Conor Purcelli in Aeon:
Across northern Europe and Canada during the 19th and 20th centuries, workers roamed coastlines and pack ice, beating infant seals to death with clubs. White ice was smeared red. Annual kill rates for seals are estimated in the hundreds of thousands, all done with the purpose of turning them into raw industrial materials for the production of clothing, oil, and meat. Even if their suffering was real, many considered it inconsequential. Seals, like many other creatures, were seen as little more than tools or resources.
However, views of animal suffering and pain soon shifted. In 1881, Henry Wood Elliott reported on the ‘wholesale destruction’ of seals in Alaska, leading to international outcry and the establishment of new treaties. And in ‘The White Seal’ (1893), Rudyard Kipling told a sympathetic story from the perspective of the hunted animals themselves. If someone killed a seal pup today, they would likely be charged in a court of law.
This widening of the so-called moral circle – the slow extension of empathy and rights beyond the boundaries we once took for granted – has changed many of our relationships with other species. It is why factory-farmed animals, who often lead short and painful lives, are killed in ways that tend to minimise suffering. It is why cosmetic companies offer ‘cruelty free’ products, and why vegetarianism and veganism have become more popular in many countries. However, it is not always clear what truly counts as ‘suffering’ and therefore not always clear just how wide the moral circle should expand. Are there limits to whom, or what, our empathy should extend?
More here.
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On 1 November 2025, the south-western Indian state of Kerala – home to 34 million people – was 
The way the fabled investor Bill Ackman sees it, he was born to move markets. It’s right there in the name: BILL-ionaire ACK-tivist MAN, as the 59-year-old always loves pointing out, whether in a 
The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to trigger a “Cambrian explosion” of new kinds of personhood. This paper proposes a pragmatic framework for navigating this diversification by treating personhood not as a metaphysical property to be discovered, but as a flexible bundle of obligations (rights and responsibilities) that societies confer upon entities for a variety of reasons, especially to solve concrete governance problems. We argue that this traditional bundle can be unbundled, creating bespoke solutions for different contexts. This will allow for the creation of practical tools—such as facilitating AI contracting by creating a target “individual” that can be sanctioned—without needing to resolve intractable debates about an AI’s consciousness or rationality. We explore how individuals fit in to social roles and discuss the use of decentralized digital identity technology, examining both ‘personhood as a problem’, where design choices can create “dark patterns” that exploit human social heuristics, and ‘personhood as a solution’, where conferring a bundle of obligations is necessary to ensure accountability or prevent conflict. By rejecting foundationalist quests for a single, essential definition of personhood, this paper offers a more pragmatic and flexible way to think about integrating AI agents into our society.
For Susan Sawyer, a physician-researcher specializing in adolescent health at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, the start of the social-media ban this week meant entering the next phase of her research. Over the past two months, Sawyer and her colleagues interviewed 177 teenagers aged 13–16 about their social-media use, screen time and mental health before the ban came into effect. She and her colleagues plan to survey the teenagers again in six months, to see whether the ban has affected their use of the platforms or their mental health. The researchers will also survey the participants’ parents about problematic Internet and social-media use by their children.
I first encountered Zheng Xiaoqiong’s writing in 
We tend to think of religion as an age-old feature of human existence. So it can be startling to learn that the very concept dates to the early modern era. Yes, you find gods, temples, sacrifices and rituals in the ancient Mediterranean, classical China, pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. What you don’t find is a term that quite maps onto ‘religion’.
Peck focuses on what Orwell got brilliantly right – about fascism, communism, imperialism, nationalism, the abuses of new technology and the lies people tell themselves without necessarily realising. But even when Orwell was proved wrong, which was often, he was wrong in a sincere and interesting way. To quote his disclaimer in Homage to Catalonia, ‘I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have done my best to be honest.’
After the long, torturous summers that bake northern India in 40-degree Celsius (104 degree Fahrenheit) heat, winter should be welcomed as a reprieve. Instead, it is our season of sadness. The annual pollution emergency faced by hundreds of millions of Indians is upon us — three months of physical and emotional suffocation. I live in Delhi, one of the 
I chose the green door ninety-three days ago. At the time, it seemed obviously correct. Not even a close call. The red door offered two billion dollars immediately—a sum so large it would solve every material problem I’d ever face, fund any project I could imagine, and still leave enough to give away amounts that would meaningfully change thousands of lives. But two billion is a number. It has a fixed relationship to the economy, to the things money can buy, to the world. The green door offered one dollar that doubles every day. I remember standing there, doing the mental math. Day 30: about a billion dollars. Day 40: over a trillion. Day 50: a quadrillion. The red door would be surpassed before the first month ended, and after that, the gap would grow incomprehensibly fast. Choosing the red door would be like choosing a ham sandwich over a genie’s lamp because you were hungry right now. So I walked through the green door. The first few weeks were unremarkable.