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  1. Feature
    An animated painting of a white dove in flight, with pink and blue wings against a blue background edged in orange.

    Would Kant's Dove Fly Better in Empty Space?

    In the introduction to the *Critique of Pure Reason*, Kant pictures a dove that feels the air pushing against its wings and imagines it would fly better without any air at all, and says that this is what Plato did when he left the world of the senses for the world of ideas. This explainer takes the figure apart: what the dove is supposed to show about reason and experience, why the physics makes Kant's point better than Kant says, where the comparison fits Plato and where Plato had already made it himself, and how the dove became, in Wittgenstein, a philosopher on ice who wants to walk.

    Philosophy
  2. Feature
    An animated portrait of Benedict de Spinoza, with dark shoulder-length curls and a pale collar against a warm brown background.

    Reading Spinoza's Ethics: Why a Book About Blessedness Looks Like Euclid

    Spinoza's *Ethics*, written in Latin between 1661 and 1675 and published only after his death in 1677, is laid out like a geometry textbook: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, each followed by its proof and the letters Q.E.D. Its subject is God, the mind, the emotions, human bondage, and the way to freedom, and its last page is about blessedness. This introduction asks why a book with that subject was built in that shape, shows a new reader how the first definitions carry the whole structure, and argues that the geometry is not a wrapper around the argument but part of the cure the argument prescribes.

    Philosophy
  3. Feature
    A brightly coloured portrait of a white-haired man with blue eyes, outlined in black against blue, yellow and red geometric shapes.

    The Arrow Herodotus Would Not Talk About

    Abaris the Hyperborean is a man about whom Herodotus declines to tell the story, and the one sentence of refusal is almost everything solid we have: a priest from beyond the north wind who carried, or rode, the arrow of Apollo around the world without eating. This feature follows that arrow through the ancient sources, from Plato's Socrates to Iamblichus's scene in which Abaris hands it to Pythagoras and is shown a golden thigh in return, and then through the modern readings that have made him a Scythian shaman, a Mongolian visitor, or a fiction generated by his own books, to ask what the Greeks were doing when they invented him.

    Ancient Greek & Latin
  4. Feature
    A solitary figure sits on a bench beneath a dark green night sky.

    I Pardon You This Time

    Seneca's account, near the end of his treatise on anger, of the evening examination he learned from Sextius and kept himself: three questions put to the spirit when the lamp is out, read with the sentence on the senses that precedes it, the two examples of pleading that follow it, and the older Pythagorean rule it descends from.

    Philosophy
  5. Feature
    A brightly coloured painting of a skull on a wooden table beside a harbour with sailboats and a green hillside.

    More Things in Heaven and Earth

    Hamlet's "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" is quoted more often than almost any line in the play, usually to rebuke a sceptic. This piece puts it back in its scene, asks what "philosophy" meant in 1600 and why the two earliest good texts disagree about whose philosophy it is, reads Horatio as the man the line is aimed at, and follows the thought back to Plato, who had a name for the kind of thing the Ghost is.

    Philosophy
  6. Feature
    A close-up photograph of a spiderweb catching rainbow-coloured light against a dark green background.

    A Rainbow Up the Spine

    The chart on the yoga-studio wall shows seven discs stacked from red at the base of the spine to violet at the crown, and it is usually captioned "ancient." This feature follows the colours back through the first English translation of the Sanskrit text that fixed the seven-chakra system, Sir John Woodroffe's The Serpent Power of 1919, and finds that the text has colours of its own, crimson, vermilion, rain-cloud, smoke, and moonlight, but no rainbow; the spectrum was added in the twentieth-century West. The piece explains where it came from, what the old text was for, and what the modern chart keeps and changes.

    New Age
  7. Feature
    Two figures standing close together in an expressive drawing of interwoven blue, red, orange, white, and black lines.

    How Two Brothers Kept One Diary

    The Goncourt journal says "I" for forty-five years, and for the first nineteen of them the "I" was two men, one of whom held the pen while both dictated. Edmond’s preface of 1872 explains how that worked, what the brothers thought they were doing to the people they wrote about, and why the diary could only be published, in his lifetime, in part.

    Journals, Notebooks & Fragments
  8. Feature
    Moonlight breaking through blue clouds and reflecting across the sea above a coastal town at night.

    A Storehouse Kept in Its Original Disorder

    Aulus Gellius spent the winter nights of a year in Attica copying out whatever struck him in the books he read and the talk he heard, and then, unusually, published the notes in the order he had made them. His preface to the Attic Nights is the earliest full account we have of what a commonplace book is for, and the best guide to reading one.

    Journals, Notebooks & Fragments
  11. Feature
    Illustration of Socrates in profile, with the Athenian Acropolis, harbour and a red-sailed boat behind him, in blue, red and cream.

    Socrates Comes Home From Potidaea

    Plato’s *Charmides* begins with a soldier back from a siege walking into a wrestling school and being asked who died. The siege was Potidaea, one of the sparks of the Peloponnesian War, and following that first sentence outward, into the history it names and the futures of the men in the room, changes how the conversation about self-restraint that follows should be read.

