EVOLVE V.A.R.C

Contrary to popular beliefs about winter sluggishness and depression, human cognition is not affected by the seasons In popular culture, it’s long been assumed that winter brings sadness, fatigue, and lower motivation. Media headlines each year warn of “winter depression,” often citing seasonal affective disorder (SAD)—a term coined by US biological psychiatrists in the 1980s to describe depression recurring in winter and fading by spring. The idea caught on quickly, even in countries where winters are mild. Yet, when examined closely, evidence for this supposed seasonal slump is surprisingly weak. In the 1990s, when I moved from the French Alps to Tromsø—350 km north of the Arctic Circle—I expected to find a gloomy population plagued by months of darkness. Instead, I found quite the opposite. Locals didn’t fight the darkness with artificial floodlights but embraced “koselig,” the Norwegian ideal of coziness. Candles glowed in cafés and homes, creating warmth without bright light. T...

  The Price of American Authoritarianism ​ IN THE WAKE OF DONALD TRUMP’S 2024 REELECTION—AN OUTCOME LEGITIMATED NOT ONLY BY THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE BUT ALSO BY A POPULAR-VOTE PLURALITY—MUCH OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL CLASS RESPONDED WITH A MUTED SHRUG, AS IF THE SYSTEM’S ELASTICITY HAD ALREADY BEEN PROVEN BY THE SURVIVAL OF HIS FIRST TERM AND THE TRAUMA OF JANUARY 6, 2021. THIS REACTION EMBODIED A DEEPLY ROOTED FAITH THAT DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS COULD ABSORB SHOCK WITHOUT FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION. YET THE SECOND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DID NOT MERELY STRAIN THESE INSTITUTIONS; IT USHERED THE UNITED STATES ACROSS A CRITICAL THRESHOLD INTO COMPETITIVE AUTHORITARIANISM , A HYBRID REGIME FORM IN WHICH ELECTIONS PERSIST BUT THE INCUMBENT SYSTEMATICALLY ABUSES STATE POWER TO DISCIPLINE OPPONENTS AND TILT THE POLITICAL FIELD. ​ THIS REGIME TYPE—OBSERVED EARLIER IN HUGO CHÁVEZ’S VENEZUELA, RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN’S TURKEY, VIKTOR ORBAN’S HUNGARY, AND NARENDRA MODI’S INDIA—MAINTAINS THE APPEAR...

 THERE ARE NO PURE CULTURES. In the 1990s, a powerful narrative of “globalisation” convinced many that they were living in an unprecedented age, cut off from the normal flow of history. This story claimed that fixed boundaries – territorial, cultural, even psychological – had dissolved, leaving humans unmoored from older geographies and identities and thrust into a borderless “global village” shaped by corporations, integrated markets, and a standardised “global English.” Globalisation was cast as a disruptive force that compressed time and space, produced hybrid “inauthentic” identities, and severed people from ancestral ways of life. Consequently, anti-globalisation movements began to present a retreat to supposedly pure roots and stable borders as a path back to a lost golden age. Yet this scare story rests on historical amnesia. Globalisation neither began in the 1990s nor with container ships, the internet, or modern supply chains; it is a deep, continuous process woven throu...

 There’s a catastrophic black hole in our climate data – and it’s a gift to deniers What begins as a seemingly empirical inquiry into global mortality—whether cold-related deaths surpass those from heat exposure—unfolds into a profound revelation about the epistemic void that undermines our comprehension of climate impacts. The assertion, frequently leveraged by climate sceptics to postpone mitigation efforts, contends that nine times as many people perish from cold as from heat. At first glance, this proposition appears fortified by quantitative evidence derived from the most extensive datasets available; yet upon scrutiny, its statistical authority dissolves into a mirage constructed atop a foundation of systemic omission. The global mortality estimates in question emerge from a study encompassing 750 localities across 43 nations. However, this ostensible diversity conceals a glaring geographical asymmetry. Entire regions of paramount climatic vulnerability—sub-Saharan Africa,...

