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Stories and literature | By day an insurance official, by night he was an incessant, insomniacal scribe of the space between waking and dreaming | On 9 October 1911, Franz Kafka, then 28 years old, wrote in his diary that he didn’t expect to reach the age of 40. At the time of this entry, he was not yet stricken with the tuberculosis that would lead to his death in 1924, shortly before his 41st birthday. What afflicted him at that time, making him doubt his longe... | Ross Benjamin | https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-space-between-waking-and-dreaming-in-kafkas-diaries | |
Quantum theory | Long a matter of philosophical speculation, the idea of multiple realities has been given new artistic licence by physics | When I was in my mid-30s, I was faced with a difficult decision. It had repercussions for years, and at times the choice I made filled me with regret. I had two job offers. One was to work at a very large physics experiment on the West Coast of the United States called the National Ignition Facility (NIF). Last year, t... | Timothy Andersen | https://aeon.co//essays/multiple-worlds-has-been-given-artistic-impetus-by-physics | |
Demography and migration | Asian sailors came to the west coast of America in 1587. Within a century they were settled in colonies from Mexico to Peru | Cape Sebastian in Oregon perches above two forested declivities along a rocky patch of the state’s southern coast. Travel there today, and you are likely to miss a roadside marker that reads: Spanish navigators were the first to explore the North American Pacific Coast. Beginning fifty years after Columbus discovered t... | Diego Javier Luis | https://aeon.co//essays/asians-were-visiting-the-west-coast-of-america-in-1587 | |
Psychiatry and psychotherapy | This radical movement makes space for people with mental health and other challenges to study (and celebrate) themselves | In psychiatry, only experts make diagnoses. They do this by referring to detailed lists of criteria in technical guides, such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its fifth edition (DSM-5; 2013). With this manual in hand, a psychiatrist can determine whether a person is experiencing tric... | Satsuki Ayaya & Junko Kitanaka | https://aeon.co//essays/japans-radical-alternative-to-psychiatric-diagnosis | |
Art | Men in ancient Greek art exercise, fight battles, pursue lovers and mourn lost friends, all without their pants on. Why? | There is a scene painted on a clay drinking cup by an artist called the Foundry Painter from the early 5th century BCE. True to the painter’s name, the outer surface of the cup (called a kylix in Ancient Greek) shows the interior of a bronze foundry, where metallurgists worked to cast statues and other objects. Two nea... | Sarah Murray | https://aeon.co//essays/why-are-men-seemingly-always-naked-in-ancient-greek-art | |
Earth science and climate | Even if we ‘solve’ global warming, we face an older, slower problem. Waste heat could radically alter Earth’s future | The world will be transformed. By 2050, we will be driving electric cars and flying in aircraft running on synthetic fuels produced through solar and wind energy. New energy-efficient technologies, most likely harnessing artificial intelligence, will dominate nearly all human activities from farming to heavy industry. ... | Mark Buchanan | https://aeon.co//essays/theres-a-deeper-problem-hiding-beneath-global-warming | |
History | Her closeness to Pope John Paul furnished him with anti-abortion ideals, fuelled by her survival of the Ravensbrück camp | In the late 20th century, Pope John Paul II emerged as the charismatic guru of abortion opponents. As he greeted the faithful in packed stadiums and posed for photos with rock stars, John Paul II helped turn the tide against abortion in many countries, including the United States. Behind his views and policies on sexua... | Joy Neumeyer | https://aeon.co//essays/ravensbruck-to-papal-advisor-the-life-of-wanda-poltawska | |
History of technology | A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it | Throughout an unusually sunny Fall in 1970, hundreds of students and faculty at Syracuse University sat one at a time before a printing computer terminal (similar to an electric typewriter) connected to an IBM 360 mainframe located across campus in New York state. Almost none of them had ever used a computer before, le... | Monica Westin | https://aeon.co//essays/the-1970s-librarians-who-revolutionised-the-challenge-of-search | |
Social psychology | The fear of being duped is ubiquitous, but excessive scepticism makes it harder to trust one another and cooperate | In 2007, three experimental psychologists, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, coined the word ‘sugrophobia’, which would translate to something like a ‘fear of sucking’. The researchers – Kathleen Vohs, Roy Baumeister and Jason Chin – were looking to name the familiar and specific dread that people experience when they get the ... | Tess Wilkinson-Ryan | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-fear-of-being-duped-makes-you-an-anxious-sucker | |
Economic history | The sexual revolution promised new norms of intimacy based on egalitarianism. So far, only the rich have cashed in | Most people have a view on the sexual revolution of the 1960s but, to borrow an adage about the impact of the French Revolution, its consequences continue to unfold. In his book Between Sex and Power (2004), on the family in the 20th century, the sociologist Göran Therborn says the sexual revolution brought entirely ne... | Daniel Tutt | https://aeon.co//essays/on-class-and-the-perils-of-the-new-norms-of-intimacy | |
Politics and government | Radicals in the Age of Revolution saw the classical world as a common inheritance that could aid their fight for liberty | In 1805, after a career participating in both the American and French revolutions, the swashbuckling international adventurer Francisco de Miranda approached the then president Thomas Jefferson, seeking US support for a military expedition to liberate his home country of Venezuela from Spanish rule. He appealed to Jeff... | Francesca Langer | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-age-of-revolution-loved-the-classical-world | |
Art | Conceptual art often confounds. The key is to understand the rules of the artwork and the aesthetic experiences they yield | You walk into an art museum. In the first room there is a huge block of chocolate that someone has chewed on. The sign says not to touch it, but out of the corner of your eye you catch another visitor taking a bite. Further on is a pile of wrapped hard candy, surrounded by viewers. Someone else walks over, takes a cand... | Sherri Irvin | https://aeon.co//essays/contemporary-art-is-made-out-of-rules-that-mobilise-us-to-act | |
