But its best years are behind it, according to a new book.

“Si recte calculum ponas, ubique naufragium est.” (If you reckon correctly, shipwreck is everywhere.) — Gaius Petronius. By A.E. Stallings.

The highest ideals of Locke, Hume and Kant were first proposed more than a century earlier by an Ethiopian in a cave. By Dag Herbjørnsrud.

The largest known world map of its time—made of 60 individual sheets—can finally be seen as the mapmaker intended. By Greg Miller.

He couldn’t save the Roman republic, but his writing crossed centuries to help inspire ours. By E.J. Hutchinson.

Could a 2,300-year-old Graeco-Roman philosophy be the key to a happy 21st-century life? By Massimo Pigliucci.

The Histoire mondiale opens the door to that most alluring of prospects: a genuinely universal republican vision of Frenchness. By Sudhir Hazareesingh.

The modes of perception and living that we attribute to Instagram are rooted in a much older aesthetic of the picturesque. By Daniel Penny.

Last month, in the process of exploring the awkward fact that most people in today’s industrial world have never learned how to think, I talked at some length about thoughtstoppers: those crisp little words or phrases that combine absurdity and powerful emotions to short-circuit the thinking process... By John Michael Greer.

Just in case you want to work “synecdoche” into casual conversation. By Alex Naidus.

An Interview with Prop Anon by R.U. Sirius.

How Stephen F. Cohen became the most controversial Russia expert in America. By “Tailgunner” Jordan Michael Smith.

He is the dramatic thunderstorm at the heart of philosophy and his provocation is more valuable than ever. By Julian Baggini.

But the theft and erasure of Sabina Spielrein’s intellectual legacy by the psychoanalytic establishment may be an even more troubling crime. By Phyllis Chesler.

Seneca thought that anger is a temporary madness, and that even when justified, we should never act on the basis of it. By Massimo Pigliucci.

A popular symbol of protest today, Guy Fawkes was first the face of treason because of his role in the murderous Gunpowder Plot of 1605. By James Sharpe.

Friday was the 23rd of October and the Internet sceptics had a field day mocking one of their favourite punching bags James Ussher (1581 – 1656) Archbishop of Armagh. By Thony Christie.

Historical evidence simply does not support such contentions. Indeed, it suggests that they are misguided. So why do they persist? The answers are political. By Peter Harrison.

A Boom interview with Simeon Wade. By Heather Dundas.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, turns Leibniz’s argument for “the best of all possible worlds” on its head by proposing that we instead live in “the worst of all possible worlds.”