  The First Futurists and  the World They Built The future, as a site of epistemic and ontological projection, has always harbored an ambivalent potency: an arena susceptible to sequestration and instrumentalization by those seeking dominion over temporality itself. Historically, it has served as both the mirror and the manufacture of authority, a contested terrain upon which power dramatizes its capacity for foresight and prescription. As Hannah Arendt apprehensively notes in On Violence (1970), all futurological claims are haunted by the automatisms of the present—they are “projections of present automatic processes,” she writes, processes that perpetuate themselves only if humanity remains inert. Her anxiety alerts us to the essential paradox of prediction: the futurist’s pronouncements are self-fulfilling only insofar as their audiences permit the inertia on which they depend. Thus, the “future” is revealed not as a horizon of liberation but as an ideological apparatus—a...

  Philosophical Reflection on the Emergence of Economic Thought Philosophical Reflection on the Emergence of Economic Thought The philosophical archaeology of economics reveals not a linear progression from moral to mathematical reasoning, but an ontological transformation in the idea of human action itself. For Aristotle, the oikonomia was not an autonomous object of inquiry but a derivative art—a prudential discipline embedded within the ethical architecture of the polis . The household, in his schema, was a microcosmic theatre of distributive justice, ordered by a teleological sense of sufficiency ( autarkeia ). Economic conduct, therefore, was inseparable from ethical moderation. The scholastic condemnations of usury, likewise, were moral commentaries upon the metaphysical nature of value and time, interpreting money not as a neutral medium of exchange but as a sterile, almost theological abstraction — an attempt to make time itself fertile through interest, a kind of meta...

 Transmission Across Cultures. Transmission across cultures denotes the historically layered and often asymmetrical movement of symbols, practices, and texts as they are carried, translated, and transformed between distinct social formations rather than merely reproduced intact from one locale to another. At once descriptive and analytical, the concept brings together anthropological accounts of cultural transmission, which classify pathways of social learning (vertical, horizontal, and oblique), with literary-critical attention to how narratives and forms circulate through translation, adaptation, and canon formation across linguistic and national boundaries. Within such a framework, culture is not imagined as a self-sufficient, territorially sealed entity, but as a dynamic ensemble of practices that is incessantly reconfigured in transnational networks of exchange, negotiation, and contestation. ​ In anthropology and social theory, cultural transmission names the processes thro...

Black Entrepreneurship in America The historiography of American entrepreneurship, in both its canonical and popular articulations, has long privileged a narrow pantheon of nineteenth-century innovators and industrial magnates—figures such as John Deere, Eli Whitney, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. This valorization of predominantly White, male capitalists has inadvertently enshrined a partial and exclusionary narrative of national enterprise, occluding the myriad ways in which African Americans and women have historically negotiated, subverted, and reconstituted the capitalist paradigm. The latest issue of History Now undertakes a potent historiographical intervention, recovering from archival silences the heterogenous genealogy of Black entrepreneurship in the United States. Through six intricately argued essays, the contributors not only recuperate marginalized figures from the edges of economic memory but also perform a critical re-mapping of U.S....

Art for the Senses: Why Textural Modern Paintings Create Deeper Emotional Resonance. The initial encounter with a painting is often ocular—a convergence of colour, composition, and subject. Yet certain modern works resist confinement to the visual, compelling the observer toward deeper sensorial participation. Such paintings, textured in both form and feeling, extend an unspoken invitation: to approach, to perceive the tactile vitality of raised pigment, and to intuit the surface as profoundly as the image. This embodiment of texture transforms perception into a near-physical experience, grounding the aesthetic in corporeal sensibility. At Mojarto, the philosophy of art transcends ornamentation; art is conceived as a synesthetic dialogue, uniting sight and sensation, intellect and affect. Textural modern paintings embody this dialogue—works that solicit not mere admiration but engagement. Through layered materialities—impasto, knife-stroke, or mixed media—the viewer’s eye deciphers ...

  Your purpose isn’t  something to find, it’s  something you form In the crucible of psychological praxis, the phenomenon of existential drift—manifesting as apathy, desuetude, and ontological bewilderment—frequently materialises among those who contend that their lives lack an orienting telos. They articulate, often with quiet desperation, their yearning for a metaphorical North Star to illumine the otherwise nebulous terrain of their existence. Yet, it is precisely this frenetic quest for “purpose” that, paradoxically, entrenches the individual deeper within the quagmire of purposelessness. To apprehend this paradox, one must first interrogate the genealogy of “purpose” itself—a concept whose lineage entwines theology, philosophy, and the modern therapist’s lexicon alike. From the didactic utterances of Krishna and the Buddha to the rational teleology of Aristotle and the moral aphorisms of Confucius, the notion of purpose has, across millennia, furnished humankind ...