All my films have a relationship to photography, this fascination and love of photography.

Living on the other side of the garden wall from the Casa Azul, the filmmaker watched a quiet neighborhood turn into a tourist trail. That daily view, and a long love of photography, became the seed of the film.

Frida: The Girl Just Doesn't Go Away

In rationalizing a state of anxiety, conspiracy theories operate very differently from a political manifesto.

Conspiracy theories are usually treated as bad thinking that more facts can cure. This thread argues they express something real: a feeling of lost agency and a future that seems foreclosed. Their spread says as much about the poverty of our political culture as about the people who believe them.

Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession

Cannibalism in Neolithic Iberia occurred at different times and reflected different human behaviours.

At Malalmuerzo, the bones of at least 36 people preserve a sequence of cuts, fractures and tooth marks. Set beside cinnabar-stained remains and carefully made skull cups from nearby caves, they show why one word cannot carry so many human stories.

Multiphase human cannibalism in Neolithic southern Iberia: Chronological and taphonomic evidence from Malalmuerzo, Carigüela, and Majolicas Caves

People Don’t Want to Argue with AI, and That Makes Them More Persuaded by It

Persuasion research has long studied the message. A conversation is two-sided, so the question became how people behave when the other side is a chatbot, and why they see so little point in arguing with it.

From People to Prompts

I didn’t write this about the world, I wrote it about myself.

An old, sick man tries to rob a bank to get medical care, and the police send him home. Seven songs ask what it would cost to treat everyone as a neighbor.

Rooming House

The early Supreme Court was a political institution both by design and in practice.

Judges are not politicians, a future chief justice told the Senate in 2005. For the nation's first hundred years that idea would have baffled Americans: justices rode circuit, drafted legislation, advised presidents, backed candidates, and roughly a third of them ran for president from the bench.

The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History

The diversity within the communist world and within particular countries is often forgotten.

Everyday life under communism is usually pictured as total control and silent conformity. Three historians were asked what that picture leaves out. Their answers find life going on beneath it in different places: churches full in Poland and banned in Albania, reformers quietly at work inside Soviet institutes, and Soviet teenagers memorizing Beatles lyrics.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part II

Mysticism without religion, and the fungus that made it possible.

A small brown mushroom travels from ritual use in the mountains of central Mexico to university labs and pharmaceutical boardrooms. Along the way it gathers many of the modern age's hopes, from mystical experience outside religion to the next profitable drug.

Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom: Fungi, Pharmaceuticals, and Mysticism Without Religion