The Philosophers Hiding Inside Our Dystopian Films
Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Foucault never watched The Matrix or The Hunger Games, but their ideas about power still explain what happens on screen.
Philosophy
Big ideas made simple — Stoicism, existentialism, and the questions worth sitting with, brought down to the scale of an ordinary life.
Raskolnikov, Oldboy, and the Prison You Build Yourself
Crime and Punishment's Raskolnikov and Oldboy's Oh Dae-su are locked up in very different ways, but both show that freedom means facing…
Nietzsche’s Case That Bad Philosophy Is Often Fatigue
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche argues the mind is a servant of the body, and that gloomy philosophies are often symptoms of…
What Assassin’s Creed Owes to Sartre’s Idea of Freedom
The real history of Hassan-i Sabbah and the Nizaris behind Assassin's Creed, and how its 'nothing is true' creed echoes Sartre's Being…
Why Unfinished Things Outlast What’s Complete
Sartre, Kafka, and Michelangelo's Non-Finito sculptures make the same case: a finished work closes as a possibility, but what's left open keeps…
From Turing’s Question to the Age of Machine Learning
Tracing artificial intelligence from Aristotle's logic and Turing's famous question through the Dartmouth Workshop and the AI winter that followed.
Descartes on Why Your Emotions Are Not the Enemy
Descartes argued in The Passions of the Soul that emotions are physical signals, not flaws — the mind's job is to understand…
Person of Interest and the Illusion of Free Choice
If an algorithm can predict your next move from your likes and pauses, the real question isn't who's watching — it's whether…
The Truman Show, Black Mirror, and Living Inside a Copy
From The Truman Show to Black Mirror to Her, four films ask the same question: if a feeling is real to you,…