Humans

Orwell recounts an incident from his time as a colonial police officer in Burma, when social pressure forced him to kill an elephant he had no wish to shoot. The essay uses that moment to dissect how domination corrupts the dominator as much as the dominated, turning colonial power into a performance the powerful are trapped inside.

Writing in dry academic anthropology-speak, Miner describes the "magical" body rituals of the "Nacirema," who turn out, on close reading, to be Americans engaged in ordinary practices like brushing teeth and visiting doctors. A landmark exercise in defamiliarization, showing how easily the anthropological gaze can be turned on one's own culture.

Heyes pushes back against the idea that distinctly human abilities like imitation, mind-reading, and language are fixed genetic instincts, arguing instead that these are "cognitive gadgets" assembled through childhood social learning. The piece reframes the nature-versus-culture debate: culture doesn't just fill the mind with content, it builds the mechanisms that do the thinking.

Romeo traces modern behavioral economics' catalogue of cognitive biases back to observations Plato made about human irrationality over two millennia earlier. Plato treated correcting these mental errors as an ethical project requiring humility, not just better information, a good bridge between philosophy and psychology on the subject of flawed human judgment.

Goodman challenges both the "humans are naturally selfish" and "humans are naturally cooperative" narratives, arguing that people carry a capacity for both and that context determines which wins out. Cooperation isn't a default state but something social institutions have to actively sustain, since exploitation flourishes wherever oversight is weak.