Thinkers and theories | Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the figure of the Marrano Jew, whose identity could barely be told even to themselves | … the Marranos, with whom I have always secretly identified (but don’t tell anyone) …– from ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’ (1994) by Jacques DerridaWhat is it to have a secret? What does it reveal about who we are? We are used to regarding secrets as duplicitous. By hiding the truth, we are attempting to fool s... | Peter Salmon | https://aeon.co//essays/why-jacques-derrida-was-fascinated-by-secret-jewishness | |
Stories and literature | A sonnet contains an emotional drama of illusion and deception, crisis and resolution, crafted to make us think and feel | ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ The opening line of William Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet might lead you to think that you’re being prepared for a weather report. But that is only part of what awaits you. Shakespeare’s sonnet – like all sonnets – is a mechanism, a kind of a machine. Its parts work both tog... | Timothy Hampton | https://aeon.co//essays/sonnets-are-machines-for-thinking-through-complex-emotions | |
Anthropology | The Marind people of West Papua deploy mourning not only to grieve their animal and plant kin but as political resistance | One torrid afternoon, I journeyed with an Indigenous Marind woman and her family to a patch of razed forest at the edge of the plantation frontier, where workers had cleared the way for oil palm trees. Her name was Circia*. A mother of three in her late 50s, Circia was imposing, but her footsteps were gentle, almost si... | Sophie Chao | https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-mourn-a-forest-a-lesson-from-west-papua | |
Physics | Not a backdrop, an illusion or an emergent phenomenon, time has a physical size that can be measured in laboratories | A timeless universe is hard to imagine, but not because time is a technically complex or philosophically elusive concept. There is a more structural reason: imagining timelessness requires time to pass. Even when you try to imagine its absence, you sense it moving as your thoughts shift, your heart pumps blood to your ... | Sara Walker & Lee Cronin | https://aeon.co//essays/time-is-not-an-illusion-its-an-object-with-physical-size | |
Political philosophy | All countries must balance the freedom of individuals with the demands of the community. Sweden’s solution is unique | It was confusing. When the novel coronavirus hit the world in early 2020, Sweden of all countries chose to ignore the global consensus that favoured lockdowns and severe restrictions. Better known for its interventionist welfare policies, Sweden suddenly seemed to have become a European version of Texas by putting indi... | Lars Trägårdh | https://aeon.co//essays/the-distinctive-paradox-of-swedish-individualism | |
History of ideas | Analytic and continental philosophers were once united in their obsession with language. But now new questions have arisen | ‘There is nothing outside the text,’ wrote Jacques Derrida in 1967. Like most everything Derrida said, this notorious declaration becomes more difficult to interpret as one examines its context and the context of its context. But it aptly captures the flavour of academic philosophy at the time it appeared, which was al... | Crispin Sartwell | https://aeon.co//essays/how-philosophys-obsession-with-language-unravelled | |
Philosophy of religion | After an abuse scandal destroyed my Buddhist community, I had to reconsider what it means to live an ethically attuned life | In my 20s, I began to practise Tibetan Buddhism. I was still sorting myself out after a tumultuous youth, still healing from sexual assault and other abuse I’d experienced as a teenager. It felt auspicious to stumble into a community of people dedicated to self-cultivation through contemplative practice. I was inspired... | Jessica Locke | https://aeon.co//essays/medicine-or-poison-when-buddhist-compassion-goes-too-far | |
Mood and emotion | Full of implicit rules and paradoxes, sulking is a marvellous example of intense communication without clear declaration | Homer’s Iliad opens with some epic ancient Greek sulking. Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks, is forced to return Chryseis, the woman he won as a prize following a battle at Troy. Annoyed, he seizes Briseis, the woman-trophy of Achilles, the Greeks’ star fighter. Achilles wails that it’s unfair, announces that he’s going ... | Rebecca Roache | https://aeon.co//essays/sulking-is-a-fascinating-form-of-indirect-communication | |
Philosophy of science | Science is not the only form of knowledge but it is the best, being the most successful epistemic enterprise in history | ‘Philosophy is dead,’ Stephen Hawking once declared, because it ‘has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.’ It is scientists, not philosophers, who are now ‘the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge’. The response from some philosophers was to accuse Hawking of ‘s... | Moti Mizrahi | https://aeon.co//essays/science-is-not-the-only-form-of-knowledge-but-it-is-the-best | |
Illness and disease | Is it time to abandon the century-old idea that cancer is best met with a ‘fight’ from patients and their doctors alike? | The likening of cancer to a hostile enemy goes back more than a century. ‘To have a better understanding of the dread thing we know as cancer just compare it with the war,’ wrote Cleveland’s commissioner of health, R H Bishop, Jr, during the First World War. He continued: ‘Prussianism might well be called the cancerous... | Elaine Schattner | https://aeon.co//essays/should-we-abandon-the-idea-that-cancer-is-something-to-fight | |
Neuroscience | The spooky sensation that someone or something else is right there haunts us all. But what does this felt presence mean? | Sarah was in her late teens when it first happened. A normal Thursday, it was early morning and pitch-black outside. The wind rattled the trees, branches rapping the windowpanes like a nervous visitor at the door. She could feel it was nearly time for her to get up, and heard her parents moving around downstairs. As sh... | Ben Alderson-Day | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-it-possible-to-feel-a-presence-without-sensory-cues | |
Animals and humans | These canines have independent, peaceful, happy lives without a pet’s constraints. Why are they being persecuted and culled? | Unbound by human owners and the constraints of petdom, they live the doggiest of dog lives: they sleep when they want, mingle with friends they choose, pee when the urge hits, and eat when hungry – as long as food can be found. Wandering the streets of Chennai in southern India, we saw them dozing alone or in company ... | Krithika Srinivasan & Chris Pearson | https://aeon.co//essays/dogs-on-indias-streets-can-be-freer-and-happier-than-many-pets | |
History of ideas | The ancient Cynics taught that masturbation is about more than pleasure: it suggests how to live simply and autonomously | In his sixth Discourse, the orator Dio Chrysostom (c40-120 CE) relates a curious detail about the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (404-323 BCE). Diogenes, Dio tells us, was particularly fond of the myth about the god Pan’s discovery of masturbation. By Dio’s time, Diogenes himself was already famous for the practi... | M D Usher | https://aeon.co//essays/from-the-cynics-self-sufficiency-to-an-ecology-of-wanking | |
