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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
Successful romantic relationships require desire, but that desire doesn't have to be sexual.
Scientology, QAnon, and Heaven’s Gate: why do we seek healing from cults?
There is much more to the Kama Sutra than just sex. It's a guide to anyone wanting more pleasure in life, however they take it.
Most cities reeked of death, defecation, and industrial waste. Still, focusing only on stench means turning a blind eye (or nose) to the many other smells that helped shape human history.
Social media distorts the reality of the public sphere.
An optical telescope with a massive 20-foot (6-meter) mirror has an eye-popping price tag of $11 billion.
There have been some 6,000 Great Lakes shipwrecks, which have claimed an estimated 30,000 lives. These maps show some of them.
To Vladimir Putin, a young KGB colonel at the time, the decision was a colossal mistake.
Scientists have known blobs existed for a long time, but how they have behaved over Earth’s history has been an open question.
Many people perceive the struggle to understand our Universe as a battle between science and God. But this is a false dichotomy.
Chess was once blamed for triggering mental health problems, including suicide and even murder. Today, the same is said of video games.
The results of a 2021 study suggest that the world's most powerful psychedelic may be an underutilized peace-building tool.
The idea of "absolute time" was our default for millennia. But time is relative, as gravity and motion both cause time to dilate.
Scientists across a range of disciplines have helped solve Darwin's dilemma.
The story of how Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were made isn't a universal one. Some gas giants were built different.
From Brahms to Tchaikovsky, here's a curated list of composers whose music has shaped the classical canon.
It's possible to measure philosophy's progress in two ways. But is that really the point?
While there is more to North Korean cinema than meets the eye, the country’s film industry ultimately amounts to little more than a mouthpiece for the ruling Kim dynasty.
On Nov. 13, 1946, a scientist dropped crushed dry ice from a plane into supercooled stratus clouds.
Mutations that confer malaria resistance occur more frequently in people who live in regions where the disease is endemic.