Located in the Thar Desert, the dynamic city of Jodhpur, India breaks the starkness of its surroundings with intense punches of color. The metropolis is cloaked in blue not just for aesthetic purposes; the hue historically demarcated the residence of the Brahmin, a caste of priests and protectors, and thus was meant to deter looters should the city ever come under siege.

Starting in the 1970s, a cohort of enterprising women set out to bring feminism and sex-positivity to the adult-toy industry. By Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite.

The study of languages has long been prone to nonsense. Why is linguistics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots? By Gaston Dorren.

A young woman, wearing a traditional full-length Amish dress and white bonnet, stepped away from a farmer’s market, opened her palm and revealed a smartphone... By Kevin Granville, Ashley Gilbertson.

Culture critic Beth Daniels argues the cartoon moose even allowed viewers to reckon with nuclear war.

She tried to dispose of the unflushable waste out of a window and got stuck trying to get it back.

Kokpar and the Future of Kazakhstan. By Will Boast.

I'm going to try to do something that's generally not recommended on the internet: I'm going to try to discuss a complicated issue that has many nuances and gray areas. That often fails, because all too often people online immediately...

Ways that terrorist groups end: Converted into a legitimate political process. (Negotiation) 43%; Law enforcement took out 40 percent. Ten percent won. Only 7 percent, were taken out by military force.

Today, no one thinks there has been a stage in humanity when some colours were not yet being perceived. Plato’s list of primary colours includes white, black, red, and the ‘brilliant and shining’, to us, not a colour at all.

Stigma continues to inform legal, social and cultural attitudes towards sex work and remains a barrier to health, human rights and justice. Developing stigma indicators is one step towards change.

As the US press and social media came alive in condemnation as a result of the Hobby Lobby smuggling case, I couldn’t help but notice that while the hashtag #HobbyLobbyisISIS is noticeably attention-grabbing the more important facet of the “is-that-object-looted” puzzle was still being overlooked. By Lynda Albertson. (July 9, 2017)

Rather than viewing China as a monolith, the country can be understood as twelve distinct regions. First in a series. By John Lee.

In the rural heartland of south-west China, a traditional ceremony with molten iron is performed to bring good luck for the harvest. Watch the video to find out more.

Last week, I (like probably many of you) saw the news that the famous (or infamous, depending on your viewpoint) fact checking website "Snopes" was crowdfunding on GoFundMe, saying that it needed to raise money as soon as possible, because...

Implicit racial bias, measured across Europe.

released under different names

Say you're driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behaviour like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.

It may be that familiarity breeds contempt, and if that’s so, we should all be very glad of the wealth of excellent documentaries correcting the monolithic commercial story of punk, which goes something like this:

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Baywatch were never going to be critical darlings. In the fallout, are Hollywood producers blaming the writers? The actors? Themselves? (Of course not.) No, they are reportedly blaming Rotten Tomatoes.

No nation can claim chess as its own. It is a truly global game. Yet as this map shows, it too has a history, and a geography.

Reissued on its 20th anniversary, the band’s third album still sends chills.

A deep-rooted crisis in education, and a long cultural and political decline, is what got us here. There's hope!

The right loves to accusingly demand, “Do you love this country?” We need the confidence to answer, “I love the parts you’re trying to destroy.” By Jon Schwarz.

The online game of geocaching shows there are ways to create value online that are not purely financial.

Robert McCrum has reached a verdict on his selection of the 100 greatest novels written in English. Take a look at his list

Cleaning up the Uffington Horse is the neigh-borly thing to do. By Emily Cleaver.

A new memoir lends a fresh perspective to one of the great mysteries of modern linguistics.

A new book argues that thought and knowledge are community efforts. By Gareth Cook. (June 20, 2017)

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes had his annual earnings call this morning, in which he discussed all sorts of money-related things that are very boring and are only important to people who have stupid things like “stocks” and “investment portfolios” and “retirement strategies.” But he also discussed Game of Thrones and piracy, and in doing so, he said this, which I kind of love.

In December 2016, at a rally in North Carolina, a 12-year-old girl looked at then candidate Donald Trump, "I'm scared," she said. “What are you going to do to protect this country?” “You know what, darling?” Trump replied. “You’re not going to be scared anymore. They’re going to be scared.”

Newscasters and Stephen Colbert seem to think so.

Scientists have claimed that humans have an innate, universal preference for some chords over others—but a study of remote villagers suggests otherwise. By Ed Yong.

On 12 July 1967, Florida newspaper the St Petersburg Times had an eye-catching front-page headline: “Dame Margot, Nureyev seized in hippie raid.” Police had busted a party in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, and unexpectedly ensnared two world-famous gatecrashers: Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, who had been in the city all of four hours. “Marijuana cigarettes were found at the scene,” noted the paper, although the two ballet dancers had to be released as there was no evidence that they had been smoking them. A high-spirited Nureyev had, however, performed a jeté into the back of a police van.

A remote mountain village once was home to hundreds. Now it has just 30 residents. Tsukimi Ayano, 67, is one of the younger ones. She has repopulated the village by making scarecrow-like figures.