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Nations and empires | Not just American or British, the Anglo-Saxon is a mirror to Frenchness: the country’s alter-ego and most feared enemy | In the English-speaking world, the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ usually refers to a specific period in medieval history. Occasionally, a residual contemporary usage creeps back into general parlance – such as the common expression ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’, used to describe a certain type of American East Coast elite – but ... | Emile Chabal | https://aeon.co//essays/the-anglo-saxon-is-not-american-or-british-but-a-french-alter-ego | |
Language and linguistics | The study of languages has long been prone to nonsense. Why is linguistics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots? | Ah, for the days of fact-free linguistics! The pre-scientific era might have produced a lot of codswallop and hogwash, but how entertaining it is to look back upon. Scholars erred in ways that few modern linguists ever would. Today, their field of study is a respectable social science, exacting in its methods, broad in... | Gaston Dorren | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-linguistics-such-a-magnet-for-dilettantes-and-crackpots | |
War and peace | Photography came of age amid the wars and atrocities, as well as the humanitarian aspirations, of the modern world | Mathew Brady, the great 19th-century American photographer, said: ‘The camera is the eye of history.’ The power of the photographic eye makes the global village visible, obliterates distance, and brings strangers close up. Brady came to his insight photographing the carnage of the American Civil War. Whether he knew it... | Jeremy Adelman | https://aeon.co//essays/does-photography-make-us-act-or-inure-us-to-despair | |
Neuroscience | Fixing chronic back pain is possible only when patients understand how much it is produced by the brain, not the spine | For patient after patient seeking to cure chronic back pain, the experience is years of frustration. Whether they strive to treat their aching muscles, bones and ligaments through physical therapy, massage or rounds of surgery, relief is often elusive – if the pain has not been made even worse. Now a new working hypoth... | Cathryn Jakobson Ramin | https://aeon.co//essays/to-treat-back-pain-look-to-the-brain-not-the-spine | |
Human evolution | Our imaginative life today has access to the pre-linguistic, ancestral mind: rich in imagery, emotions and associations | Imagination is intrinsic to our inner lives. You could even say that it makes up a ‘second universe’ inside our heads. We invent animals and events that don’t exist, we rerun history with alternative outcomes, we envision social and moral utopias, we revel in fantasy art, and we meditate both on what we could have been... | Stephen T Asma | https://aeon.co//essays/imagination-is-such-an-ancient-ability-it-might-precede-language | |
Stories and literature | How can you go about finding ‘who you really are’ if the whole idea of the one true self is a big fabrication? | Near the end of J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), the novel’s hero Holden Caulfield buys his sister Phoebe a ticket to the carousel in the park and watches her ride it. It begins to rain, and Holden – having spent most of the book in some form of anxiety, disgust or depression – now nearly cries with joy. ‘... | Cody Delistraty | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-coming-of-age-narrative-is-a-conformist-lie | |
Global history | There are 70 million people around the world who claim Irish ancestry. What shaped and made the great Irish emigration? | From 1700 to the present, fully ten million Irish men, women and children left Ireland and settled abroad. Remarkably, this figure is more than twice the population of the Republic of Ireland today (4.8 million). It exceeds the population of the island of Ireland, north and south (6.6 million). And it is greater than t... | Kevin Kenny | https://aeon.co//essays/the-irish-experience-and-the-meaning-of-modern-diaspora | |
Wellbeing | The idea that immersing yourself in forests and nature has a healing effect is far more than just folk wisdom | ‘The longer the trip, the more healing occurs,’ says the geologist Peter Winn, who has been leading expeditions down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon since the 1960s. ‘Healing happens for people almost without exception.’ The most dramatic transformations that he’s observed have been in disabled military veterans... | Rebecca Lawton | https://aeon.co//essays/why-forests-and-rivers-are-the-most-potent-health-tonic-around | |
Cities | Nation-states came late to history, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest they won’t make it to the end of the century | If you’d been born 1,500 years ago in southern Europe, you’d have been convinced that the Roman empire would last forever. It had, after all, been around for 1,000 years. And yet, following a period of economic and military decline, it fell apart. By 476 CE it was gone. To the people living under the mighty empire, the... | Jamie Bartlett | https://aeon.co//essays/the-end-of-a-world-of-nation-states-may-be-upon-us | |
Information and communication | It took a polymath to pin down the true nature of ‘information’. His answer was both a revelation and a return | Just what is information? For such an intuitive idea, its precise nature proved remarkably hard to pin down. For centuries, it seemed to hover somewhere in a half-world between the visible and the unseen, the physical and the evanescent, the enduring medium and its fleeting message. It haunted the ancients as much as i... | Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni | https://aeon.co//essays/how-a-polymath-transformed-our-understanding-of-information | |
Stories and literature | Dancer, courtesan, spy: on the centenary of her execution, how much do we really know about the woman behind the legend? | Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer and convicted spy, once told a journalist why she left Holland for Paris in 1902: ‘I thought all women who ran away from their husbands went to Paris.’ In another version of this transformative moment, she arrived at the Gare du Nord, with half a franc in her pocket, and went straight... | Julie Wheelwright | https://aeon.co//essays/revamping-the-vamp-the-woman-behind-the-legend-of-mata-hari | |
History | Locke, Spinoza and Voltaire were all brilliant, but religious freedom in Europe was driven by statecraft not philosophy | Religious freedom has become an emblematic value in the West. Embedded in constitutions and championed by politicians and thinkers across the political spectrum, it is to many an absolute value, something beyond question. Yet how it emerged, and why, remains widely misunderstood. According to the conventional narrative... | Mark Koyama | https://aeon.co//essays/the-modern-state-not-ideas-brought-about-religious-freedom | |