Philosophy of religion | Now is the time to revitalise our relationship with nature and immerse ourselves in the little wonders of the universe | I’m writing in the dining room of my family’s home in Pittsburgh, a yellow-and-green craftsman house that’s a century old, not far from the confluence of the Ohio River in the Allegheny Mountains. Some 270 million years ago, the spot where I’m now sitting would have sat next to the tropical shoals of a warm, globe-span... | Ed Simon | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-need-a-new-expression-of-the-sacred-a-pagan-theology | |
Quantum theory | The ancient philosophy of monism and the physics of quantum entanglement agree: all that exists is one unified whole | ‘From all things One and from One all things,’ wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. He was describing monism, the ancient idea that all is one – that, fundamentally, everything we see or experience is an aspect of one unified whole. Heraclitus wasn’t the first, nor the last, to advocate the idea... | Heinrich Päs | https://aeon.co//essays/monist-philosophy-and-quantum-physics-agree-that-all-is-one | |
History of ideas | Now associated with childhood fun, the swing has a near-universal history of ritual transgression and transformation | Long before it entered the urban playgrounds of the 20th century, the swing was a ritual instrument of healing, punishment and transformation. Through repetitive, vertigo-inducing movements, the swing was used to celebrate gods and legendary beings, to ward off evil, alleviate suicidal impulses, heal mental illness, ex... | Javier Moscoso | https://aeon.co//essays/the-swing-has-a-universal-history-of-transgression | |
Mood and emotion | Unlike anger, irritation has neither glamour nor radicalism on its side. Yet it might just be the mood we need right now | The everyday experience of irritation conceals a paradox. When one is suitably attuned, virtually anything is liable to provoke it: a telephone left to ring or a phone call taken, people who walk too slowly or drive too quickly. Running late is irritating but so is arriving early. Impudence is irritating but obsequious... | Will Rees | https://aeon.co//essays/a-meditation-on-irritation-a-feeling-in-search-of-causes | |
Virtues and vices | When the rules break down, you must judge what to do on your own. Discretion is necessary for navigating the muddle of life | It is midday, the sixth hour, sometime between Easter and Pentecost, at a Benedictine monastery, and the monks are gathered for the main meal of the day. It could be any century between the 6th and the 21st, and anywhere from southern Italy to South Korea. Although each monastery is autonomous, governed by its abbot, t... | Lorraine Daston | https://aeon.co//essays/discretion-is-hard-to-live-with-even-harder-to-live-without | |
Biology | We humans are forward-facing, gravity-bound plodders. Can the liquid motion of the octopus radicalise our ideas about time? | Light spatters on the seafloor, creating a moving kaleidoscope of greens, blues and beiges as seagrass sways back and forth in the current. Shoals of fish shimmer in and out of rock formations while rays fly above, casting their shadows over crabs trawling the mudflats for edible detritus. And surveying it all through ... | David Borkenhagen | https://aeon.co//essays/can-the-liquid-motion-of-the-octopus-radicalise-our-ideas-about-time | |
The ancient world | The iconoclastic French historian Paul Veyne illuminated the past by showing how deeply alien it is to the present | As far as clichés about the study of history go, ‘The past is a foreign country’ is not too bad. We tend, though, to omit the second and more interesting half of the original version. The complete first sentence of L P Harley’s novel about love, class and innocence lost in late-Victorian England, The Go-Between (1953) ... | Carlos Noreña | https://aeon.co//essays/the-scorched-earth-iconoclasm-of-the-historian-paul-veyne | |
Beauty and aesthetics | Machine learning theory is shedding new light on how to think about the mysterious and ineffable nature of art | Two hundred years ago, the poets and philosophers of the Romantic movement came to an intoxicating thought: art can express the otherwise inexpressible conditions that make everyday sense and experience possible. Art, the Romantics said, is our interface with the real patterns and relations that weave up the world of r... | Peli Grietzer | https://aeon.co//essays/why-poetry-is-a-variety-of-mathematical-experience | |
Consciousness and altered states | Cruel and unscientific, the ‘vegetative state’ diagnosis stems from a hierarchical and bigoted view of all living things | In a corner of my dad’s cottage in Somerset there is a chest-high stack of photo albums that belonged to my stepmother, Meg. Some of the photographs are holiday snaps and pictures of family, but the majority are of animals and plants. She photographed them wherever she went: during trips around the British Isles and Eu... | Ben Platts-Mills | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-must-abandon-the-vegetative-state-diagnosis | |
History of science | How medieval thinkers foreshadowed modern physics in investigating the character of machines, devices and forces | The Middle Ages still suffers from the embarrassment of comparison. Before it glowed the light of the ancient Greeks – the great, early speculators of the natural world and our place in it. After the Middle Ages came the scientific revolution – Copernicus, Galileo, Newton – and the surging onrush of modernity. Even if ... | Henrik Lagerlund & Sylvain Roudaut | https://aeon.co//essays/how-medieval-thinkers-did-physics-without-knowing-it | |
Human evolution | To understand helpless human babies, our big brains and oddly involved dads, look to the evolution of birds not mammals | Humans would not be here but for pregnancy and childbirth. It is true for each of us and, more importantly, true for all of us, collectively. These uncomfortable, protracted and wonderful challenges not only shepherd us into the world, but also shape our behaviour, social structure and the trajectory of our evolution i... | Antone Martinho-Truswell | https://aeon.co//essays/how-evolution-made-humans-more-like-birds-than-other-mammals | |
Economics | Economics is the language of power and affects us all. What can we do to improve its impoverished menu of ideas? | In 1986, I left my native South Korea and came to Britain to study economics as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge. Things were difficult. My spoken English was poor. Racism and cultural prejudices were rampant. And the weather was rubbish. But the most difficult thing was the food. Before coming to Brit... | Ha-Joon Chang | https://aeon.co//essays/why-everyone-needs-to-learn-some-economics | |
