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Yearly Archives: 2026

Fifteen Eighty Four

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  • 21 Jul 2026
    John Pemberton, Eileen Munro, Nancy Cartwright

    Causal Processes and Their Warrant: Towards More Effective Social Policy

    Debates about the effectiveness of social interventions often begin with a deceptively simple question: ‘does it work?’ Yet this question obscures the deeper epistemic challenges at stake. Social policies and practices operate within richly detailed dynamic systems in which causal processes are rarely uniform or independent of context.  As a result, establishing whether an intervention […]

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  • 20 Jul 2026
    E. Michael Nussbaum

    Why do So Many People Believe the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election was Stolen?

    Although there is no credible evidence that the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election were illegitimate, about one-third of Americans (as of 2024) continued to believe that the election was stolen. Why this belief persists is one of several questions I explore in my book, The Waning of Wisdom: The Psychology of Reasoning in […]

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  • 20 Jul 2026
    Kiran Klaus Patel

    What IKEA and the EU Have in Common

    Buying furniture from IKEA often feels like a metaphor for European integration. The pieces arrive separately, the instructions are never quite as straightforward as they seem, and assembling the final product requires patience, compromise, and occasional frustration. The European Union has often been built in much the same way-not according to a single grand design, […]

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  • 15 Jul 2026
    Ho-fung Hung

    A Swing from Fear to Fantasy of China is Happening Again, Right in Front of Our Eyes

    Just two years ago, many political elites and policy experts in the United States and other Western countries concluded that the Chinese model of development had failed as China’s economic growth faltered amid the real estate crisis, mounting local government debt, and rising youth unemployment. They denounced Xi Jinping’s concentration of autocratic power, his crackdowns […]

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  • 15 Jul 2026
    Philippa Carter

    Frenzy in Early Modern England: Madness, Brain Disease and the Soul

    In the last decade of his life, my paternal grandfather suffered from undiagnosed vascular dementia. During those years, we saw sudden changes in his speech, mood, personality and behaviour, ranging from unprovoked aggression to gloomy withdrawal. His son – my father – is a committed Christian, who believes that every human soul will live forever. […]

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  • 15 Jul 2026
    Coryn Bailer-Jones

    Interstellar Travel

    Human-built spacecraft have visited every single planet in our solar system, as well as several comets and asteroids. We have landed robotic spacecraft not only on Venus and Mars but also on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. Spacecraft have dived down close to the Sun’s surface and others have escaped the solar system, flung […]

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  • 14 Jul 2026
    Meena Mehta Kotecha

    From fear to confidence: tackling mathematics anxiety in university students

    If students have already passed mathematics at school, why do so many still experience mathematics anxiety at university? For a significant number of learners, mathematics anxiety does not disappear with age or progression. Instead, it evolves, becoming more deeply embedded in how they think, learn, and participate in higher education.

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  • 13 Jul 2026
    Kyle Beardsley

    What do NATO and the MCU’s Avengers have in common?

    “There may be a causality. Our very strength invites challenge. Challenge incites conflict. And conflict breeds catastrophe.” -Vision, in Captain America: Civil War Who your friends are shapes who your enemies are and vice versa. NATO bears this out well. NATO is a relational web of security assistance that was necessary to defend against and […]

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