Neuroscience | Before fathering psychoanalysis, Freud first slayed the dominant Cartesian intellectual tradition of mind-body dualism | Most people think of Sigmund Freud as a psychologist or a psychiatrist. But he was neither. He was trained as a neuroscientist and went on to create a new discipline that he called ‘psychoanalysis’. But Freud should also be thought of as a philosopher – and a deeply insightful and prescient one at that. As the philosop... | David Livingstone Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/from-philosophy-to-psychoanalysis-a-classic-freudian-move | |
Human evolution | As far as we can tell, no other animal knows this. Did our understanding of baby-making change the course of human history? | Throughout most of evolutionary history, sex was just sex. Among vertebrates, fish were the first to do it, going back some 400 million years. While it might be fun for fish and all the other species that evolved to reproduce sexually, for most species, sex still is just sex. But for our own peculiar species of primate... | Holly Dunsworth & Anne Buchanan | https://aeon.co//essays/i-think-i-know-where-babies-come-from-therefore-i-am-human | |
Consciousness and altered states | Psychedelics have a remarkable capacity to violate our ideas about ourselves. Is that why they make people better? | Psychedelic drugs are making a psychiatric comeback. After a lull of half a century, researchers are once again investigating the therapeutic benefits of psilocybin (‘magic mushrooms’) and LSD. It turns out that the hippies were on to something. There’s mounting evidence that psychedelic experiences can be genuinely tr... | Philip Gerrans & Chris Letheby | https://aeon.co//essays/psychedelics-work-by-violating-our-models-of-self-and-the-world | |
History | Democracy, by nature, is a contest between clashing political desires. That is why the public square matters so much | The fall of Mycenaean power, the intervening Dark Ages, and the dawn of a new civilisation during the ‘Greek miracle’ of the Archaic period is one of the most fascinating stories in ancient history. After the collapse of the Mycenaean palace system around 1100 BCE, Greece experienced centuries of social and economic de... | Saul Frampton | https://aeon.co//essays/democracy-is-a-clash-not-a-consensus-why-we-need-the-agora | |
Personality | Can novelists or psychologists better capture the strange multitude of realities in every human self? | With her curling blonde hair and her slender limbs and her beautiful clothes, Inez was alluring in an obvious way, and yet it was easy enough to see that her slightly protruding blue eyes were blank screens of self-love on which a small selection of fake emotions was allowed to flicker. She made rather haphazard impers... | Carlin Flora | https://aeon.co//essays/are-novelists-or-psychologists-better-at-describing-people | |
Ethics | A religious worldview cannot expect the same kinds of tolerance as racial, gender, or sexual identities. Here’s why | Throughout the Western world, the political ‘Left’ is in disarray. It is fragmented, rudderless and lacks a coherent plan to stem the tide of ‘populism’, nationalism and xenophobia. Identity politics and questions of religion have done much to fuel both the Right’s xenophobic tendencies, and the Left’s fragmentation. T... | Paul Russell | https://aeon.co//essays/why-religious-identities-are-not-immune-to-robust-criticism | |
Evolution | The ctenophore’s brain suggests that, if evolution began again, intelligence would re-emerge because nature repeats itself | Leonid Moroz has spent two decades trying to wrap his head around a mind-boggling idea: even as scientists start to look for alien life in other planets, there might already be aliens, with surprisingly different biology and brains, right here on Earth. Those aliens have hidden in plain sight for millennia. They have p... | Douglas Fox | https://aeon.co//essays/what-the-ctenophore-says-about-the-evolution-of-intelligence | |
Beauty and aesthetics | The Greek colour experience was made of movement and shimmer. Can we ever glimpse what they saw when gazing out to sea? | Homer used two adjectives to describe aspects of the colour blue: kuaneos, to denote a dark shade of blue merging into black; and glaukos, to describe a sort of ‘blue-grey’, notably used in Athena’s epithet glaukopis, her ‘grey-gleaming eyes’. He describes the sky as big, starry, or of iron or bronze (because of its so... | Maria Michela Sassi | https://aeon.co//essays/can-we-hope-to-understand-how-the-greeks-saw-their-world | |
Metaphysics | Does the mother contain the foetus or is it a part of her? On the metaphysics of pregnancy, and its ethical implications | After a long wait, last year Bridget Jones once again graced our cinema screens. But things had changed considerably for the heroine, played by Renée Zellweger, in Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016). Following an emotional rollercoaster of romantic misunderstandings and sexual mishaps, Bridget becomes pregnant, a state that f... | Suki Finn | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-mother-a-container-for-the-foetus-or-is-it-part-of-her | |
Work | When employees are treated as short-term assets, they reinvent themselves as marketable goods, always ready to quit | In the early 1990s, career advice in the United States changed. A new social philosophy, neoliberalism, was transforming society, including the nature of employment, and career counsellors and business writers had to respond. The Soviet Union had recently collapsed, and much as communist thinkers had tried to apply Mar... | Ilana Gershon | https://aeon.co//essays/how-work-changed-to-make-us-all-passionate-quitters | |
Neuroscience | Seeing things that are hidden; failing to see things in plain sight. How magic exploits the everyday weirdness of perception | The Amazing Johnathan pretends to cut his arm with a big knife. ‘What you are about to see,’ he says, ‘is just a trick.’ He only scratches the surface, but you can already see some blood. ‘It is stage blood. It is riding on the surface of my arm, it is not penetrating my arm, that would be real, this is an illusion.’ A... | Vebjørn Ekroll | https://aeon.co//essays/how-real-magic-happens-when-the-brain-sees-hidden-things | |
Ethics | Two people drive drunk at night: one kills a pedestrian, one doesn’t. Does the unlucky killer deserve more blame or not? | There is a contradiction in our ordinary ideas about moral responsibility. Let’s explore it by considering two examples. Killer, our first character, is at a party and drives home drunk. At a certain point in her journey, she swerves, hits the curb, and kills a pedestrian who was on the curb. Merely Reckless, our secon... | Robert J Hartman | https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-tell-a-bad-person-from-a-person-who-did-a-bad-thing | |
Physics | How the neutrino went from ghost particle to vital physics tool – a tale of bombs, espionage and subtle flavours | Every fraction of a second, invisible particles called neutrinos whiz past the vans and Winnebagos on Highway 169 headed toward McKinley Park in northeastern Minnesota, just shy of the Canadian border. Having begun their journey at Fermilab, an imposing physics laboratory outside Chicago, some of those speeding neutrin... | David Kaiser | https://aeon.co//essays/the-explosive-tale-of-a-spy-a-ghost-particle-and-a-new-physics | |