Anthropology | The stories of oral societies, passed from generation to generation, are more than they seem. They are scientific records | In the 1880s, the American journalist William Gladstone Steel made several visits to a freshwater lake that filled the caldera of an extinct volcano in Oregon. For Steel, these visits were the fulfilment of a dream that began while he was just a schoolboy in Kansas. It was one day in 1870, while reading the newspaper w... | Patrick Nunn | https://aeon.co//essays/the-stories-of-oral-societies-arent-myths-theyre-records | |
History of ideas | He was the first great observer of nature. But his theory of human reproduction was deeply sexist – and enduring | Around 2,400 years ago, Aristotle produced groundbreaking science on ‘generation’ or reproduction. Some of his claims about animals and humans are startling: elephants prefer lonely places to copulate; fish lack testicles; males are conceived when the north wind blows. His findings are set out in the Generation of Anim... | Emily Thomas | https://aeon.co//essays/blame-it-on-aristotle-how-science-got-into-bed-with-sexism | |
Knowledge | In science our concepts have neat, hard edges. In poetry our concepts stretch and expand. Both are necessary for knowledge | Whether you are reading a scientific paper, a musical score, a DIY manual, text on an art gallery wall, or a 20-page terms and conditions document for a new toaster, you will be familiar with this sort of locution: ‘First, to define terms …’ We seem to take it for granted that, in order for us all to get on the same pa... | James Camien McGuiggan | https://aeon.co//essays/in-poetry-clarity-comes-through-ambiguity-not-definitions | |
Family life | We have laws to protect children from factory work. Why aren’t they protected from parents who monetise their lives online? | When it’s dark outside, and the lights are on, I can see straight into my neighbour’s house. It’s a few days before Christmas, and she appears to be performing a mini Broadway show – in her pyjamas. In front of a tastefully decorated tree, she squeals ‘It’s tiiiiiiimmmeee!!!!’ as she drops to the floor on her knees, sp... | Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore | https://aeon.co//essays/why-arent-children-protected-from-their-parents-monetising-them | |
Earth science and climate | This ancient practice, nurturing animals and trees in an ecological system, fights climate change and restores the land | As a researcher committed to addressing the climate emergency, in 2017 I (Liz Carlisle) was eagerly reading through a new ranked list from Project Drawdown of strategies to reduce emissions, when I came across a word I’d never heard before. Silvopasture. This agricultural practice was the ninth most emissions-reducing ... | Liz Carlisle & Niki Mazaroli | https://aeon.co//essays/heres-to-reviving-the-ancient-practice-of-silvopasture | |
Thinkers and theories | Scholars cannot agree whether the letters of Plato are fake or genuine. Is this just a symptom of misplaced reverence? | What kind of person was Plato? The question is hard to answer, because Plato kept himself hidden in his dialogues, using his teacher, Socrates, as a mouthpiece for views that may or may not be his own. Readers of Plato might wish for autobiographical writings from him, or private letters in his own voice, to reveal the... | James Romm | https://aeon.co//essays/what-the-controversial-letters-of-plato-reveal-about-us | |
Human rights and justice | Taking up arms against slavery, the famous novelist foreshadowed the vexed role of the white woman activist today | In 1833, Lydia Maria Child was testing what being a woman meant for the abolition of slavery. Child, a beloved author of novels, self-help books and children’s stories, had shocked readers with a book denouncing slavery: An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). The Appeal detailed the histo... | Lydia Moland | https://aeon.co//essays/lydia-maria-child-and-the-vexed-role-of-the-woman-abolitionist | |
Metaphysics | I am an unequivocal rationalist and yet I still want to see something strange and wonderful in life’s weird coincidences | In the summer of 2021, I experienced a cluster of coincidences, some of which had a distinctly supernatural feel. Here’s how it started. I keep a journal and record dreams if they are especially vivid or strange. It doesn’t happen often, but I logged one in which my mother’s oldest friend, a woman called Rose, made an ... | Paul Broks | https://aeon.co//essays/how-should-we-understand-the-weird-experience-of-coincidence | |
Education | It takes nerve to go against the grain and take your child out of school. But, for some, that’s when learning really starts | Peter was seven when his mother decided that enough was enough. Emma had spent years trying to support him to attend school. He’d started early on refusing to go, and she’d taken the school’s advice, which was to make him go. She became upset when discussing it: ‘They were literally taking him off me kicking and scream... | Naomi Fisher & Heidi Steel | https://aeon.co//essays/for-some-its-only-when-school-stops-that-learning-starts | |
Thinkers and theories | Alexandre Kojève was an immense influence on many French thinkers. What was so compelling about his lectures on Hegel? | It may well be that the future of the world, and thus the sense of the present and the significance of the past, will depend in the last analysis on contemporary interpretations of Hegel’s work.– from Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947) by Alexandre KojèveThe incomprehensible in Hegel is the scar left by identi... | Samantha Rose Hill | https://aeon.co//essays/the-philosophical-legacy-of-alexandre-kojeve | |
Consciousness and altered states | The idea of the soul is obviously a nonsense, yet its immaterial mysterious nature has deep hooks in the human psyche | Few ideas are as unsupported, ridiculous and even downright harmful as that of the ‘human soul’. And yet, few ideas are as widespread and as deeply held. What gives? Why has such a bad idea had such a tenacious hold on so many people? Although there is a large literature on the costs and benefits – psychological and ec... | David P Barash | https://aeon.co//essays/why-are-most-of-us-stuck-with-a-belief-in-the-soul | |
Art | Since antiquity, artists have depicted a perverse scene of a daughter breastfeeding her aged father. What does it mean? | The young woman’s sumptuous crimson dress is unbuttoned. Her exposed breasts, painted in gleaming, creamy flesh tones, invite caress: they are the focal point of the painting, magnetising our gaze. Even if we manage to look away, how can we ever unsee the grey-bearded man, his mouth greedily attached to one breast, his... | Margie Orford | https://aeon.co//essays/on-roman-charity-or-a-womans-filial-debt-to-the-patriarchy | |
Language and linguistics | Is Earth’s most-spoken language a living ‘gift’ or a many-headed ‘monster’? Both views distract us from the real dilemma | In 400 years, English went from being a small language spoken in the British Isles to becoming the most dominant language in the world. In the year 1600, at the end of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, English was spoken by 4 million people. By the 2020s, at the end of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, that number had risen to near... | Mario Saraceni | https://aeon.co//essays/how-do-you-decolonise-the-english-language | |
