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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
We often laugh at inappropriate things, but not when we are emotionally invested. Laughter cannot be serious. So, can we ever laugh at death?
When you're a genius, how do you make ends meet?
The role of the Devil’s advocate was to argue against the beatification of mystics. Contrary to popular belief, they did not wear Prada.
It is all too easy for humans to fall into the cognitive trap of thinking that an entity that can use language fluently is sentient or intelligent.
Long before tobacco arrived from the Americas, ancient civilizations in the Old World were getting high off hemp smoke and opium.
One might think that people who started poor and became rich might be more sensitive to the plights of the poor. Not so, suggests a new study.
It might seem like science and faith are at war, but the two have a historical synergy that extends back in time for centuries.
John Templeton Foundation
Genetic analysis reveals that a specimen collected in 2019 is the same subspecies as one caught more than a century earlier.
Science and the sacred both allow us to retain our sense of wonder, even as disaster seems to swirl around us.
Three out of four Russians accused of witchcraft were men.
The way to understand the earliest moments of creation is to recreate those conditions and study them. Why would we stop now?
Symbolic gestures often speak to our psyche in ways no rational action could ever speak to our intellect.
The Netflix show about a Birmingham crime family and their personal demons concluded earlier this month.
The architecture and infrastructure found may well have required the greatest amount of skilled labor of any construction from the same time period in the entire continent.
The weird and wild ways mummy fever swept through Europe.
Unlike other world rulers, Genghis Khan was laid to rest not inside an elaborate mausoleum but an unmarked grave somewhere in Mongolia. Maybe.
Modern cosmology conjectures different possible fates for the Universe and thus for the end of time. Details depend on which model is right.
From the explosions themselves to their unique and vibrant colors, the fireworks displays we adore require quantum physics.
Before gunpowder was introduced to the West, medieval Arabs devised grenades using crockery.
1859's Carrington event gave us a preview of how catastrophic the Sun could be for humanity. But it could get even worse than we imagined.