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Every time you stand on a floor, you are trusting a rule about electrons that nobody can picture: no two of them may share a state. Rules just as strange let the sun burn for bi…
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In the 1420s a man trained as a goldsmith, not an architect, promised to roof the biggest hole in Florence, a cathedral opening more than forty meters across, without any of the…
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There are about as many bacterial cells living in your body as human ones. Every animal on Earth carries the remains of ancient bacteria in its cells. And the oxygen you just br…
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A clear, even-handed introduction to the ideas of Karl Marx and the tradition built on them. Eight levels cover Marx's life and times, historical materialism, class and ideology…
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The Roman Empire did not fall in 476. In the east it carried on for almost another thousand years, with emperors in Constantinople who called themselves Romans, ran the world's …
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Five hundred citizens, one day, a jar of draining water to keep time. That was all the machinery Athens needed in 399 BCE to sentence its most famous thinker to death. Socrates …
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Somewhere on the Egyptian coast, a king's agents once searched every ship that sailed into port, not for weapons or gold, but for books. They kept what they found and handed the…
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Around 585 BCE a man in Miletus is said to have predicted an eclipse. He also taught, we are told, that everything comes from water. He was wrong about the water, but he started…
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What ethics is and why moral argument is possible, the case for and against moral relativism, utilitarianism (Bentham and Mill), Kant's ethics of duty, Aristotle's virtue ethics…
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An introduction to Universal Humanism, the ethical framework at the heart of CivilSimian: Truth as correspondence to reality, the three apple proof, the Preserve Life axiom, hum…
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The law of war lets a soldier shoot an enemy asleep in his tent, yet forbids him to shoot the same man a minute later once he has thrown down his rifle and raised his hands. Why…
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Charles Darwin built a theory of all life on inherited differences without knowing how inheritance worked, while a friar in Brno was counting peas that held the answer. Within a…
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What would you do if a modest check arrived every month for the rest of your life, whether or not you showed up for work? Most people answer quickly and with confidence, and the…
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In 1902 the city of Hanoi paid a bounty for every rat tail handed in, and before long people were spotting tailless rats in the streets, alive, well and breeding. Nobody in that…
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In May 1791 Maximilien Robespierre stood before France's National Assembly and asked it to abolish the death penalty, calling it unjust and useless. Three years later he was a l…
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Which would you trust more: a friend who sometimes says "I don't know," or one who answers every question instantly, in polished sentences, with total confidence, and is quietly…
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Which is easier to fake today, a photograph or a video call with your boss? Neither is hard anymore. A finance worker in Hong Kong learned that after wiring about $25 million to…
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Try a small experiment. Pick the political view you find most baffling, then write it down so well that someone who holds it would ask to borrow your wording. Most people cannot…
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In 2017 a river in New Zealand became a legal person, with guardians who can speak for it in court. That sounds strange until you remember that the company that made your phone …
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Every Thursday at noon, a row of farmers in black smocks sits outside a cathedral door in Valencia and settles quarrels over irrigation water. There are no lawyers, no written b…
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Look up from this page for a moment and count how many things are asking for your eyes: a screen, a blinking light, a sound from the next room. Each one is cheap to produce and …
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Should the railroads try to abolish the commission created to police them? No, their lawyer advised in 1892: the commission could be made "of great use to the railroads," becaus…
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In August 1920 a 24-year-old legislator in Nashville wore a red rose that marked him as an opponent of votes for women, while his pocket held a letter from his mother telling hi…
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A bolt of Chinese silk could pay a soldier's wages in a desert fort, change hands for a horse, cross the Pamirs on a camel's back and end its days wrapping a saint's bones in a …
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