    Philosophy
  12. Art History
    A woman sleeps on white linen beneath marble columns, holding a fan. Striped red-and-cream fabric lies across the couch, two doves perch on a stone ledge, and a wooded landscape extends beyond.
    Félix Auguste Clément, La Sieste, also called Femme romaine endormie, 1858–59. Canvas, 118 × 197 cm. Signed at the right, on the parapet, in red: “F. Clement. / Rome 1859.” Whereabouts unknown since 1897.

    A Study He Calls the Siesta

    Félix Auguste Clément (1826–1888), *La Sieste* (*Femme romaine endormie*), 1858–59. Canvas, 118 × 197 cm. Second-year envoi from the Académie de France à Rome; exhibited at the Villa Medici in April 1859, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris that autumn, and at the Salon of 1861 (no. 634). Whereabouts unknown.

    Art History#FélixAugusteClément#LaSieste#FrenchPainting#Rome#Sleep#NineteenthCentury
  13. Feature
    A red puppet king wearing a yellow crown hangs from thin strings against a green background, in a textured illustration with irregular cream paper edges.

    The Fifth String

    An original fable, told the way the old literary fairy tales are told: a puppet king in a toyshop window wants to stand up without strings, and learns, after a flood and a fisherman's daughter and a one-eyed gull, that there was a fifth string all along, too fine to see, which does not pull.

    Fairy Tales
  14. Feature
    A richly illustrated juniper tree with a twisting blue-green trunk, red berries, and a small bird beside its roots against a golden yellow background.

    The Song the Bird Would Not Sing Twice for Nothing

    In the Grimms' "The Juniper Tree" (KHM 47), a murdered boy returns as a bird and sings the story of his own death, first to strangers and then under his family's windows. This feature follows that seven-line song through the tale, and through the painter Philipp Otto Runge's part in writing it down, to show how a song can carry a story of murder toward judgement, restitution and return.

    Fairy Tales
  15. Feature
    The word Karma painted in vivid red brush lettering with an underline and scattered flecks on a pale cream background.

    The Word Karma Meant Before It Meant Payback

    "Karma" in everyday English means what goes around comes around: the universe keeping score. The Sanskrit word it comes from means "deed," and the two oldest texts in which it became a doctrine, an Upanishad and the *Bhagavad Gita*, use it to say something almost the opposite of the modern slogan. This explainer follows the word from its root, through the sentence in which it first became a law of moral cause, to the Gita's instruction to act without any concern for what comes back, and shows where the popular sense fits the sources and where it leaves them.

    New Age
  16. Book Review
    A golden common carp leaps out of blue water, with droplets trailing from its fins and tail.

    The Inland Cities

    M. John Harrison's Goldsmiths Prize-winning novel follows two drifting middle-aged people, one by the Thames and one above the Severn Gorge, while something old and not quite human surfaces through the damp of Brexit-era England. A study guide and review in one, covering the story, the characters and key words, the novel chapter by chapter, its critics, and Charles Kingsley's sunken land.

    Book Reviews
  17. Book Review
    The Parthenon on the Acropolis above cypress trees and orange foliage beneath a green-blue sky.

    The Polis Has Decided

    John Ma follows the Greek city-state across fifteen centuries and moves its prime from classical Athens to the centuries after about 350 BC. A study guide and review in one, covering the argument, the key terms and figures, the book chapter by chapter, its critics, and what became of the idea of the polis.

    Book Reviews
  18. Feature
    A figure’s shadow amid blue water and rippling bands of light.

    The Old English Refrain Nobody Can Quite Translate

    “Deor,” a forty-two-line poem in the tenth-century Exeter Book, ends each of its six stanzas with the refrain þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg—often translated “that passed over, so may this.” Its grammar resists a simple English equivalent. This essay follows the poem’s legendary sorrows and asks what its ambiguous promise can offer someone still waiting for grief to pass.

    Medieval
  19. Feature
    Little Red Riding Hood in a red cloak faces the looming dark shape of a wolf in a brown forest.

    Perrault's Morals: A Guide to the Fairy Tale That Explains Itself

    In Charles Perrault's collection of 1697, the book that gave the world its Cinderella, Puss in Boots, and Sleeping Beauty, every tale ends with a rhymed "Moral," and the morals are stranger than the tales. This introduction explains where the book came from, why its morals are addressed to a different audience from its stories, and how to read two of them, the one that follows a Red Riding Hood who is never rescued and the pair that follow Bluebeard, so that the gap between the story and its lesson becomes the most interesting thing on the page.

    Fairy Tales
  20. Research Note

    “As Above, So Below”: Following a Slogan Back to Its Source

    The four-word formula at the heart of much modern esoteric and New Age writing is usually presented as the teaching of an Egyptian sage older than Moses. Tracing it backwards, from a 1908 Chicago book through a Victorian occultist and Isaac Newton’s notebooks to a ninth-century Arabic treatise, shows that the saying is old, that its familiar wording is not, and that its meaning changed at almost every stop.

    New Age