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Read more: Is There a Moral Obligation to Grant Rights to Artificial Life?
Moral progress often involves expanding our circle of concern beyond our own kind. In past centuries, basic rights were denied to many humans on the basis of race, gender, or class; over time, these distinctions have been eroded as we recognized shared personhood. In recent decades, we’ve begun to seriously discuss rights for non-human creatures.…
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Read more: Spinosaurus: A Story about Scientific Truth
Jurassic Park: Rebirth gives us fully aquatic sail-backed dinosaurs terrorizing our main characters. This is a departure from two decades ago when the franchise first tackled Spinosaurus. But how did we get here? In the parched Sahara over a century ago, a set of peculiar fossil bones emerged from ancient rock. The creature hinted at…
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Read more: Why Do So Many Cultures Invent Protection Talismans?
Let’s imagine we’re at the mouth of a dimly lit cave in prehistoric Siberia, a hunter threads a bear’s tooth on a sinew cord and hangs it around his neck. He believes this fierce creature’s tooth carries some of the animal’s strength, guarding him against harm. Across the world and millennia apart, a mother in…
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Read more: Does Transcendental Meditation Improve Creativity?
A soft morning light spills into a cluttered studio. In the corner, a famous songwriter sits quietly with eyes closed, a gentle rise and fall of breath the only motion. No audience applauds this scene; no camera captures it. For twenty minutes, the artist lets the world fall away, repeating a silent mantra. In that…
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Read more: Growing Beyond the Competitive Lens: Reframing Human Nature Toward Cooperation
On a sunny playground, a group of children races toward a finish line… Nearby, a teacher posts gold stars on a chart for the top test scores, while parents speak proudly of their kid being “ahead of the others.” Scenes like these play out every day, teaching us a powerful lesson early on: life is…
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Read more: Three Times We've Avoided Nuclear War
Lessons for the Unpopular and Shocking U.S. Bombing of Iran
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Read more: It's Solstice! Let's Explore Five Summer Solstice Traditions from Around the World
Every year, around the time of the summer solstice — the longest day of sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere… communities across the globe honor the sun with vibrant rituals and ancient celebrations. These traditions, rooted in pagan or pre-Christian practices, bridge the distant past and the living present. Bonfires crackle against twilight skies, drums echo…
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Read more: Pigeons: Pest? Abandoned Technology
High above an ancient battlefield, a small shadow streaks across the sky. If you could follow its flight, you would see a pigeon, fierce and determined, a tiny cylinder strapped to its leg. Inside that cylinder, a message: perhaps a general’s desperate plea for reinforcements or a lover’s words from a besieged city. For thousands…
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Read more: Coyotes are Self-Domesticating
On a cold dawn in the early 1900s, a lone coyote watched from a distant ridge as men on horseback scattered poison across the frostbitten grass. For decades, scenes like this played out across the American West. Ranchers and government agents waged an all-out war on predators, determined to cleanse the wild landscape of any…
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Read more: The Singularity: Wonder & Uncertainty
In a dimly lit laboratory sometime in the not-so-distant future, a machine hums softly to itself – a machine no human fully understands. It improves upon its own design in rapid iterations, each version smarter than the last, until the pace of its thinking leaves human intellect far behind. At that moment, the story of…
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Read more: Positive Perspectives on Falling Birth Rates?
In maternity wards from Tokyo to Toronto, a curious quietude is growing. Across the world, families are choosing to have fewer children. Where once the average home brimmed with many siblings, now one or two little faces at the dinner table have become common in many societies. This global shift in birth rates is often…
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Read more: Finding Joy in Troubled Times
We exist in a time that has been called a “polycrisis.” This means we exist in a confluence of multiple political, economic, and environmental issues which continue to compound each other to a mass-existential level. Although recent times have been an unusual period of comfort and stability the pendulum is swinging to a direction that…