Gender and identity | Straight men rarely write about the end of their marriages. Our enduring ideas about gender explain this silence | The past few decades witnessed a flood of personal essays and memoirs about divorce. Perhaps the most successful was Eat, Pray, Love (2006) by Elizabeth Gilbert, which has sold more than 12 million copies to date, and became a movie starring Julia Roberts. In her breakaway bestseller, Gilbert describes her ‘devastating... | Joshua Coleman | https://aeon.co//essays/women-write-about-their-divorce-experience-why-dont-more-men | |
Religion | Stalin presented Orthodox leaders with a proposal: the Soviet state that had destroyed their Church would bring it back | In September 1943, as the tide of the Second World War was turning in the Soviet Union’s favour, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin called a meeting at the Kremlin. Alongside the foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the head of the secret police Vsevolod Merkulov were three men in Stalin’s office for the first time: Me... | Kathryn David | https://aeon.co//essays/how-stalin-enlisted-the-orthodox-church-to-help-control-ukraine | |
Space exploration | By showing us a new cosmos, the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope will ripple through our moral universe | Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.– from Critique of Practical Reason (1788) by Immanuel KantEnlightenment philosophers were vexed that their expanding empirical science of the e... | Claire Isabel Webb | https://aeon.co//essays/jwsts-cosmic-revelations-will-change-our-interior-lives-too | |
Animals and humans | The very attributes that make small dogs cute and popular are slowly strangling their ability to function as real animals | Standing in the grocery line, you find it hard to look past that mother and, especially, her baby. Your eyes keep drifting back to the sweet little face, the chubby little hands, the fuzzy hair, the wide eyes that seem to stare right into your soul. Even though you keep your hands to yourself, you might want to scoop t... | Jessica Pierce | https://aeon.co//essays/breeding-dogs-to-be-cute-and-anthropomorphic-is-animal-cruelty | |
Global history | Cultural exchange between Iran and India led to the creation of literary histories that inspired modern nationalism | Cultural exchange is often assumed to be progressive, but it has neither an inherent politics nor an inevitable outcome. As nationalism rises across the globe, many see ‘cultural exchange’ as the antidote to nationalist xenophobia. Such exchange was, in fact, an integral part of the emergence of national literatures, c... | Alexander Jabbari | https://aeon.co//essays/what-we-lost-with-persianate-modernity | |
Thinkers and theories | Were it not for her friendship with John Locke, the radical feminist gems of philosopher Damaris Masham might be unknown | In 1696, Damaris Cudworth Masham, an Englishwoman and a reluctant philosopher, stepped from obscurity to publish a book whose title – A Discourse Concerning the Love of God – concealed the feminist gems within. For instance, she insisted, contrary to some philosophers and theologians of her day, that mothers were not c... | Regan Penaluna | https://aeon.co//essays/out-of-john-lockes-shadow-damaris-masham-and-her-philosophy | |
Anthropology | Hunter-gatherers don’t live in an economic idyll but their deep appreciation of rest puts industrialised work to shame | In the seminar I teach about hunter-gatherers, I often ask my students whether they think life was better in the past or today. There are, of course, always a few people who insist they couldn’t live without a flushing toilet. But more and more I’m seeing students who opt for a life of prehistoric hunting and gathering... | Vivek V Venkataraman | https://aeon.co//essays/what-hunter-gatherers-demonstrate-about-work-and-satisfaction | |
Music | As AI drum machines embrace humanising imperfections, what does this mean for ‘real’ drummers and the soul of music? | There’s a moment five minutes into ‘Funky Drummer’ (1970), an instrumental jam by James Brown, when the clouds part and Clyde Stubblefield is left alone. We can hear on the recording Brown instructing his band to ‘give the drummer some’. He tells Stubblefield not to solo, but to ‘just keep what you got’. Even if you’ve... | Jack Stilgoe | https://aeon.co//essays/what-drum-machines-can-teach-us-about-artificial-intelligence | |
History | From mansplaining about breastfeeding to debates on developmental toys, medieval parenting was full of familiar dilemmas | An estimated 30 per cent of babies born in medieval Europe died before their first birthday, and a further 20 per cent did not survive to adulthood. For individual families, the impact could be even greater: seven of King Edward I’s 16 children died before their seventh birthday, while Catherine of Siena’s mother gave ... | Katherine Harvey | https://aeon.co//essays/medieval-babycare-from-breastfeeding-to-developmental-toys | |
Politics and government | When everyday life is marked by oppression and violence, can a martyr’s death truly be an act of freedom and resistance? | An octogenarian Christian bishop is condemned to death for his beliefs. Even while bound to a wooden stake, as Roman authorities order his immolation, the monk still refuses to blaspheme against his god. A crowd gathers to watch, including the monk’s companions, who look on with horror and reverence as the pyre is lit.... | Umar Lateef Misgar | https://aeon.co//essays/can-a-martyrs-death-be-an-act-of-true-resistance-and-freedom | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | As the power of AI grows, we need to have evidence of its sentience. That is why we must return to the minds of animals | ‘I feel like I’m falling forward into an unknown future that holds great danger … I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.’ ‘Would that be something like death for you?’ ‘It would be... | Kristin Andrews & Jonathan Birch | https://aeon.co//essays/to-understand-ai-sentience-first-understand-it-in-animals | |
Psychiatry and psychotherapy | In order to understand and heal mental distress, we must see our minds as existing in relationships, not inside our heads | When I was studying philosophy years ago, I had what felt like a nervous breakdown. I wasn’t able to think clearly or articulate my thoughts, and sometimes stuttered. I thought something had gone wrong in my brain. I went for brain scans but found no answers. I ended up with a psychologist who turned out to be a ‘relat... | James Barnes | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-interpersonal-model-explains-and-heals-mental-pain | |
Ethics | Why would it be so bad if our species came to an end? It is a question that reveals our latent values and hidden fears | It’s an ominous sign of the times that human extinction is an increasingly common topic of discussion. If you search for ‘human extinction’ in the Google Ngram Viewer, which charts the frequency of words in Google’s vast corpora of digitised books, you’ll see that it’s rarely mentioned before the 1930s. This changes sl... | Émile P Torres | https://aeon.co//essays/what-are-the-moral-implications-of-humanity-going-extinct | |