Bioethics | That pigs are smart and sensitive is not in doubt. How can we justify continuing to kill them for food? | Domestic pigs, the kind portrayed in hot-pink neon above barbecue joints, curly tailed and carefree, have prodigious memories. In problem-solving with computers, they match wits with little kids and win. They are able to plan ahead, and they live in complex social communities. They recognise other pigs as distinct indi... | Barbara J King | https://aeon.co//essays/what-more-evidence-do-we-need-to-stop-killing-pigs-for-food | |
History | When Cold War philosophy tied rational choice theory to scientific method, it embedded the free-market mindset in US society | The chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was worried. It was May 1954, and UCLA had been independent of Berkeley for just two years. Now its Office of Public Information had learned that the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner was preparing one or more articles on communist infiltration at the u... | John McCumber | https://aeon.co//essays/how-cold-war-philosophy-permeates-us-society-to-this-day | |
Language and linguistics | Much of linguistic theory is so abstract and dependent on theoretical apparatus that it might be impossible to explain | Science is a messy business, but just like everything with loose ends and ragged edges, we tend to understand it by resorting to ideal types. On the one hand, there’s the archetype of the scientific method: a means of accounting for observations, generating precise, testable predictions, and yielding new discoveries ab... | Arika Okrent | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-study-of-language-a-science | |
History of ideas | Homer’s warrior is no mere tragic human figure: fuelled by anger, he is at once a man of honour and a sword of the gods | A warrior hero such as Ajax, Hector or Achilles must be willing to fight in hand-to-hand combat day after day. He must be able, physically and psychologically, to plunge a sword into the body of another human being, and to risk having a sword plunged into his own. He must be brutal and ready to risk brutality. At the s... | C D C Reeve | https://aeon.co//essays/the-anger-that-fuels-homers-hero-is-both-honourable-and-divine | |
Demography and migration | The ultimate ‘outsider’ space, the Jungle refugee camp in Calais became its own society, the no-borders idea made real | I am sitting in a big white shelter – what was known as the Sudanese tent, in what was the Jungle refugee camp in the French port city of Calais. I am one of perhaps 200 people gathered together to talk. It is getting late, and the bright lighting in the tent jars with the softness of dusk. We have been here for two ho... | Natasha King | https://aeon.co//essays/the-subalterns-are-speaking-whos-listening | |
Neuroscience | The subtle flows and toxic hits of stress get under the skin, making and breaking the body and brain over a lifetime | Stress pervades our lives. We become anxious when we hear of violence, chaos or discord. And, in our relatively secure world, the pace of life and its demands often lead us to feel that there is too much to do in too little time. This disrupts our natural biological rhythms and encourages unhealthy behaviours, such as ... | Bruce McEwen | https://aeon.co//essays/how-stress-works-in-the-human-body-to-make-or-break-us | |
Philosophy of mind | You are only as strong as your powers of attention, and other uncomfortable truths about the self | You have thoughts, feelings and desires. You remember your past and imagine your future. Sometimes you make a special effort, other times you are content to simply relax. All of these things are true about you. But do you exist? Is your sense of self an illusion, or is there something in the world that we can point to ... | Carolyn Dicey Jennings | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-the-self-if-not-that-which-pays-attention | |
Economic history | Moneylending has been taboo for most of human history. So how did usury stop being a sin and become respectable finance? | ‘A banker and a theologian’ sounds like the start of a bad joke. But for David Miller it’s merely a job description. After working in finance and business for 16 years, Miller turned to theology, and received his PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary in 2003. Now he’s a professor of business ethics and the director o... | Alex Mayyasi | https://aeon.co//essays/how-did-usury-stop-being-a-sin-and-become-respectable-finance | |
Cities | When we think of urban public space in terms of competing rights, we create a battleground. Is there a better way to share? | Depending on whom you ask, Kilburn is either one of the most vibrant or one of the most dysfunctional neighbourhoods in London. Clustered in the north-western part of the city, the area has been a swirling mix of cultures for more than 100 years, starting with Irish and Jewish migrants in the late 19th and early 20th c... | Farhan Samanani | https://aeon.co//essays/whats-the-best-way-to-find-common-ground-in-public-spaces | |
Biology | Our sense of smell gives flavour to food, emotion to memories, and connects us to each other. But how exactly does it work? | I know the dangers of smoking. Tobacco is a leading cause of head and neck cancer, which can lead to life-changing disfigurement or, in the worst cases, death. Speaking as an ear, nose and throat surgeon, this spectrum of disease has produced the most emotionally and technically challenging cases of my career: cigarett... | Katherine Whitcroft | https://aeon.co//essays/how-exactly-does-smell-unlock-buried-memories-from-the-past | |
Politics and government | The postmodern carnival has arrived, and there are good reasons to prefer François Rabelais’s version | In early 16th-century France, François Rabelais, who had already made his reputation as a doctor of theology and of medicine, a scholar and a scallywag, turned his hand to novel-writing. Several years, and several hundred pages later, he loosed Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-64) on the world. Driven by an insatiable hu... | Robert D Zaretsky | https://aeon.co//essays/the-grotesque-is-back-but-this-time-no-one-is-laughing | |
Meaning and the good life | Humanity is nothing more than a microscopic blip in the Universe. But does that mean we are insignificant? | Humanity occupies a very small place in an unfathomably vast Universe. Travelling at the speed of light – 671 million miles per hour – it would take us 100,000 years to cross the Milky Way. But we still wouldn’t have gone very far. By recent estimates, the Milky Way is just one of 2 trillion galaxies in the observable ... | Nick Hughes | https://aeon.co//essays/just-a-recent-blip-in-the-cosmos-are-humans-insignificant | |
