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Absurdism
Speculative evolution explores the strange paths natural selection might have taken — and what that means for humans.
8mins
"The thing that the nihilist recognizes is that the values he or she holds are not grounded in anything other than their own preferences."
A preview of the latest novel by the National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson.
The plan — conquer China and push west to attack the Ottomans — was peak imperial hubris, as the Spanish themselves eventually realized.
In this excerpt from "The Art of Spending Money," Morgan Housel lays out the spending and financial habits guaranteed to end in regret.
How to look cool in post-war France in black and white photos.
Some books are remembered for their lyrical prose or engaging stories. Others are remembered for simply being weird.
Want to study philosophy but skip some of its heavier tomes? These five novels are a great place to start. (Existential despair guaranteed.)
Common knowledge says the maximum size of a PDF is as big as 40% of Germany — but that’s a gross underestimate.
If humanity lives in an otherwise barren Universe, we'll have to forge philosophy that fills the void.
"It’s only natural for us to get America back," quipped Kim Kielsen, former prime minister of Greenland, in 2019.
Most waves need a medium to travel through. But the way that light and gravitational waves travel shows that space can't be a medium at all.
For J.R.R. Tolkien, the single most important element of a fairy tale was the dramatic reversal of misfortune in the story's ending.
How do you cope when joining a team shatters your confidence? Albert Camus and Harry Stack Sullivan can help.
Whenever something goes wrong — in business as in life — we tend to get cause and effect totally muddled up.
What you can learn about media by parodying it from the print era into the digital age.
Voltaire's wonderful satire, Candide, remains a useful work-life antidote to bogus platitudes and naive optimism.
There are a wide variety of theoretical studies that call our Standard Model of cosmology into question. Here's what they really mean.
In logic, 'reductio ad absurdum' shows how flawed arguments fall apart. Our absurd Universe, however, often defies our intuitive reasoning.
The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 prohibited nations from making new land claims on the continent. But it never mentioned claims from private individuals.
Today, the F-word is enjoying a renaissance the likes of which it hasn’t seen since, well, the Renaissance.
The term "zero-point energy" has at least two meanings, one that is innocuous and one that is a great deal sexier (and scammier).
In a remarkably similar way, conspiracy theories around the world cast doubt on the existence of real places.
"Time Warp" all the way back to 1800s spiritualism, magic performances, and spook shows.
Although we still don't know the question, we know that the answer to life, the Universe, and everything is 42. Here are 5 possibilities.
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a medieval airship!
When it comes to predicting the energy of empty space, the two leading theories disagree by a factor of 100 googol quintillion.
Legend holds that newly elected popes in the Middle Ages had to present their genitals for inspection to confirm that they were male.
The One Ring has its own agency and sentience — and it opens up a wonderful philosophy of things beyond our comprehension.