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Titans in the landscape

The smile catchers

From facial recognition to emojis in apps, find out how the monitoring of emotions is used to get more out of workers.

From chef’s whites to medical scrubs

Meet the machinists who have rapidly switched from making clothing for hospitality staff to uniforms for hospital workers.

How to play in secret

In secret games the strangers around you are playing too. They just don’t know it. Read on for some great ideas for undercover fun at work, school – or almost anywhere.

The spectacle maker

Born into the eyewear business 80 years ago, Lawrence Jenkin still designs and makes glasses, while supporting and inspiring the generations of designers following him.

The man who remembers everything

Tilney1 can remember his life in minute detail, but can’t control the incessant intrusion of thoughts and images from the past. As cuts to mental health services isolate him more and more, a crisis approaches.

The art of soundproof design

Too much noise is more than annoying – it has serious negative effects on health and cognitive ability. Find out how designers and architects are mitigating the downsides of sound.

The shifting shape of language

Author Jessica Andrews explores how her brother’s deafness has influenced her relationship with words and the world.

The ugly truth about fast fashion

Aja Barber reflects on her relationship with fast fashion, outlines its polluting and destructive effects, and shares the small, personal changes we can make that could help.

The cook who became a pariah

New York, 1907. Mary Mallon spreads infection, unaware that her name will one day become synonymous with typhoid.

Bringing Braille back to the modern world

For anyone who thinks Braille is so last century, read on. New tech is helping dust Braille down and bring it to today’s visually impaired people.

The 200-year search for normal people

Sarah Chaney poses the question we’ve likely all asked at some point in our lives: 'Am I normal?’, and explores whether normality even exists.

The unearthly children of science fiction’s Cold War

In the 1950s a new figure emerged in British novels, film and television: a disturbing young alien that revealed postwar society’s fear of the unruly power of teenagers.

Guide dogs or good dogs from the Middle Ages

Medieval illustrations often show blind people, sometimes with dogs. But working out whether these were actually guide dogs involves a mix of detailed detective work and expert speculation.

Inside the mind of George Vasey, co-curator of Misbehaving Bodies

Discover how curator George Vasey honoured the approaches of Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery, who mischievously subvert clichés around illness and death.

Sockets and stumps

Historian Emily Mayhew has met soldiers who have survived the seemingly unsurvivable. Here, she explores the part prosthetics play in the process of military rehabilitation.

Healing hearts and saving lives

Cardiology is a prestigious specialism, known for its life-saving, heroic staff. But a doctor’s training eventually reveals other, less obvious ways to save lives.

Invisibility

Why do menopausal women feel invisible? Because nobody talks about menopause or because society doesn't value older women?

Sex work and critical campaigners

When campaigners filmed secretly in the club where she worked, exotic dancer Ella Smith felt frightened and degraded. Here she speaks out about the attack on her livelihood.

When everyday environments become anxious spaces

Social anxiety disorder isolates those who experience it. Part of the solution is to design public spaces with mental health in mind.

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.

This is what changed my approach to interior design

An interior designer examines how emotions and cognitive activity influenced her designs, and argues that spaces reflect the people within.

Egg Inc.

Are there better ways of expressing power in the workplace and in our relations with each other?

Society, not Covid-19, makes us vulnerable

Rick Burgess coped with the death of his mother in February 2020 by immersing himself in the task of protecting his community from Covid-19 and challenging the government's failure to protect and support elderly and Disabled people during the pandemic.

Notes upon arrival

In an effort to feel at home back in the country of her birth, poet Bhanu Kapil recognises the small revelations of nature in a chilly UK spring as a way to reconnect.