History | The US Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, but the fight for religious equality was only just beginning | The age of revolution brought an enlightened political ideology to the modern world. Among its many achievements, none faces greater global challenges than freedom of religion. Today, it seems almost unthinkable that any deeply religious people, whether in the Middle East or the United States, would create constitution... | Richard D Brown | https://aeon.co//essays/the-true-story-of-the-fight-for-religious-equality-in-the-us | |
Social psychology | Prejudice remains a huge social evil but evidence for harm caused by microaggression is incoherent, unscientific and weak | Across college campuses and the corporate landscape, a big idea has taken hold: the notion that microaggressions – subtle but offensive comments or actions directed at minorities or other powerless people – can lower performance, lead to ostracism, increase anxiety, and sometimes cause so much psychological pain that t... | Scott O Lilienfeld | https://aeon.co//essays/why-a-moratorium-on-microaggressions-policies-is-needed | |
Values and beliefs | You don’t need drugs or a church for an ecstatic experience that helps transcend the self and connect to something bigger | In 1969, the British writer Philip Pullman was walking down the Charing Cross Road in London, when his consciousness abruptly shifted. It appeared to him that ‘everything was connected by similarities and correspondences and echoes’. The author of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000) wasn’t on drugs, alth... | Jules Evans | https://aeon.co//essays/religion-has-no-monopoly-on-transcendent-experience | |
Work | Human jobs in the future will be the ones that require emotional labour: currently undervalued and underpaid but invaluable | Early last year, the World Economic Forum issued a paper warning that technological change is on the verge of upending the global economy. To fill the sophisticated jobs of tomorrow, the authors argued, the ‘reskilling and upskilling of today’s workers will be critical’. Around the same time, the then president Barack ... | Livia Gershon | https://aeon.co//essays/the-key-to-jobs-in-the-future-is-not-college-but-compassion | |
Quantum theory | Despite its confounding reputation, quantum mechanics both guides and helps explain human intuition | Quantum theory contradicts common sense. Everyone who has even a modest interest in physics quickly gets this message. The quantum view of reality, we’re often told, is as a madhouse of particles that become waves (and vice versa), and that speak to one another through spooky messages that defy normal conceptions of ti... | Philip Ball | https://aeon.co//essays/the-quantum-view-of-reality-might-not-be-so-weird-after-all | |
Cognition and intelligence | The brainwashing methods of isolation, engulfment and fear can lead anyone to a cult. I should know – I was in one | I began my formal research in 1999, eight years after battling my way out of a secret, so-called Marxist-Leninist group whose leader controlled my life in its most intimate details. He determined what I wore: a version of the advice in John Molloy’s bestseller Dress for Success (1975), featuring tailored blue suits and... | Alexandra Stein | https://aeon.co//essays/how-cult-leaders-brainwash-followers-for-total-control | |
Politics and government | Throughout history, plagues and wars have left greater equality in their wake. Can we get there again without violence? | Blame inequality on climate change. Until the end of the last Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago, our ancestors lived in small foraging groups. They moved around a lot, owned very little, and passed on even less to the next generation, sharing any windfalls on the spot. The Holocene changed all that. Rising temperatures al... | Walter Scheidel | https://aeon.co//essays/are-plagues-and-wars-the-only-ways-to-reduce-inequality | |
Pleasure and pain | What if we could expand ecstasy, reduce stress and lift depression, all by delaying and extending orgasm? | Perhaps 40 of us, an equal number of men and women, sat on rows of folding metal chairs in a high-ceilinged room in the ground floor of a church in New York’s East Village that had been converted into a community centre. Most were 30-something, good-looking, well-dressed Manhattan professionals. Nicole Daedone, author ... | Peter von Ziegesar | https://aeon.co//essays/delayed-orgasm-the-sexual-technique-thats-better-than-sex | |
Cognition and intelligence | Not busy-work, ticking off to-do lists or keeping-up-with-stuff. Just sitting. And thinking. Is it so hard? | Pop-up philosophy. Stop, sit down and just think. That’s what I wrote on a whiteboard – then I took it outside and propped it next to a small folding chair near the entrance to my office at City, University of London. For a week, I had been travelling around London with two folding deckchairs and a whiteboard. My quarr... | André Spicer | https://aeon.co//essays/do-we-all-need-a-little-time-simply-to-sit-and-think | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | The most avid believers in artificial intelligence are aggressively secular – yet their language is eerily religious. Why? | My stomach sank the moment the young man stood up. I’d observed him from afar during the coffee breaks, and I knew the word ‘Theologian’ was scrawled on the delegate badge pinned to his lapel, as if he’d been a last-minute addition the conference. He cleared his throat and asked the panel on stage how they’d solve the ... | Beth Singler | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar | |
Bioethics | Thinking about children who are not yet born confronts us with the question of our ethical obligations to future people | Imagine that a 14-year-old girl, Kate, decides that she wants to become pregnant. Kate’s parents are generally broadminded, and are supportive of her long-term relationship with a boy of the same age. They are aware that Kate is sexually active, like 5 per cent of 14-year-old girls in the United States and 9 per cent i... | Dominic Wilkinson & Keyur Doolabh | https://aeon.co//essays/should-we-take-ethical-account-of-people-who-do-not-yet-exist | |
Anthropology | Even after museums return human remains pillaged from a massacre in 1864, can repatriation heal the wounds of history? | On the morning of 29 November 1864, nearly 700 United States soldiers charged towards a village along a gentle bend at Sand Creek, in Colorado Territory. Settled in peace for the winter, there were dozens of Cheyenne and Arapaho families there. Within hours, the soldiers killed more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho – most... | Chip Colwell | https://aeon.co//essays/does-returning-artefacts-help-to-heal-the-scars-of-conquest | |
Subcultures | Cults are exploitative, weird groups with strange beliefs and practices, right? So what about regular religions then? | Cults, generally speaking, are a lot like pornography: you know them when you see them. It would be hard to avoid the label on encountering (as I did, carrying out field work last year) 20 people toiling unpaid on a Christian farming compound in rural Wisconsin – people who venerated their leader as the closest thing t... | Tara Isabella Burton | https://aeon.co//essays/theres-no-sharp-distinction-between-cult-and-regular-religion | |
