Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Philip Laughlin
The Art of Pondering Distant Future Earths
Stretching the mind across time can help us become more responsible planetary stewards and foster empathy across generations. Listen to this article Brought to you by Curio, an MIT Press partner ... The word has been out for decades: We were born on a damaged planet careening toward environmental collapse. Yet our intellects are poorly equipped to grasp the scale of the Earth’s ecological death spiral. We strain to picture how, in just a few decades, climate change may displace entire populations.
A Cognitive History of Numerals
Photo: Elizabeth Kay/Unsplash Those of us who learned arithmetic using pen and paper, working with the ten digits 0-9 and place value, may take for granted that this is the way it’s always been done, or at least the way it ought to be done. But if you think of the amount of time and energy spent in the early school years just to teach place value, you’ll realise that this sort of numeracy is not preordained.
What’s Behind the U.S. War on Science?
An anthropologist looks to Finland to argue that solutions must go far beyond reversing Trump’s policies. Biden faces a grand challenge: regaining trust in science among those who have lost faith in expertise itself. Photo by Jose M., via Unsplash In U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s victory speech last November, he vowed his administration would “marshal the forces of science” to take bold action against climate change and the pandemic.
Re-counting the Cognitive History of Numerals
Linguistic and cognitive anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis reckons with numbers and the mind. Those of us who learned arithmetic using pen and paper, working with the ten digits 0–9 and place value, may take for granted that this is the way it’s always been done, or at least the way it ought to be done. But if you think of the amount of time and energy spent in the early school years just to teach place value, you’ll realize that this sort of numeracy is not preordained.
Is Consciousness Everywhere?
Experience is in unexpected places, including in all animals, large and small, and perhaps even in brute matter itself. Honey bees can recognize faces, communicate the location and quality of food sources to their sisters via the waggle dance, and navigate complex mazes with the help of cues they store in short-term memory.
Our moral fate: Allen Buchanan on escaping tribalism
Looked at in one way, human history can be viewed as a depressing litany of inhumane events: war, slavery, genocide, and political persecution. Looked at in another way, one can clearly see the outlines of moral progress that has been made. In fact, two great expansions of the "moral circle" have occurred in just the past couple of centuries. The first was the shift from "tribal rights" to universal human rights.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Philip
Contact Philip, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack