Entertainment

David Humphrey Is Allergic to Style

The artist challenges the status quo of postmodernism, not by knocking it over but by slyly subverting it.

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

Required Reading

This week: a record-breaking World Cup mural in Mexico City, the Gen Z of 19th-century France, van Gogh and AI, and more.

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

Art Movements: Wolfgang Tillmans Wins Europe's Richest Art Prize

The first public exhibition of Jack White's artwork, Cheryl Finley gets the David C. Driskell Prize, and more news to know.

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

The Looter Who Built Your Favorite Museum

A new book maps the network that allowed Douglas Latchford to violently rip Khmer statues from their homes and funnel them into Western institutions.

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

How gamification can ruin your life

In 2004, I started running. Like some British Forrest Gump, I put on some cheap trainers and went jogging out into the night. But unlike Forrest, I found myself bent over and wheezing into some bushes...

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

To access your creativity, start playing

To live a fulfilling life, we need to have a grasp on our personal values, what lights us up as individuals, and how to connect to ourselves and our communities. Exploring my individual creative expre...

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

Animal play may be about more than survival

We tend to think of animals as survival machines, their every action designed to help them avoid threats, fulfill needs, and find mates. But what are we to make of a crow that repeatedly places a disc...

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

The hidden cost of taking yourself too seriously

I was in St Albans, England, walking through the sunny park leading up to the cathedral, when I saw a small boy rolling down the hill in the grass. I felt something unexpected: jealousy. I wish that w...

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

How playgrounds reinvented childhood

Fictional though they are, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn exemplify a lost truth about American kids up until the 1880s: Childhood was wild.  Like millions of their real-life contemporaries, the...

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

What children learn when adults aren’t around

Children, like all mammals, are born completely dependent on adults for survival. The primary task of childhood is to grow increasingly independent of this care, and so they are also born with instinc...

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

Why play brings us pleasure

Since the days of ancient Greece, thinkers have grappled with the mystery of why humans and other animals play. Survival is hard, so why waste energy? Over the years, theories have ranged from Plato’s...

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

Why your brain loves games — and how to use that to your advantage

I remember sitting in class as a kid, struggling to pay attention while my teacher explained fractions. But at home, I could play Age of Empires for five hours straight — managing civilizations, balan...

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

The 250-year-old company that survived by refusing to lay people off

What happens when you lose all of your customers at once? In 1978, that’s exactly what happened to Garbellotto S.p.A., one of Italy’s oldest and most celebrated barrel-makers. Founded in 1...

May 28, 2026 • 5 min

One of Neptune's 16 moons is not like the others, James Webb telescope finds — and it could be key to fully understanding the solar system

Neptune has a complicated life story, and its moon Nereid might be the only one left standing from the planet’s multibillion-year history.

May 22, 2026 • 5 min

Can AI really simulate human thinking? Research casts doubt on an influential study, suggesting an advanced model was just really good at memorizing patterns.

A study published in July 2025 claimed the Centaur AI model could simulate and predict human behavior with astonishing accuracy. A counter study raises doubts.

May 22, 2026 • 5 min

Scientists claimed the world's oldest rock art is 67,800 years old. But is the science behind that estimate flawed?

A technique that has rewritten the timeline of prehistoric art may be overestimating the ages of cave paintings, some scientists say.

May 22, 2026 • 5 min

Seal pups were dying from a 'corkscrew killer' on a Canadian island. It turned out to be cannibals.

Dead seal pups on a Canadian island have been found with mysterious spiral-shaped injuries for years. The wounds were thought to be the work of sharks or boat propellers, but new research confirms a d...

May 22, 2026 • 5 min

Landmark finding that showed brains of kids with ADHD mature later was actually a mirage in the data, new research finds

A "foundational" study found that the brains of children with ADHD matured later, but that finding was likely a mirage tied to issues with how the children were followed over time.

May 22, 2026 • 5 min

Ebola outbreak in Central Africa will be a nightmare to contain, experts warn

Experts say the Ebola outbreak raging in Central Africa could be challenging to contain due to ongoing conflict in the region and a lack of vaccines and international aid.

May 22, 2026 • 5 min

The 'Doomsday Glacier' is poised to lose its ice shelf this year. An Antarctic researcher explains what that means for global sea levels

Researchers have warned that the Thwaites Glacier, one of the largest glaciers in the world, is about to lose its eastern ice shelf. We spoke to marine geophysicist Robert Larter about what this means...

May 28, 2026 • 5 min