Social psychology | Experts are either derided or held up as all-seeing gurus. Time to reboot the relationship between expertise and democracy | In 2002, a distinguished historian wrote that the widely told tales of ‘No Irish Need Apply’ signs in the late 19th-century United States were myths. Richard Jensen at the University of Illinois said that such signs were inventions, ‘myths of victimisation’, passed down from Irish immigrants to their children until the... | Tom Nichols | https://aeon.co//essays/its-time-to-reboot-the-relationship-between-expertise-and-democracy | |
Technology and the self | Mother Nature might be lovely, but moral she is not. She doesn’t love us or want what’s best for us | To live in Vermont is to be smothered by nature’s beauty on a daily basis. Everywhere you look is another peaceful pond, another shimmering lake or emerald hill or misty field graced by a family of grazing deer. It’s almost obnoxious, like that one friend you have who’s so pretty, funny, smart and talented that you wan... | Molly Hodgdon | https://aeon.co//essays/mother-nature-might-be-lovely-but-moral-she-is-not | |
Meaning and the good life | Humanity is more technologically powerful than ever before, and yet we feel ourselves to be increasingly fragile. Why? | The end of the world is a growth industry. You can almost feel Armageddon in the air: from survivalist and ‘prepper’ websites (survivopedia.com, doomandbloom.net, prepforshtf.com) to new academic disciplines (‘disaster studies’, ‘Anthropocene studies’, ‘extinction studies’), human vulnerability is in vogue. The panic i... | Claire Colebrook | https://aeon.co//essays/the-human-world-is-not-more-fragile-now-it-always-has-been | |
Political philosophy | The Frankfurt School argued that reason is dangerous, mass culture deadening, and the Enlightenment a disaster. Were they right? | ‘One wants to break free of the past,’ Theodor Adorno, one of the Frankfurt School’s leading luminaries, wrote in an essay in 1959. ‘Rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because t... | Stuart Walton | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-frankfurt-school-diagnosed-the-ills-of-western-civilisation | |
Personality | A judgment of competence is made in a tenth of a second on the basis of facial features. Thus political decisions are made | I became interested in studying first impressions after my research group discovered that such impressions can predict the outcomes of important political elections. First impressions mattered. I was in my first few years as an assistant professor at Princeton with a tiny lab consisting of one half-time research assist... | Alexander Todorov | https://aeon.co//essays/judgment-of-political-competence-takes-a-10th-of-a-second | |
Nations and empires | The Tudors are always good box office, but their melodramatic lives distract from a much deeper legacy of civic nationhood | Tudor mania, Tudoralia, call it what you will: the Tudors are ubiquitous. Each year, new books, films and exhibitions fuel an insatiable appetite for all things Tudor. Be it C J Sansom’s hugely successful Shardlake series of detective novels, Philippa Gregory’s Tudor court romps, or Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) and... | Anna Whitelock | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-tudors-continue-to-shape-an-island-nations-identity | |
Politics and government | Embrace dreams as a counter to the naive realism of politics today, and they could become a potent democratic force | It’s almost impossible to think about the promises and shortcomings of the United States and not think in terms of the ‘American Dream’. US advertisers promote its seductions of individual freedom and material comfort, while school teachers use it to impart civic values. Even in the rough and tumble world of US Realpol... | Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen | https://aeon.co//essays/revisiting-the-american-dream-in-the-cold-light-of-today | |
Stories and literature | Whether divining ancient wisdoms or elevating the art of cold reading, tarot is a form of therapy, much like psychoanalysis | There are clues that this is no ordinary suburban living room. For one, we’re in Glastonbury. Then there’s the perfumed candle, the Buddha figure, the cloth draped over the television and, not least, the worn little wooden box that sits atop an occasional table hung with black silk. Inside it are 78 tarot cards. I have... | James McConnachie | https://aeon.co//essays/tarot-cards-a-tool-of-cold-tricksters-or-wise-therapists | |
Illness and disease | Swine Flu, Naples Soldier, Ebola. Disease names express fear, create stigma and distract attention. Can they be improved? | Remember the Naples Soldier, the vicious flu pandemic that swept the globe almost 100 years ago, infecting one in three people and killing up to 50 million? You probably don’t, but you might remember the Spanish flu, the name by which that pandemic is better known. ‘Naples Soldier’ was what the Spanish called it, after... | Laura Spinney | https://aeon.co//essays/disease-naming-must-change-to-avoid-scapegoating-and-politics | |
History | The Nazis have occupied France. It’s easy to condemn the collaborators. But be honest: what would you really do? | A puncture can change your life. In Louis Malle’s film Lacombe, Lucien (1974), the young peasant Lucien is rejected by his former schoolteacher who runs the local resistance organisation he wishes to join and then, returning home by bicycle, gets a flat tire. Seeking help in a nearby farmhouse, he finds himself among a... | Robert Gildea | https://aeon.co//essays/put-yourself-in-vichy-france-do-you-resist-or-collaborate | |
Consciousness and altered states | The special trick of consciousness is being able to project action and time into a range of possible futures | I have a confession. As a physicist and psychiatrist, I find it difficult to engage with conversations about consciousness. My biggest gripe is that the philosophers and cognitive scientists who tend to pose the questions often assume that the mind is a thing, whose existence can be identified by the attributes it has ... | Karl Friston | https://aeon.co//essays/consciousness-is-not-a-thing-but-a-process-of-inference | |
Stories and literature | The North Sea is rich in signs of what made the modern world. It’s also a monument to what awaits us in the Anthropocene | The red-veined rocks of Bohuslän in western Sweden have one of the highest concentrations of Bronze Age art in Europe. I was lucky enough to see the carvings during a recent October visit. The site was set back from a road, which marked where the shoreline of the North Sea would have been when the figures were first in... | David Farrier | https://aeon.co//essays/the-north-sea-is-a-sign-of-what-awaits-in-the-anthropocene | |
Politics and government | Autocrats shouted, cursed, and bullied, while American revolutionaries used politeness as a tool of radical politics | Long before current fears about incivility in public life – before anxieties about Twitter-shaming and cable-news name-calling – politeness was very much on the minds of United States leaders. In 1808, the US president Thomas Jefferson ranked the ‘qualities of mind’ he valued. Not surprisingly, he included ‘integrity’,... | Steven Bullock | https://aeon.co//essays/how-politeness-became-a-tool-of-radical-democratic-politics | |