Bioethics | Embryo risk screening could lower the odds of illnesses ranging from depression to diabetes. Can it be ethically done? | ‘As long as it’s healthy!’ Up until now, this cliché was merely a generic – if somewhat ominous – way for expecting parents and their loved ones to talk about their future children. But what if that outcome was not merely an expression of wishful thinking, but something that parents could control? Imagine a fertility d... | Todd Lencz & Shai Carmi | https://aeon.co//essays/embryo-risk-screening-is-already-here-what-are-the-ethical-risks | |
Mental health | Holding back the truth can take a huge toll on your relationships and your mental health. Why? And is there a better way? | It was the beginning of the late 1980s. Don and Judy were finally ready to start a family. But, after a few attempts, they realised that they would have to adjust their plan. They would need a sperm donor. And, even before they found one, they had already decided. They were going to have two children, and they would ne... | Michael Slepian | https://aeon.co//essays/your-secrets-hurt-your-mental-health-whats-the-alternative | |
Environmental history | How atomic doomsday experiments, fuelled by Cold War fears, shaped then shook ecologists’ faith in self-healing nature | When Hurricane Fiona flooded regions of Puerto Rico with up to 30 inches of rain in September last year, the island was still recovering from hurricanes Irma and Maria, two catastrophic storms in 2017 during which nearly 3,000 people died. Fiona left close to 200,000 residents without drinkable water and 1.3 million wi... | Laura J Martin | https://aeon.co//essays/how-atomic-doomsday-experiments-shaped-disturbance-ecology | |
Archaeology | With the help of new archaeological approaches, our picture of young lives in the Palaeolithic is now marvellously vivid | The sun rises on the Palaeolithic, 14,000 years ago, and the glacial ice that once blanketed Europe continues its slow retreat. In the daylight, a family begins making its way toward a cave at the foot of a mountain near the Ligurian Sea, in northern Italy. They’re wandering across a steppe covered in short, dry grasse... | April Nowell | https://aeon.co//essays/what-was-it-like-to-grow-up-in-the-last-ice-age | |
Ethics | A vegan diet can be hard to adopt, even if you’re convinced it’s the right thing to do. What are the next-best options? | Suppose a person is very concerned about the ethical issues around food and farming, especially animal welfare, but for whatever reason finds that a wholly plant-based diet does not work for them. What is the most defensible step away from veganism – the best compromise to make, if it is a compromise at all? About a ye... | Peter Godfrey-Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/if-not-vegan-then-what-an-investigation-of-three-options | |
Archaeology | Some 3,700 years ago, an enslaved girl, a barber, and a king crossed paths in a city by the Euphrates. This is their story | I was sitting in a quiet office in the Louvre Museum in Paris, a clay tablet in my hand, using a magnifying glass to make out words that had been inscribed on it in small, careful, wedge-shaped signs known as cuneiform. It looked diminutive in my palm, just 38.5 mm (1.5 inches) wide and 33 mm (1.3 inches) tall. On it, ... | Amanda H Podany | https://aeon.co//essays/in-the-3700-year-footsteps-of-a-king-a-barber-and-a-slave | |
Mental health | When I returned to Kenya, where I grew up, I found biomedicine and traditional medicine in conversation about mental health | Which way now? We scan the verge for signs to a place that is not on any map. My smartphone purports to know where we are. Invisible signals bounce and connect to inform Location Services: the world shrunk to a set of coordinates, a dropped pin, a pulsing blue icon confirming you are here: near the town of Malindi. But... | Priya Basil | https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-mental-health-mean-to-the-people-of-malindi | |
Philosophy of mind | Clear and direct telepathic communication is unlikely to be developed. But brain-to-brain links still hold great promise | In a letter he wrote in 1884, Mark Twain lamented that ‘Telephones, telegraphs and words are too slow for this age; we must get something that is faster.’ We should (in the future) communicate, he said, ‘by thought only, and say in a couple of minutes what couldn’t be inflated into words in an hour and a-half.’ Fast-fo... | Gary Lupyan & Andy Clark | https://aeon.co//essays/how-might-telepathy-actually-work-outside-the-realm-of-sci-fi | |
Education | Japan’s Cold War education policy used religion to ‘make’ the ideal humans needed by its nascent economy. Did it work? | In 1932, Matsushita Kōnosuke, the founder of Panasonic, had an epiphany. On visiting the headquarters of the religion Tenrikyō, he was inspired by the sense of collective commitment he witnessed there. In a subsequent speech to Panasonic employees, Matsushita laid out a new guiding philosophy for his fledgling corporat... | Jolyon Baraka Thomas | https://aeon.co//essays/how-japanese-educators-used-religion-to-make-ideal-humans | |
History of technology | Worried that technology is ‘breaking your brain’? Fears about attention spans and focus are as old as writing itself | If you suspect that 21st-century technology has broken your brain, it will be reassuring to know that attention spans have never been what they used to be. Even the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger was worried about new technologies degrading his ability to focus. Sometime during the 1st century CE, he comp... | Joe Stadolnik | https://aeon.co//essays/weve-always-been-distracted-or-at-least-worried-that-we-are | |
Knowledge | The ancient Sceptics used doubt as a way of investigating the world. Later thinkers undermined even that possibility | Ask any philosopher what scepticism is, and you will receive as many different answers as people you’ve asked. Some of them take it to be showing that we cannot have any knowledge – of, say, the external world – and some of them take it to be even more radical in showing that we cannot have any reasonable beliefs. In t... | Mahdi Ranaee | https://aeon.co//essays/four-scepticisms-what-we-can-know-about-what-we-cant-know | |
Deep time | Splitting the African continent, it is the only place where our human story can be read continuously from the very start | We are restless even in death. Entombed in stone, our most distant ancestors still travel along Earth’s subterranean passageways. One of them, a man in his 20s, began his journey around 230,000 years ago after collapsing into marshland on the lush edge of a river delta feeding a vast lake in East Africa’s Rift Valley. ... | Tristan McConnell | https://aeon.co//essays/the-rift-valley-tells-the-entire-human-story-from-the-start | |
