Research on art, media, religion, language, and history. Coverage follows how ideas, beliefs, and identities move through societies.
Robert Boatright reads the Showa era Godzilla films of 1954 to 1975 against the first Trump presidency and its aftermath, mapping Liz Cheney onto Mothra and Ron DeSantis onto Mechagodzilla, and calls the exercise exploratory rather than settled.
New modelling in Science puts the peak at roughly ten times today’s diversity between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago — and finds the collapse began with the first multinational empires, not European colonialism. The pre-agricultural world, it turns out, had fewer languages than we do now. The authors call it a coarse global model rather than a census.
Bows and maces kept turning up in royal women’s tombs at Dahshur, and no one could say whether they were props or kit. A reassessment of six skeletons found the archery signature — thickened upper-arm and grip muscles — matching the weapons each woman was buried holding.
Brain condition challenges David Hume’s claim that abstract thought depends on mental images, forcing philosophers to reconsider how minds handle ideas like justice and geometry.
People testing AI chatbots trained on the dead preferred emotional “reincarnation” over accuracy, while warning the technology could deepen grief.
A new psychology scale measures the belief that truth is personal and felt. Researchers say it may help explain why some people distrust science.