Economics | How much did Plato know about behavioural economics and cognitive biases? Pretty much everything, it turns out | In his essay ‘On Being Modern-Minded’ (1950), Bertrand Russell describes a particularly seductive illusion about history and intellectual progress. Because every age tends to exaggerate its uniqueness and imagine itself as a culmination of progress, continuities with previous historical periods are easily overlooked: ‘... | Nick Romeo | https://aeon.co//essays/what-plato-knew-about-behavioural-economics-a-lot | |
Art | Ever since Hegel, artists and critics alike have been claiming that art is finished. But what could that actually mean? | There are more artworks, and more types of artwork, being produced than ever before. Galleries are widespread and – in some countries – free. Major art prizes, and major artists, receive frequent press attention. With all this abundance, it seems nonsensical to suggest that art had ended. It’s not clear that the claim ... | Owen Hulatt | https://aeon.co//essays/even-if-the-story-of-art-has-died-does-art-still-live-on | |
Economics | Human capital theory was invented as an ideological weapon in the Cold War. Now it is helping to Uberise the world of work | Chicago, 1960. The United States is bogged down in a long, expensive and dangerous Cold War with the Soviet Union. Inside the Economics Building at the University of Chicago, two academics are engaged in a private, intense conversation. Theodore ‘Teddy’ Schultz is tall and lanky. Raised on a South Dakota farm and pulle... | Peter Fleming | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-cold-war-led-the-cia-to-promote-human-capital-theory | |
Information and communication | The interesting thing about news has never been its truth or falsehood but how it explodes our sense of onrushing time | On the night of 13 November 2015, I was at home in Paris when I received a WhatsApp message from a friend in London. It was my first inkling that something unusual was unfolding a few streets away. As word of the terrorist attacks at the Bataclan theatre and elsewhere swept across the city, I scrambled to make sense of... | Arthur Asseraf | https://aeon.co//essays/news-has-never-been-pristine-always-entangled-in-time | |
Sports and games | For mountaineers, it’s not enough to get to the top – it must be done a certain way. But why is the harder way better? | When asked in the 1920s why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, George Mallory notoriously quipped: ‘Because it’s there.’ It was a flippant remark, of course, but also an instance of what Friedrich Nietzsche had called ‘superficiality out of profundity’. For Mallory’s retort conveyed the deep human impulse to attempt cha... | Paul Sagar | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-mountaineers-choose-the-hardest-routes-to-the-top | |
History of science | Drawing on intuition, Edgar Allan Poe offered some remarkably prescient ideas about the universe in his poem ‘Eureka’ | Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were thus borne … I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious – for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foa... | Paul Halpern | https://aeon.co//essays/edgar-allan-poe-visionary-of-big-bang-cosmology | |
Cognition and intelligence | Social problems are fantastically complex, while human minds are severely under-engineered. Is democracy doomed? | When mulling over possible reasons for the alarming nastiness associated with the recent presidential election in the United States, I am reminded of my grade-school bully. Handsome, often charming, superbly athletic, the bully (let’s call him Mike) would frequently, usually without clear provocation, kick, punch and s... | Robert A Burton | https://aeon.co//essays/the-complexity-of-social-problems-is-outsmarting-the-human-brain | |
History | All around the world, and throughout history, women have been shamed, sequestered, and medicalised for bleeding regularly | Auntie Flo, on the rag, girl flu, back in the saddle, jam and bread, going to Oklahoma, howlin’ at the moon – these are just some of the many English expressions used to avoid the embarrassing subject of menstruation. The time has come to speak plainly and directly about this straightforward biological function of the ... | Janie Hampton | https://aeon.co//essays/throughout-history-and-still-today-women-are-shamed-for-menstruating | |
Beauty and aesthetics | In the myth of flow, the performer soars when the music starts. But it’s grit and self-analysis until the very last bar | When I was a student at the San Francisco Ballet School, I loved watching the advanced dancers in the class before mine. Their soaring leaps, their whirlwind turns, their command over everything from the sweep of their arms to the delicate placement of their heels – so easy did they make it all seem that I sometimes wo... | Barbara Gail Montero | https://aeon.co//essays/the-true-expert-does-not-perform-in-a-state-of-effortless-flow | |
Religion | Westerners think that Buddhism is about peace and non-violence. So how come Buddhist monks are in arms against Islam? | The recent violence in southern Thailand began on 4 January 2004, when Malay Muslim insurgents invaded a Thai Army depot in the southernmost province of Narathiwat. The next day, after the burning of 20 schools and several bomb attacks in a neighbouring province, the Thai government declared martial law over the three ... | Michael Jerryson | https://aeon.co//essays/buddhism-can-be-as-violent-as-any-other-religion | |
Music | One grim day (when youth is over) you find that new music gets on your nerves. But why do our musical tastes freeze over? | Some of us are more susceptible than others, but eventually it happens to us all. You know what I’m talking about: the inability to appreciate new music – or at least, to appreciate new music the way we once did. There’s a lot of disagreement about why exactly this happens, but virtually none about when. Call it a casu... | Lary Wallace | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-your-musical-tastes-get-frozen-over-in-your-twenties | |
Political philosophy | Love is not just a feeling given or received, it is an action too. It could be a radical force in politics | Politics is inescapably emotional. Political ideas – such as freedom or equality – are often talked about as if they’re dry concepts, sandpapered down in a seminar room or a theoretical conversation. But political ideas involve feeling. The singer Nina Simone once said that freedom is ‘just a feeling’: a feeling of ‘no... | Max Harris | https://aeon.co//essays/it-is-time-for-love-to-become-a-radical-force-in-politics | |
