How a debunked Māori voyage to Antarctica, along with other indigenous folklore, became part of the New Zealand educational curriculum New Zealand is known for its enthusiastic embrace of its indigenous cultural heritage. However, this has
When a driverless car makes a mistake, everyone pays attention. A robotaxi stops awkwardly in traffic. A Waymo gets confused near a construction zone. A child runs into the street and is struck. A fleet of empty autonomous cars circles a re…
On this, the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9), it is altogether fitting to revisit the moral question of their development and use. Operating under the best intelligence that indicated t…
“Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is far from clear how to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why d…
Steve Stewart-Williams on Evolutionary Psychology, Pseudoscience, and the Politics of Gender In this conversation with Timur Sevincer and Nikil Mukerji, Steve Stewart-Williams, author of the new book A Billion Years of Sex Differences, disc…
Three-year-old Yu, from the southwestern Japanese island of Kyushu, worried his mother, Kimi. He suffered from nightmares and anxiously searched everywhere for smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. One day he told Kimi that he remembered
Before I dive in, a disclosure: I haven’t eaten meat since I was about 18 years old. That’s right, I’ve intentionally deprived myself of the joys of filet mignon and wagyu. And while most of my reasoning is centered around animal welfare (s…
In many domains, the old moral vocabulary remains in place even as the social pattern has reversed, or at least become far more complicated. Women now outperform men across most of education, earn the majority of advanced degrees, and have
In many domains, the old moral vocabulary remains in place even as the social pattern has reversed, or at least become far more complicated. Women now outperform men across most of education, earn the majority of advanced degrees, and have
Michael Shermer speaks with political scientist Marlene Laruelle about Russia’s turbulent transformation during the 1990s and the rise of Vladimir Putin, why the Kremlin so badly misjudged Ukraine, China’s rise and its ambitions for Taiwan,…
A review of: The Spy Archive: Hidden Lives, Secret Missions, and the History of Espionage by Dexter Ingram (IN Network, 2025) and The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB by Gordon Corera (Pegasus Books, 2026). Has espionag…
For generations, the mystery of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) has been viewed through a narrow lens of mechanical engineering, split between fears of foreign espionage and fantasies of extraterrestrial invasion. By viewing these a…