Young people are evaluating good and bad life decisions on a scale and seeking input from others. To philosophy experts, it sounds familiar You can count calories, steps, streams of your favorite song – and now, you can assign a number to how cool you are. See: aura points, a way to calculate your rizz. (That’s what the kids call charisma, and if you didn’t know that, you just lost 100 aura points.) Ask someone out and get a yes? That’s 100 aura points for you. Still on Snapchat past the age of 19? Gross and suspect … dock 1,000 aura points. Confidently answered a question in class, but got it ..read more

He was mentored by Jacques Derrida, and his memoir about taking hormones broke new ground. Now, Preciado’s radical cinematic riff on Virginia Woolf’s novel explores a life spent defying the gender binary In the opening seconds of Orlando: My Political Biography, a shadowy figure in a quiet city street says: “Someone once asked me, ‘Why don’t you write your autobiography?’ And I replied, ‘Because Virginia Woolf fucking wrote it for me in 1928.’” The scene takes place in the dead of night, with the silence broken only by the swish of a brush as this speaker pastes up a large gold poster. “Orland ..read more

In the past 10 years the idea that trees communicate with and look after each other has gained widespread currency. But have these claims outstripped the evidence? By Daniel Immerwahr ..read more

Unearthed notes owned by the renowned philosopher Jeremy Bentham reveal the roots of his influential ethics One of the dangerous “fools” caricatured in a medieval printed satire called Ship of Fools is the Foolish Reader. He is shown in an illustration surrounded by his many learned volumes, but he doesn’t read any of them. This idiot, depicted with many others, including a Feasting Fool, a Preaching Fool and a Procrastinating Fool, was a warning to the wise by the German author Sebastian Brandt 530 years ago. Now research at a London university has unearthed a rare English 1509 copy of this b ..read more

Modern life is stuck on a treadmill and its pace exceeds human limits. What would it look like to step off? I can’t run right now – or what, for me, passes for running. I must walk, and I hate it. A tear in my right calf muscle has exposed me as a walking cliche of middle-class, middle-aged life: I overcompensate for a desk-bound existence through bursts of physical exercise, but now with painful results. This 43-year-old body isn’t what she used to be ..read more

Asked 10 random questions, the philosopher and author shares the strangest thing he’s done for love, his famous hair and his fears for the future of the moon Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Your latest book is called Who Owns the Moon. Who owns the moon? Well, nobody does and that’s part of the problem. Billions are being invested in exploiting the moon, because there are some very valuable resources there that are in short supply back on this planet. There will be great technological spin offs when there’s settlement on the moon. But I wrote the book because I feel that the regu ..read more

Founded in 2005 and lauded by Silicon Valley, the Nick Bostrom’s centre for studying existential risk warned about AI but also gave rise to cultish ideas such as effective altruism Two weeks ago it was quietly announced that the Future of Humanity Institute, the renowned multidisciplinary research centre in Oxford, no longer had a future. It shut down without warning on 16 April. Initially there was just a brief statement on its website stating it had closed and that its research may continue elsewhere within and outside the university. The institute, which was dedicated to studying existentia ..read more

In the past 10 years the idea that trees communicate with and look after each other has gained widespread currency. But have these claims outstripped the evidence? There are a lot of humans. Teeming is perhaps an unkind word, but when 8 billion people cram themselves on to a planet that, three centuries before, held less than a tenth of that number, it seems apt. Eight billion hot-breathed individuals, downloading apps and piling into buses and shoving their plasticky waste into bins – it is a stupefying and occasionally sickening thought. And yet, humans are not Earth’s chief occupants. Trees ..read more

Controversial US philosopher who sought to understand and explain the science of the mind Daniel Dennett, who has died aged 82, was a controversial philosopher whose writing on consciousness, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology helped shift Anglo-American philosophy from its focus on language and concepts towards a coalition with science. His naturalistic account of consciousness, purged as far as possible of first-person agency and qualitative experience, has been popular outside academia and hotly opposed by many within it ..read more

Nick Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute closed this week in what Swedish-born philosopher says was ‘death by bureaucracy’ Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run by one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movement and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. Musk had donated £1m to the FIH in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence. He had also boosted the ideas of its leader for nearly a ..read more