- Article
- Article
Finding solidarity in arachnophobia
Arachnophobia is very different from just disliking spiders. Izzie Price shares the reality of having the phobia, and explores its likely origins.
- In pictures
- In pictures
Southern Italy’s centuries-long dancing mania
How the symptom of a terrifying sickness became a lively folk dance in southern Italy.
- Article
- Article
Ken’s ten: looking back at ten years of Wellcome Collection
Wellcome Collection founder Ken Arnold picks his favourite exhibits.
- Long read
- Long read
The ambivalence of air
Daisy Lafarge investigates the effects of air quality and pressure on body and mind, exploring air as cure, but one with contradictions.
- Article
- Article
Plant portraits
The beautiful and mysterious illustrations in medieval herbals convey a wealth of knowledge about the plants they portray.
- Article
- Article
Sex in graphic novels
Sex and sexuality have long been explored in the history of the graphic novel.
- Article
- Article
Can our sexual desires be transformed?
In the 1950s, many psychiatrists thought that homosexuality could be reformed. One found that it couldn’t – and his discoveries led to a change in the law.
- Book extract
- Book extract
How to manage your Schadenfreude
Do you sometimes enjoy witnessing others’ distress? Tiffany Watt Smith suggests five ways to manage - and even embrace - the perplexing emotion of Schadenfreude.
- Book extract
- Book extract
Tracing the roots of our fears and fixations
Kate Summerscale explores the history of our anxieties and compulsions, and the new phobias and manias that are always emerging.
- Book extract
- Book extract
Eating their own kind
In his grisly history of cannibalism, zoologist Bill Schutt asks what drives an animal to feast on its own flesh and blood.
- Long read
- Long read
Our complicated love affair with light
Sunlight is essential, but our relationship with artificial light is less clear cut. It expands what’s possible; it also obscures and polices. In this long read, Lauren Collee pits light against night, and reveals the shady places in between.