Worldcrunch
Even more so than laughter, smiling is the human trait par excellence. It’s a real language — but can we learn to understand it? Or to cultivate it? The rewards could be high, and not just to boost morale: Smiling could increase life expectancy.
Stuffed toys, fetish objects, lucky charms, pets — we all have our comforting objects or companions, even if we sometimes find it hard to admit to ourselves. It’s an anthropological need that makes our lives more comfortable. But with smartphones, chatbots, and soon robots, taking up a new role as our future companions, we need to rethink whether our new, digital teddy bears create more harm than they provide comfort.
The practice of gift giving exists in every culture in the world, and has for as long as recorded history. What does it tell us about the nature of human society?
Thanatology or the study of death has entered Italian academia, led by the University of Padua, which is taking an interdisciplinary approach to our fascination with mortality.
Philosophers debate the meaning and sincerity of social network friendships, finding affirmation or disagreement from the words of long-dead forebears. Because there’s no app for that.
ROME — Lo Chiameranno Andrea (“We’ll Call Him Andrea“) is the name of a famous film by Vittorio De Sica, where two elementary school teachers who yearn for but are unable to have a child, compensate by giving him this hypothetical name. It was 1972 and the male name Andrea represented the essence of Italy, […]
As France embarks on its third military intervention in Africa in the past three years, in the Central African Republic, a search for the sources of a continent’s perennial instability.
PARIS – For the past ten years, Mundiya, head of the Hulis tribe, has been traveling across France, finding things, movies… to bring home with him to his native Papua New Guinea. His last find – three showgirls from the Lido. There are many things Mundiya Kepanga could export to France. He could start by […]