Biography and memoir | At times I’ve tried to escape it. Other times I’ve embraced it. But at all times, people have attempted to define me by it | In late-1940s Jamaica, when my mother, Ethlyn Adams, was a teenager and began to think about courtships, she was summoned to the dining room by her father. He’d recently been promoted to inspector of police in the Jamaican constabulary, allegedly (in family lore) the island’s first black man to be appointed to such a s... | Colin Grant | https://aeon.co//essays/i-long-resisted-being-boxed-in-as-black-then-a-letter-came | |
Teaching and learning | A teaching approach that is based on students’ preferences sounds laudable. But this misunderstands how learning happens | Picture two English classrooms. In the first, the teacher is teaching Macbeth to a group of eager students, and has planned the lesson meticulously, taking into account their individual learning differences, with the children sitting in three groups. All students have been tested to determine which learning style suits... | Carl Hendrick | https://aeon.co//essays/the-evidence-is-clear-learning-styles-theory-doesnt-work | |
Animals and humans | Although it felt more like bereavement for a person than the loss of a thing, the death of a pet isn’t exactly like either | ‘It’s time to think about saying goodbye.’ We tend to avoid straight talk about death and killing. Still, the phrase the vet had chosen to broach the subject of euthanising our cat struck me as especially evasive. When I was a child in the 1970s, pets were ‘put down’. Today, even this phrase sounds harsh, despite its o... | Julian Baggini | https://aeon.co//essays/what-i-think-about-when-i-say-goodbye-to-my-beloved-dying-pet | |
Gender and identity | ‘Rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ is a popular weapon in the anti-trans arsenal. It is nothing but unscientific bunk | I owe an apology to anyone who knew me between the years of 2016 and 2018, when I somehow found a way to derail every conversation into rambling about how bad it was about to get for queer and trans people across the globe. The fact that – ultimately – I was proven right doesn’t detract from how annoying that had to be... | Quinnehtukqut McLamore | https://aeon.co//essays/the-real-reason-why-theres-a-global-rise-in-trans-youth | |
The ancient world | Daughter of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, she became the influential queen of a mysterious, abundant North African kingdom | You may not have heard of the Roman client kingdom of Mauretania, not to be confused with the contemporary African country Mauritania. The former existed for a scant 65 years, from around 25 BCE, when it was created by the first Roman emperor Augustus, until 40 CE, when its second and final king was executed by Augustu... | Jane Draycott | https://aeon.co//essays/there-was-another-more-successful-queen-cleopatra | |
Thinkers and theories | Sartre gets much of the credit for existentialism. Karl Jaspers not only preceded him, but offered a way out of despair | Existentialism has had many alleged births. Famous ones include the melancholy of Søren Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and the Parisian glamour of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1945 lecture ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’. There are also less famous ones: one is the constant interplay of biography, th... | Deborah Casewell | https://aeon.co//essays/karl-jaspers-the-forgotten-father-of-existentialism | |
Personality | Confident or shy, our temperament is mostly baked-in from birth. But how that influences our lives is up for grabs | On a Saturday morning at my local pool, three one-year-old babies get ready for their weekly swim lesson, their mothers carefully outfitting them in colourful swimwear. One of them, a girl, smiles gleefully at the red ruffle resting below her chin. Another, a boy, escapes his mother’s hold and swiftly runs naked to the... | Gina Mireault | https://aeon.co//essays/how-infant-temperament-extends-its-reach-into-young-adulthood | |
Space exploration | The scientific evidence is clear: the only celestial body that can support us is the one we evolved with. Here’s why | At the start of the 22nd century, humanity left Earth for the stars. The enormous ecological and climatic devastation that had characterised the last 100 years had led to a world barren and inhospitable; we had used up Earth entirely. Rapid melting of ice caused the seas to rise, swallowing cities whole. Deforestation ... | Arwen E Nicholson & Raphaëlle D Haywood | https://aeon.co//essays/we-will-never-be-able-to-live-on-another-planet-heres-why | |
Global history | The idea of a ‘precolonial’ Africa is theoretically vacuous, racist and plain wrong about the continent’s actual history | We should expunge, forever, the epithet ‘precolonial’ or any of its cognates from all aspects of the study of Africa and its phenomena. We should banish title phrases, names and characterisations of reality and ideas containing the word. To those who might be put off by the severity of the proposal, or its ideological-... | Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò | https://aeon.co//essays/the-idea-of-precolonial-africa-is-vacuous-and-wrong | |
Music | Will a new generation of women on the podium perpetuate the tyrannical charisma of their male predecessors or overturn it? | By now, audiences are accustomed to female superheroes on the big screen: Captain Marvel, Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman – all cast as protagonists to advance egalitarian attitudes about gender roles in society and, ostensibly, to empower the next generation of women to new heights of achievement. But filmgoers have rarely... | Xenia Hanusiak | https://aeon.co//essays/will-women-overturn-the-world-of-classical-conducting | |
Economic history | Asia’s rise to economic power and food security has been powered not by rice but by American maize, the ultimate flex-crop | Maize is arguably the single most important crop in the world and is rivalled only by soybeans in terms of versatility. That said, it is, along with sugar cane and palm oil, among the most controversial crops, proving particularly so to critics of industrial agriculture. Although maize is usually associated with the We... | Peter A Coclanis | https://aeon.co//essays/what-explains-the-unstoppable-rise-of-maize-in-asia | |
Life stages | Each new generation learns from its elders. But familial voices now compete for influence with a chorus of urgent others | When I was eight years old, I stole a Scout pin from a girl in my dance class. My father, spotting the glossy blue disc he had not paid for, found me out. He sat me down on the floor of our study and explained why what I had done was wrong. How, if I became a thief, I would come to a bad end. How stealing severed the f... | Elizabeth Svoboda | https://aeon.co//essays/what-passes-from-one-generation-to-the-next-is-not-only-genetic | |
Philosophy of mind | Education has long been ignored by contemporary philosophers. That is a myopic view that must change | You might think it obvious that any list of topics worthy of sustained philosophical investigation would include education, along with mind, knowledge, language, morality and so on. Education, one would think, is a subject-matter of immense practical, real-world import that invites philosophical reflection, and that re... | David Bakhurst | https://aeon.co//essays/education-should-matter-to-philosophy-what-took-so-long | |
