External article · The Conversation
IDEAS
A physician who devises screening guidelines for the American Cancer Society explains the pros and cons of the Galleri multicancer early detection test.
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External article · The Conversation
IDEAS
The methods can be subtle but effective at slowing progress, particularly when fossil fuels are involved. Here’s what to watch for as the latest global climate talks get underway.
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External article · The Conversation
IDEAS
Americans are standing up to protect public lands and bringing concerns about conservation and management into broader public discussion.
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External article · The Conversation
IDEAS
From colorful orbs to delicate spirals, heating and manipulating glass allows artists to create beautiful translucent sculptures.
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External article · The Conversation
IDEAS
Your farts’ aromas are tuned to your diet – and your overall health.
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External article · The Conversation
IDEAS
For veterans with brain injuries, noisy, overstimulating environments can lead to high stress and irritability, making them want to avoid such situations altogether.
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External article · The Conversation
IDEAS
Conditions for migrant workers in the 21st century are often as precarious as they were for immigrant laborers in the 19th century.
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External article · The Conversation
IDEAS
Racial profiling by police extends beyond Black-white comparisons. Recent studies of traffic stops in Philly show intraracial disparities within Black neighborhoods.
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External article · The Conversation
IDEAS
With so few Americans serving in the military, many learn about veterans from stereotyped news coverage. A media scholar explains why that matters.
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External article · Aeon
IDEAS
In the summer of 1646, the idea of equality gained new and profound depths. We are still catching up with the consequences- by Teresa M BejanRead on Aeon
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External article · The Conversation
IDEAS
Pope Leo’s November 2026 trip to Latin America will bring him back to Peru, where he served as a priest and bishop for two decades.
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External article · Aeon
IDEAS
The cosmos has become a lab for the Big Questions in physics. Along the way, we’ve lost sight of its glorious messiness- by Dylan JowRead on Aeon
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External article · Aeon
IDEAS
I need order and routine – just as much as I crave excitement and variety. What’s life like with both autism and ADHD?- by Sarah HendrickxRead on Aeon
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External article · The Conversation
IDEAS
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear two assault weapons cases caps a multi-decade dispute over restricting assault weapons that extends far beyond legal arguments.
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About Ideas
What this page is for
Ideas covers philosophy, ethics, political theory and intellectual history: the arguments that sit underneath practical disputes rather than the disputes themselves. Questions about what a just distribution would be, what obligations people owe strangers, what makes an institution legitimate, and how knowledge is justified do not resolve on a news cycle and have been argued for millennia. Reading them is less about reaching a verdict than about seeing the shape of a disagreement clearly, which is frequently the thing missing from the practical argument it underlies.
Traditions, not just opinions
Philosophical positions come in families with internal logic, and knowing the family explains the position. Consequentialist reasoning judges an act by its outcomes. Deontological reasoning judges it against duties and rights that hold regardless of outcome. Virtue reasoning asks what a person of good character would do. Contractual approaches ask what rules people could reasonably agree to. Each produces different answers to the same case, and much apparently stubborn disagreement is two people applying different frameworks while assuming they share one.
Old arguments are not settled arguments
It is tempting to treat the history of ideas as a sequence of superseded errors, but the durable questions recur because they are genuinely hard rather than because earlier thinkers were careless. Arguments about liberty and equality, about the authority of the state, about what obligations the present owes the future, are alive because the considerations on each side are real. Reading an older text on its own terms, rather than as a rough draft of the present, is the whole skill this page is meant to reward.
Thought experiments and what they are for
Philosophy leans heavily on invented cases, and readers new to it often object that the scenarios are unrealistic. That is usually the point. A deliberately artificial case isolates one variable so that intuitions about it can be examined without the noise of a real situation, in the same way a laboratory strips out confounds. The test of such a case is not whether it could happen but whether the intuition it produces survives being applied consistently elsewhere. When a principle delivers an unacceptable answer in a strange case, that is genuine evidence against the principle rather than a trick.