Human rights and justice | Indian society deludes itself that caste discrimination is a thing of the past, yet it suffuses the nation, top to bottom | In October 2016, a young man walked into a flour mill in Uttarakhand, a state of northern India where the mist-wrapped mountains of the outer Himalayas begin. He was Dalit (Sanskrit for broken, scattered, downtrodden), a relatively recent collective identity claimed by communities across the nation that are considered ... | Prayaag Akbar | https://aeon.co//essays/how-india-deludes-itself-that-caste-discrimination-is-dead | |
Consciousness and altered states | The grand drama of Freud’s ideas has obscured the reality: every school of psychology needs a theory of the unconscious | Towards the end of 1892, ‘Miss Lucy R’, a pale and delicate English governess living in Vienna, made her way to the surgery of a young neurologist on Berggasse 19 for the treatment of a ‘suppurative rhinitis’. Miss Lucy was tired, in low spirits and complained of ‘a muzzy head’. And though she had lost her sense of sme... | Antonio Melechi | https://aeon.co//essays/every-school-of-psychology-has-its-own-theory-of-the-unconscious | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | We already have a way to teach morals to alien intelligences: it’s called parenting. Can we apply the same methods to robots? | Intelligent machines, long promised and never delivered, are finally on the horizon. Sufficiently intelligent robots will be able to operate autonomously from human control. They will be able to make genuine choices. And if a robot can make choices, there is a real question about whether it will make moral choices. But... | Regina Rini | https://aeon.co//essays/creating-robots-capable-of-moral-reasoning-is-like-parenting | |
Politics and government | In politics, as in militant religion, the performance of sincerity is everything, no matter whether right or wrong | A generation ago, the philosopher Judith Shklar at Harvard argued that hypocrisy is one of the ordinary vices. By mimicking virtue, Shklar pointed out, the hypocrite tacitly acknowledges and helps to maintain the moral order in public, even as he betrays it privately. Indeed, the hypocrite can even be congratulated for... | Faisal Devji | https://aeon.co//essays/beyond-right-or-wrong-beyond-fact-or-fake-lies-sincerity | |
Stories and literature | Indigenous peoples around the world tell myths which contain warning signs for natural disasters. Scientists are now listening | Shortly before 8am on 26 December 2004, the cicadas fell silent and the ground shook in dismay. The Moken, an isolated tribe on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, knew that the Laboon, the ‘wave that eats people’, had stirred from his ocean lair. The Moken also knew what was next: a towering wall of water washing... | Carrie Arnold | https://aeon.co//essays/indigenous-myths-carry-warning-signals-about-natural-disasters | |
Stories and literature | Can walking the city streets still be liberating, when every path is paved with literary quotations and artistic prefiguring? | Live in a city long enough and you can complete very substantial journeys on foot, broken into many hundreds of instalments, all out of order. Take the example of the line of main roads through London – including Whitechapel Road, Cheapside and Oxford Street – that runs from Stratford in the east, to Shepherd’s Bush in... | Will Wiles | https://aeon.co//essays/psychogeography-where-writers-should-now-fear-to-tread | |
History of ideas | Plato said we ought to be suspicious of persuasive speakers and the appeal to emotions. But rhetoric can be a civic good | Philosophers have had a longstanding problem with rhetoric. The standard view of the quarrel is well-known: philosophy is a truth-directed activity concerned with reasoned argument, while rhetoric is uninterested in truth and concerned merely with persuasion. This view is often traced to Plato, but it is too crude. As ... | Tushar Irani | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-the-difference-between-good-and-bad-political-rhetoric | |
War and peace | His cap is bleached as white as the bones of a Saharan camel. Is the romance of the French Foreign Legion a cult of death? | What comes to mind when you think of the French Foreign Legion? Most likely men struggling through the desert in heavy blue coats and white peaked caps. Men who joined up after a lifetime of crime, fighting valiantly, then leaving the Legion to become tough, faceless mercenaries trading on their background, or else dyi... | Robert Twigger | https://aeon.co//essays/why-young-men-queue-up-to-die-in-the-french-foreign-legion | |
Bioethics | Children born with in-between sex development are subject to surgeries that many believe violate their human rights | People tend to assume that everyone is born simply male or female. But nature shows us otherwise. About one in 2,000 babies is born with genitals roughly halfway between male and female types. Their genitals might include what looks rather like a penis along with what appears to be a vaginal opening. More subtle forms ... | Alice Dreger | https://aeon.co//essays/people-born-intersex-have-a-right-to-genital-integrity | |
Global history | The great king Aurangzeb is among the most hated men in Indian history. A historian claims he’s been unjustly demonised | Aurangzeb Alamgir, the sixth ruler of the Mughal Empire, is the most hated king in Indian history. He ruled for nearly 50 years, from 1658 until 1707, the last great imperial power in India before British colonialism. According to many, he destroyed India politically, socially and culturally. Aurangzeb’s list of allege... | Audrey Truschke | https://aeon.co//essays/the-great-aurangzeb-is-everybodys-least-favourite-mughal | |
Neuroscience | We ride a stream of naked neurons, stripped of their sheaths, to the most blissful moments and deepest intimacies of life | As a student of neuroanatomy, I was provided with a human brain in a half-gallon tub. Our lab manual depicted a brain in situ, half-exposed in the head of an aged Irishman cut open along the midline, where his part might have run. My lab partner and I spent a semester peeling away layers of our stranger’s accumulated e... | Steven M Phelps | https://aeon.co//essays/it-takes-neuroscience-and-poetry-to-map-the-tributaries-of-touch | |
Logic and probability | Thinking like a philosopher need not be a strange and arcane art, if you get started with these tricks of the trade | Philosophers pride themselves on thinking clearly by seeing what follows from what, exposing sophisms, spotting fallacies, and generally policing our reasoning. Many have spent years honing their skills, often deploying them on arcane topics. But these skills are not the exclusive property of rarefied sages, accessed o... | Alan Hájek | https://aeon.co//essays/with-the-use-of-heuristics-anybody-can-think-like-a-philosopher | |
Human rights and justice | It’s not a profound mystery, or explained by deep psychosocial complexity. For rapists, rape is easy. And that must stop | There is a simple and surprisingly durable myth about what causes men to rape women. It goes like this: if a man is too horny, from sexual deprivation or from being constitutionally oversexed, he will lose control in the presence of an unguarded woman. Through the early days of psychology as a science, this basic assum... | Sandra Newman | https://aeon.co//essays/until-we-treat-rapists-as-ordinary-criminals-we-wont-stop-them | |
