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Meet the climate emergency

Find out what led Yinka Shonibare to create the compelling artwork ‘Refugee Astronaut’.

Enduring taboos and the future of skin bleaching

Many condemn skin bleaching in public while secretly lightening their own complexions. To break away from these taboos, we need honest information and open conversation.

The desire for lighter skin

Discover why some Black people feel more attractive with lighter skin. Ngunan Adamu speaks to three women who explain how they got hooked on skin bleaching.

How writing helps me manage schizophrenia

Desperate housewives and suburban neurosis

Discover how a pioneering health centre replaced housewives’ supposedly empty home lives with a social space that encouraged healthy child rearing.

Would you like to buy a unicorn?

The story behind why somebody tried to sell Henry Wellcome a unicorn head in 1928.

A little wildness

To salve her longing for a dog, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan chose a puppy. She found that, despite centuries of domestication, her dog still retains aspects of her wild ancestry.

Being trans in the world of sex work

Unstable. Predatory. Risk takers. Dr Adrienne Macartney sheds stark light on the hostile and negative assumptions faced by trans sex workers.

How not to play

Here are seven ways to sidestep doing as you’re told in a game. But strangely, they seem to be as much a part of playing as the game itself.

London, city of lost hospitals

Come on the trail of hundreds of ghost hospitals, whose remnants hold clues to medical treatments of the past.

Exceptional talent and the trouble with IQ tests

Is a high IQ really a mark of genius, or does something else explain the exceptional?

The yogi as hermit, warrior, criminal and showman

How the modern world changed the life and reputation of the yogi.

Ginger’s role in cures and courtroom battles

Some people will use a dose of ginger to help with hangovers – but it hasn’t always been a friend to the thirsty.

‘Jessy’, a film about cerebral palsy

How the 1950s British film industry portrayed this disease.

Milk trails round Euston

Where cows once grazed near Wellcome Collection in London, baristas now froth their milk. Esther Leslie uncovers Euston’s dairy-based urban history.

Beyond a green carpet

Plant ecologist Sara Middleton explores the amazing symbiotic relationships between the species that make up grasslands, and considers their future as rain becomes more scarce.

Tracing the toxic story of tear gas

Investigating tear gas – from factory to Black Lives Matter protest – Imani Jacqueline Brown uncovers a toxic legacy where pollution, violence and racism are intimately entwined.

Close encounters of the spiritualist kind

When it comes to practical and emotional advice, Daphne heeds the words of her lost loved ones. Find out how a spiritualist medium helps her stay in touch.

The indelible harm caused by conversion therapy

With first-hand evidence from two powerful testimonies, neurologist Jules Montague explores the destructive history of conversion therapy, a punitive treatment designed to ‘cure’ people of homosexuality.

The history of brainwashing

Is it possible to control what other people think? In this abridged extract from his book ‘Brainwashed’, psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick offers us a new history of thought control.

Delusional recycling and the problem with plastic

Many of us are guilty of wishful thinking when it comes to our rubbish. Arianne Shahvisi exposes shaky recycling infrastructure and overseas dumping, arguing for an end to waste colonialism.

The child whose town rejected vaccines

Gloucester, 1896. Ethel Cromwell is taken ill at the height of Britain’s last great smallpox epidemic.

Why are women more willing donors than men?

Why is there a gender imbalance when it comes to the donation of organs, blood and tissue, and what can be done about it?

Yoga gets physical

Modern yoga owes a debt to the physical culture movement that created a world obsessed with health and fitness.

The healing power of breathing

The healing powers of different breathing methods are said to help with a range of health challenges, from asthma to PTSD. Effie Webb traces their spiritual origins and explores the modern proliferation of breathwork therapies.