culture

The book Buddha Takes the Mound delivers an engaging and sophisticated account of Buddhism’s worldview through the prism of baseball.

Engaging in a brief mindfulness exercise made people who identified “I/me” words 33% less likely to volunteer.

Studio Ghibli movies celebrate the natural world using a very Japanese mixture of Shinto, Buddhist, and Daoist themes.

In 1966, Disney announced his intention to build Epcot, an acronym for “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.”

Computer Space lacked a critical ingredient that the other games possessed: gravity.

Without Benjamin List and David MacMillan, chemists would still be using metals and enzymes to catalyze chemical reactions.

The Swedish Academy honored the writer for his uncompromising inquiry into the lasting consequences of Africa’s colonization.

Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series helped inspire the field of social physics, which uses math to understand crowd behavior.

A new study suggests that depressed people may prefer a Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan song to one from The Beach Boys or One Direction.

Bolsheviks planned to erect a towering monument to the socialist cause, but their quixotic ideas never got off the ground.

Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K448) can help reduce seizures in epilepsy patients.

The German artist painted death as it appeared in life – omnipresent and hidden in plain sight.

AI tried to write music. It wasn’t exactly The Beatles.

Ever wondered what oxytocin receptor proteins sound like?

A 5,300-year-old mummy teaches us the global history of tattoos.

As Russia’s youth welcomed a new era of capitalism in the 1990s, their parents and grandparents clung to fleeting memories of Soviet life.

Due to deteriorating health, all Beethoven left behind for his final symphony were some musical sketches.

An unexpected finding shows us how little we know about the early human story in our region.

In the perilous mountains of Tibet, archaeologists unearthed ancient hand and footprints that seem to be the creative work of children.

A future kitchen appliance could make it possible to 3D-print entirely new recipes and cook them with lasers.

This is a time for family and friends to gather, watch the full moon and eat mooncakes and other delicacies.

Journey to the West is rightly considered one of the most influential novels ever written, but the real reason for its success may be its charismatic poster-boy: The Monkey King.

What started as a viral case of public shaming has morphed into a dark story involving internet sleuths, a criminal network, and the suspicious death of a 62-year-old man in St. Louis.

Do right and wrong depend on culture, or does morality transcend place and time?

Our chart shows new additions since 1984 that have stuck around.

For the ancients, hospitality was an inviolable law enforced by gods and priests and anyone else with the power to make you pay dearly for mistreating a stranger.

Australian parrots have worked out how to open trash bins, and the trick is spreading across Sydney.

All the latest titles from the experts at MIT.

For decades, researchers have proposed that climate change and human-caused environmental destruction led to demographic collapse on Easter Island. That’s probably false, according to new research.

We eat 50 billion chickens every year. Is there a better way?