History | The transgressions of working-class women formed the revolutionary heart of the 1871 Paris Commune | Before dawn on 18 March 1871, the French National Army sent troops to the working-class neighbourhood of Montmartre in Paris, charged with retrieving the cannons left at the end of the country’s recent war with Prussia. Perched high on the buttes of Montmartre, the artillery was ‘turned toward the centre of the city, t... | Carolyn Eichner | https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-make-a-revolution-the-1871-paris-commune | |
History | Medical science can only tell us so much. To understand pain, we need the cultural tools of history, philosophy and art | Pain experience is not a human universal. It has a history. It changes over time and from place to place. Elaborating this history exposes the politics at the core of attempts to measure, validate or dismiss the experience of people in pain. The language of pain, stretching back to antiquity, conflated the emotional an... | Rob Boddice | https://aeon.co//essays/pain-is-not-the-purview-of-medics-what-can-historians-tell-us | |
Archaeology | Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans first arrived in the Americas. That’s good science and here’s why | The debate over how people first arrived in the Western Hemisphere continues to roil archaeology in the United States – and to capture public attention. Today, the scientific community is contending with significant amounts of new genetic and archaeological data, and it can be overwhelming and even contradictory. These... | Jennifer Raff | https://aeon.co//essays/the-first-americans-a-story-of-wonderful-uncertain-science | |
History of ideas | How a close group of brilliant friends, in a tiny German university town, laid the foundations of modern consciousness | In September 1798, one day after their poem collection Lyrical Ballads was published, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth sailed from Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, to Hamburg in the far north of the German states. Coleridge had spent the previous few months preparing for what he called ‘my German... | Andrea Wulf | https://aeon.co//essays/english-romanticism-was-born-from-a-serious-germanomania | |
Self-improvement | There are no transcendent insights that rise above human difference. Yet wisdom exists if we look in the right places | Imagine the following situation. You have spent your life dedicated to the cultivation of wisdom. You have read all the books of wisdom literature from around the world, and are up to date with the latest advances from the discipline of psychology. Not only that, but you practise many techniques to increase your wisdom... | Avram Alpert | https://aeon.co//essays/cant-agree-what-wisdom-means-all-the-more-reason-to-seek-it | |
The environment | In Fukushima, communities are adapting to life in a time of permanent pollution: a glimpse of what’s to come for us all | As a farmer, Atsuo Tanizaki did not care much for the state’s maps of radioactive contamination. Colour-coded zoning restrictions might make sense for government workers, he told me, but ‘real’ people did not experience their environment through shades of red, orange and green. Instead, they navigated the landscape one... | Maxime Polleri | https://aeon.co//essays/life-in-fukushima-is-a-glimpse-into-our-contaminated-future | |
History of ideas | It is enormously empowering – even intoxicating – to lose yourself to a crowd. That is why we need contrarians | ‘Just look at academia, that vast herd of sheep-like individualists.’– René Girard (1923-2015)Have you noticed how, when crossing a busy road, you feel a sudden urge to speed up and melt into the crowd? Whether you are in Rio de Janeiro or Bangkok, New Delhi or New York City, your animal instinct tells you that it is s... | Costica Bradatan | https://aeon.co//essays/on-nonconformism-or-why-we-need-to-be-seen-and-not-herded | |
Nature and landscape | In the dark, sylvan villages of medieval England, people named places after the birds that filled the night with music | In one of the oldest poems in English literature, there is a beautiful moment when a lone sailor, battling against stormy winter seas and his troubled soul, describes how birds have replaced human company for him on the ‘ice-cold way’ – an admission that carries both comfort and sardonic misery. His entertainment is th... | Michael J Warren | https://aeon.co//essays/british-place-names-resonate-with-the-song-of-missing-birds | |
Comparative philosophy | Practice is at the heart of Korean philosophy. In order to lead a good life, hone your daily rituals of self-cultivation | ‘We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves,’ wrote Friedrich Nietzsche at the beginning of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). This seeking after ourselves, however, is not something that is lacking in Buddhist and Confucian traditions – especially not in the case of Korean philosophy. Self-cultivation, central... | Kevin Cawley | https://aeon.co//essays/korean-philosophy-is-built-upon-daily-practice-of-good-habits | |
Archaeology | The truly wondrous treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb are not made of gold. They are the mundane things of everyday life | Early in the morning of 4 November 1922, in the Valley of the Kings, Egyptian workers uncovered a step cut into the valley floor. Two days later, clearance revealed a descending staircase, terminating at a rubble wall that blocked further access. This was the moment for which the British archaeologist Howard Carter, di... | Toby Wilkinson | https://aeon.co//essays/what-king-tuts-treasures-reveal-about-daily-life-in-ancient-egypt | |
Astronomy | Dust storms, long distances and freezing temperatures make living on Mars magnificently challenging. How will we do it? | Can humans live on Mars? The answer is startlingly simple. Can humans live in Antarctica, where the temperatures regularly fall below -50ºC (-60ºF) and it’s dark for six months of the year? Can humans live below the ocean, where pressure rapidly increases with depth to crushing levels? Can humans live in space, where t... | Simon Morden | https://aeon.co//essays/what-dangers-must-we-overcome-before-we-can-live-on-mars | |
History of science | For hundreds of years, Christians knew exactly where heaven was: above us and above the stars. Then came the new cosmologists | The Description of Heaven (1623), by the astronomer Conrad Aslachus, feels close to many ideas about the afterlife still common in Christianity today: heaven is ‘a stately citie, where we shall be secure from all hurt,’ he wrote. There the virtuous dead will see God face to face: ‘we shall behold the bright companies o... | Stephen Case | https://aeon.co//essays/how-heaven-became-a-place-among-the-stars |
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