The latest PISA assessment presents an unusually stark picture of educational performance. More than 760,000 15-year-old students across 91 participating countries and economies were assessed, producing evidence of broad declines in some
We know that humans live relatively long lives, and we certainly know that we spend a larger proportion of those lives as children than other species. The question remains: how did we
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Millions of years ago, in the Miocene Epoch (23 to 5.3 million years ago), about 100 species of apes roamed Europe, Asia, and Africa. Just a few million years later, this number
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Why were Clean Slates so important to Bronze Age societies? From the third millennium in Mesopotamia, people were aware that debt pressures, if left to accumulate unchecked, would distort normal fiscal and
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You must have seen people around you passionately following certain ideologies, firmly entrenched in their beliefs and unwilling to consider alternative perspectives. It’s a common sight in today’s world, and it raises
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Considering whether modern states are empires tells us almost nothing useful about either modern states or empires. A better question is what policies and structures pioneered by empires are still employed by
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Empires historically possessed a unique ability to organize diversity and successfully rule over people quite different from one another. The national states that succeeded them in Europe were organized on the basis
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The UK Government has announced it will open the AI Safety Institute (AISI) in the US. The office, due to open in the summer of 2024, will be located in San Francisco
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You might be wondering … what’s it like to be the graduation speaker on an American college campus these days? On Monday evening, I got the chance to find out. Columbia University’s
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This marks the final installment of a series of articles by Ian James Kidd on Buddhism and social activism. We extend our gratitude to both the author and the editor of Daily
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In my book “The Storm Before the Calm,” I wrote that the United States is headed into institutional and socio-economic crises. The institutional crisis, in my view, would primarily concern the way
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