuring thousands ...

There’s a modern belief that talent or effort can carry anyone to the top. It’s a myth that’s especially harmful to men The early 21st century is described as a time of crises. Liberal democracy, the ...

‘If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm,’ Virginia Woolf once wrote, ‘dares call me “middlebrow” I will take my pen and stab him, dead.’ With this, in an unsent letter to the ...

I wrote my mother’s mad letters to celebrities. It was the only time we shared the same plane of reality ...