Cars ruined cities. Anyone can see that cities built before the invention of the automobile are incomparably more beautiful and serene than anything built after them. The contrast between Los Angeles and Prague is unmistakable. But people like things that move fast and make life easier, which means we’re stuck with the modern city hellscape
One of the few benefits of being an anthropologist is the uncanny exhilaration one feels watching novel current events as re-runs from previous episodes in the history of mankind. Donald Trump’s capture of Nicolás Maduro, President of Venezuela, is no exception. Kidnapping Latin American emperors is a continental tradition. It’s simply the most practical method
When the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski traveled to Papua New Guinea in the 1920s, he discovered a group of remote and mostly naked tribes, none of whom had encountered literacy before. And without writing, he found, they organized knowledge in a different way from the rest of the world. Rather than label and categorize everything that
Aldous Huxley understood quite intuitively that technology begins to enslave us
Woke language is used to browbeat ordinary people into submission, but research shows that it’s achieving the precise opposite
A ceremonial magician, poet, artist, novelist, prophet, journalist, mountaineer and spy
Anti-Semitic conspiratorialism has gone mainstream among large swathes of the American electorate
Is it the future of romance?
Within a few hours of Kirk’s shooting, posts generating millions of views expressed delight
The Blackstone CEO was not the shooter’s intended victim. All too many think she deserved to die anyway
We’ve come to a series of startling conclusions about a change that’s happening in US society