Cosmology | Ripples in space-time could herald the demise of general relativity and its replacement by a quantum theory of gravity | A billion years ago, two dancing black holes make a final spin, merge, and – in a matter of seconds – release a cataclysmic amount of energy. Much as a falling pebble spreads waves on the surface of a still lake, the merger initiates gravitational waves in the space-time continuum. Fast-forward to planet Earth and the ... | Sabine Hossenfelder | https://aeon.co//essays/do-ripples-in-space-time-herald-a-new-theory-of-gravity | |
Human rights and justice | Hypotheticals, fantastical beings, and a fictional omnibus: legal reasoning is made supple by its use of the imagination | The legal world is wonderfully strange. Pull down a dusty volume of case law from a barrister’s bookshelf, and you’ll discover a parade of fantastical beings that could have been lifted from the pages of Jorge Luis Borges or Dr Seuss. In the law, constitutions behave like living trees, the island of Minorca is treated ... | Maksymilian Del Mar | https://aeon.co//essays/why-judges-and-lawyers-need-imagination-as-much-as-rationality | |
Politics and government | National apologies are a big deal: they acknowledge the past to help move everyone forward. No wonder they’re so hard | In May 2016, when Barack Obama visited Hiroshima, some speculated that the president of the United States might offer an apology, on behalf of his country, for the bombing of that city at the close of the Second World War. Instead, in his joint press conference with Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe, Obama said that hi... | Edwin Battistella | https://aeon.co//essays/a-national-apology-has-the-power-to-change-the-future | |
Human rights and justice | It is everywhere illegal yet slavery persists in many corners of the global economy. How do its beneficiaries justify it? | I liked Aanan as soon as I met him. My field notes read: ‘What a nice guy, you can just see from his face.’ Open-faced and conversational, he was enthusiastic about the explosive growth in his quarry operations and excited to show me around. Together, we toured the open mines where his workers carve into the earth, pro... | Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick | https://aeon.co//essays/this-is-what-slavery-looks-like-today-in-the-eyes-of-slavers | |
Fairness and equality | As a society we have forgotten how to talk about the benefits of hierarchy, expertise and excellence. It’s time we remembered | The modern West has placed a high premium on the value of equality. Equal rights are enshrined in law while old hierarchies of nobility and social class have been challenged, if not completely dismantled. Few would doubt that global society is all the better for these changes. But hierarchies have not disappeared. Soci... | Stephen C Angle, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Julian Baggini and others | https://aeon.co//essays/hierarchies-have-a-place-even-in-societies-built-on-equality | |
Political philosophy | Since Francis Fukuyama proclaimed ‘The End of History’ 25 years ago, he has been much maligned. His work now seems prophetic | This year marks the 25th anniversary of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Rarely read but often denigrated, it might be the most maligned, unfairly dismissed and misunderstood book of the post-war era. Which is unfortunate for at least one reason: Fukuyama might have done a better job of pr... | Paul Sagar | https://aeon.co//essays/was-francis-fukuyama-the-first-man-to-see-trump-coming | |
Stories and literature | His name is synonymous with serial seduction but Casanova’s memoirs reveal a man greater than the sum of his ‘conquests’ | Everyone thinks that they know about Casanova, the legendary lover who proceeded from one romantic conquest to another, but almost no one really does. They believe that he was handsome, distinguished and practised in the arts of love, a virtual Zorro of the boudoir. That he was a wealthy member of the upper class, and ... | Laurence Bergreen | https://aeon.co//essays/is-there-more-to-the-legendary-lover-than-his-reputation | |
Wellbeing | For those suffering the trauma of intensive care, the soothing swoosh of otherworldly ambient music can be a welcome gift | It’s an odd gig, even for musicians who are used to some odd venues. For one thing, we can’t see our audience. It’s not that we haven’t attracted many people, so much as that our listeners are in another building. They are lying in hospital beds next door, and they are connected up to machines. Some of them are quite c... | Charles Fernyhough | https://aeon.co//essays/how-ambient-music-can-help-ease-the-trauma-of-the-icu | |
Political philosophy | Original, painstaking, sometimes frustrating and often dazzling. Foucault’s work on power matters now more than ever | Imagine you are asked to compose an ultra-short history of philosophy. Perhaps you’ve been challenged to squeeze the impossibly sprawling diversity of philosophy itself into just a few tweets. You could do worse than to search for the single word that best captures the ideas of every important philosopher. Plato had hi... | Colin Koopman | https://aeon.co//essays/why-foucaults-work-on-power-is-more-important-than-ever | |
Subcultures | Subterranean metaphors have been a powerful tool of political resistance. Today, is there anywhere left to hide? | In early 1942, a slim book appeared in London under the title Underground Europe Calling. Its author was the Austrian refugee Oscar Pollak. ‘Underground’, the introduction begins, has become a catchword, handled by the tabloid press, flashed by the films. Imagination colours it with all the thrills of romance. In actua... | Terence Renaud | https://aeon.co//essays/the-strange-political-history-of-the-underground | |
Physics | The closer you look, the more the materialist position in physics appears to rest on shaky metaphysical ground | Materialism holds the high ground these days in debates over that most ultimate of scientific questions: the nature of consciousness. When tackling the problem of mind and brain, many prominent researchers advocate for a universe fully reducible to matter. ‘Of course you are nothing but the activity of your neurons,’ t... | Adam Frank | https://aeon.co//essays/materialism-alone-cannot-explain-the-riddle-of-consciousness | |
History of technology | How the hair-trigger nuclear age and fears of Armageddon inspired visionary cold warriors to invent the internet | ‘We have some big trouble,’ president John F Kennedy told his brother, the attorney general Bobby Kennedy, early in the morning of 16 October 1962. A few hours later, the younger Kennedy was staring at pictures of Cuba taken by the U-2 surveillance aircraft. ‘Those sons of bitches, Russians,’ he said, sitting in the Wh... | Sharon Weinberger | https://aeon.co//essays/how-nuclear-fears-helped-inspire-creation-of-the-internet |
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