September 2023

Mary Wollstonecraft has had something of a revival in recent years. Though considered the mother of first-wave feminism, the 18th-century philosopher long endured her share of trolls refusing to take her seriously. She was dubbed a “hyena in a petticoat” by contemporary politician and writer Horace Walpole, accused of being “unsexed”, unladylike, and of having […]

“ChatGPT is a natural language generation platform based on the OpenAI GPT-3 language model.” Why did you believe the above statement? A simple answer is that you trust the author of this article (or perhaps the editor). We cannot verify everything we are told, so we regularly trust the testimony of friends, strangers, “experts” and institutions. Trusting

Warning: the following article contains spoilers for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. Having enlisted an old friend to babysit our little girls, my husband and I hopped on the bus to see Everything, Everywhere, All at Once as our almost once-in-a-year date film. In the cinema, I started to wonder: why on earth I am

Shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I set aside my academic work as a fellow in public philosophy to report on civilian life in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities and to examine the state of higher education in Ukraine. Public philosophy, in dialogue with other forms of scholarship, journalism and thinking, translates esoteric ideas into accessible writing

Baseball moves very fast. That’s how it seems to me, anyway. Just try coaching a Little League game; decisions pile up like branches on a tree, as tactical and strategic considerations multiply. And as a player, when it’s time to act, you need to do so before you even get to the “t” in “think,”

One of the ways tech billionaire Elon Musk attracts supporters is the vision he seems to have for the future: people driving fully autonomous electric vehicles, colonizing other planets and even merging their brains with artificial intelligence. Part of such notions’ appeal may be the argument that they’re not just exciting, or profitable, but would benefit humanity as

A common complaint in America today is that politics and even society as a whole are broken. Critics point out endless lists of what should be fixed: the complexity of the tax code, or immigration reform, or the inefficiency of government. But each dilemma usually comes down to polarized deadlock between two competing visions and everyone’s conviction that

Ruben Östlund’s 2022 film Triangle of Sadness has attracted both praise and criticism as a satire of the world’s rich. Triangle of Sadness follows the familiar plot of a castaway story. A luxury cruise ship capsizes after a disastrous drinking session between the captain (an American communist) and a passenger (a Russian capitalist) in the

The 2024 presidential election is still a year and a half away, but it can feel much closer: President Joe Biden has made his reelection bid official, presumed candidates are giving out-of-state speeches, pundits are already weighing in on nomination hopefuls, and social media is, as ever, a mess of people trying to persuade strangers to back their

While we may enjoy the company of companion animals or a fleeting encounter with wildlife, many people believe humans have a superior consciousness of the world we live in. Every now and then, though, new study findings about the surprising intelligence of other animals reignite this debate. Recently, two German philosophers, Professor Leonard Dung and