Daily Reads by Articles Daily.

 It resembled a fragment of driftwood adrift upon the ochre-hued tumult of floodwaters, unassuming and inert, until two eyes emerged with quiet deliberation above the water’s surface. As the canoe neared, the crocodile lunged without warning, attempting to unseat its occupant. Bereft of recourse, the woman propelled her canoe toward an overhanging copse of trees. In her desperate leap to grasp a branch, the reptile rose, too, dragging her beneath the surface in a harrowing death roll. “That was the worst part of the whole experience,” she recounted from her hospital bed, voice wavering in retrospective dread. “The part that I still don’t like to remember.” In the torrid February of 1985, Val Plumwood, an Australian eco-philosopher of formidable intellect, survived this primeval encounter on a secluded river in Kakadu, a remote region of immense biodiversity. Submerged thrice beneath the water's opaque surface, she clawed herself, grievously wounded, up the embankment, fabricating ...

  Despite the general consensus that the internet originated as a haven for frivolity—most famously cat videos—its trajectory has extended far beyond feline amusement; viral content now frequently features a host of other animals whose behaviors, often misinterpreted through anthropocentric lenses, stir both admiration and unintended ethical scrutiny. From a baby turtle that seemingly grins with delight as its belly is scrubbed with a toothbrush, to a polar bear that gently paws a husky in a gesture easily mistaken for affection, and a hamster that, upon being mimicked with finger-gun gestures, falls backward in a manner so theatrically exaggerated it appears playful—these visuals invite visceral human responses. What renders them viral is not merely their surface-level cuteness, but the profound human resonance they elicit. The turtle appears joyous, the bear and dog seem companions, and the hamster, positively whimsical. Such interpretations foster a compelling, if illusory, sens...

 The Oxford philosopher J L Austin died on 8 February 1960, just weeks after receiving a grave diagnosis. His friend Isaiah Berlin called it a “dead secret” – Austin, remarkably, had no idea how little time he had. As Hilary term approached, Austin requested only four weeks’ leave until his glands “cleared up.” He died five weeks later. Today, Austin is best known for speech act theory, which posits that language does not simply transmit information but performs actions. In brief, we do things with words. Yet one word remained conspicuously absent from Austin’s final correspondence: cancer. Lung cancer – his grave diagnosis – claimed his life at age 48. As was common at the time, Austin’s physicians, family, and friends avoided naming the disease. “Cancer” was a whispered word, a kind of semantic obscenity – abominable, ill-omened, and repugnant to the senses. Doctors often withheld the diagnosis, fearing its utterance would obliterate hope and accelerate death. Susan Sontag, who ...

 By 1997, Moscow’s skyline underwent a remarkable metamorphosis with the re-emergence of a golden dome once effaced from memory. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, standing regally along the Moskva River, now reflects almost precisely the original 19th-century edifice, once erected to commemorate Russia’s triumph over Napoleon in 1812. Its obliteration by the Bolsheviks in 1931 and subsequent replacement in 1958 with a colossal heated outdoor pool marked the Soviet regime’s overt ideological subversion of ecclesiastical history. My mother swam in this pool during her childhood in the early 1980s, enveloped in vaporous warmth beneath falling snow—a surreal theatre of everyday Soviet life wherein the cathedral’s absence loomed as a silent but potent affirmation of the state’s secular supremacy. The eventual drainage of this pool, the land’s reconsecration, and the swift architectural resurrection of the cathedral all signal a profound ideological reversal. Yet today, to a passerby ...

 During the COVID-19 pandemic, while some turned to baking or the companionship of dogs, I found myself immersed in the meticulous world of slime mould cultivation. The study in my partner’s flat in Edinburgh became a makeshift laboratory for two cultures of Physarum polycephalum , an acellular slime mould colloquially dubbed ‘the blob’. What began as idle curiosity rapidly evolved into a sequence of rudimentary experiments designed to observe whether bisected masses from a single Physarum cell would continue to fuse upon reintroduction. Days lengthened into weeks, and the experiment gradually lost momentum after approximately six weeks due to temporal limitations. Yet, this marked merely the inception of my fascination. In the ensuing year, under the noses of unsuspecting neighbours, I conducted several more trials. Though unpublished, each endeavour raised foundational philosophical inquiries—many of which still reverberate through my thought. A core question persisted: what, if ...

 Once regarded as a foundational figure of modern Western philosophy and rational inquiry, René Descartes (1596–1650) has historically enjoyed an almost mythic reverence for his role in establishing reason as the cornerstone of epistemology, particularly through his famous dictum, “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). His dualistic conception of mind and body has sparked centuries of philosophical scrutiny, from 17th-century theologians to 20th-century feminist thinkers. Though his remains never reached the Pantheon, where other national heroes rest, Descartes remains enshrined in the French intellectual tradition, and to be called “Cartesian” still suggests one’s alignment with logical clarity and structured reasoning. Yet Descartes's legacy has never been entirely unassailable. In 17th-century England and the Netherlands, Descartes was publicly condemned not merely on philosophical or scientific grounds but for allegedly deploying calculated deception to control his rea...

 On 6 April 1667, a cataclysmic earthquake ravaged the city of Dubrovnik, extinguishing at least 3,000 lives and decimating the architectural corpus of the once-flourishing Adriatic republic. Irretrievable cultural repositories—thousands of manuscripts, books, and archival records—were lost in the rubble and conflagrations that ensued. The Rector’s Palace, the repository of the Republic’s state archives, suffered grievous damage, and the subsequent fires consumed the remnants. Monastic libraries—especially those maintained by the Dominican and Franciscan friars—were nearly annihilated. The palatial dwellings of the aristocracy, themselves architectural testaments to Dubrovnik's grandeur, crumbled, burying private collections and personal chronicles beneath layers of destruction. The seismic upheaval did not merely alter the city's urban contour or political orientation; it inflicted a profound laceration upon Dubrovnik’s intellectual and philosophical heritage. Had this geolog...

 No one paid much attention when an obscure biology journal published a review in 2017 concerning "the evolutionary processes which led to a crab-like habitus." This innocuous piece of crustacean taxonomy, authored by German scientists Jonas Keiler, Christian S Wirkner, and Stefan Richter, revisited studies dating back to the 1820s. Their research revealed that what we colloquially group as “crabs” are not unified by lineage; instead, various species such as hermit crabs and squat lobsters had independently developed similar morphological traits—an evolutionary phenomenon known as convergent evolution. The authors revived the antiquated term “carcinisation” to describe this recurrence of crab-like features and disavowed the need for any mystical “evolutionary tendencies” to explain it. Yet within a short span, that cautious assertion was swept up in a storm of sensationalism. Online outlets, seizing upon the absurd and the clickable, propelled headlines like “Animals Keep Ev...