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History of ideas | Georg Cantor showed that some infinities are bigger than others. Did he assault mathematical wisdom or corroborate it? | In 1883, the brilliant German mathematician Georg Cantor produced the first rigorous, systematic, mathematical theory of the infinite. It was a work of genius, quite unlike anything that had gone before. And it had some remarkable consequences. Cantor showed that some infinities are bigger than others; that we can devi... | A W Moore | https://aeon.co//essays/why-some-infinities-are-bigger-than-others | |
History | Last century’s dictators wanted to reinvent their subjects as ‘new men’. This century’s strongmen just don’t care. Why? | We might take the demonstrative demise of strongmen such as Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and – more recently and unobtrusively – Fidel Castro in Cuba to indicate that the day of the dictator has largely passed. Alas, authoritarianism is staging a comeback. Yet it is clear to poets and political... | Holly Case | https://aeon.co//essays/the-new-dictators-speak-for-the-complainer-not-the-idealist | |
Stories and literature | Literature can enthuse medicine, and medicine can inspire literature. They are complementary treatments for being human | Every month or so, I see a patient called Fraser in my primary care clinic, a soldier who was deployed in Afghanistan. Fifteen years after coming home, he is still haunted by flashbacks of burning buildings and sniper fire. He doesn’t work, rarely goes out, sleeps poorly, and to relieve his emotional anguish he sometim... | Gavin Francis | https://aeon.co//essays/medicine-and-literature-two-treatments-of-the-human-condition | |
Global history | Historians cheered globalism with work about cosmopolitans and border-crossing, but the power of place never went away | Well, that was a short ride. Not long ago, one of the world’s leading historians, Lynn Hunt, stated with confidence in Writing History in the Global Era (2014) that a more global approach to the past would do for our age what national history did in the heyday of nation-building: it would, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau had ... | Jeremy Adelman | https://aeon.co//essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment | |
Economics | Cash might be grungy, unfashionable and corruptible, but it is still a great public good, important for rich and poor alike | I recently found myself facing a vending machine in a quiet corridor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. I was due to speak at a conference called ‘Reinvent Money’ but, suffering from jetlag and exhaustion, I was on a search for Coca-Cola. The vending machine had a small digital interface built by... | Brett Scott | https://aeon.co//essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is-good-will-be-lost | |
Subcultures | Most utopian communities are, like most start-ups, short-lived. What makes the difference between failure and success? | At 16, Martin Winiecki dropped out of school and left his home in the German city of Dresden to live full-time at Tamera, a 300-acre intentional community in the rolling hills of southwestern Portugal. His mother and father – a doctor and a professor of mathematics – were reluctant to let him go. ‘It was quite a shock ... | Alexa Clay | https://aeon.co//essays/like-start-ups-most-intentional-communities-fail-why | |
Gender | Elite female athletes are subjected to invasive gender tests, and hormone treatments if they fail. This is deeply unfair | For elite athletes, the 800-metre event in track and field is a breathtaking race of two laps completed in under two minutes. The world record for women is 1:53.28, set by Jarmila Kratochvílová of the Czech Republic in 1983. The world record for men, 1:40.91, has belonged to David Rudisha from Kenya since 2012. It is t... | Silvia Camporesi | https://aeon.co//essays/sports-culture-binds-us-to-gender-binaries-this-is-unfair | |
Art | How wealthy Americans grew to appreciate the French Impressionist painter – as an artist but also as a financial asset | On 16 November 2016, the investment guru and philanthropist Tom Marsico, one of the wealthiest men in the United States, became a little bit richer: an auction at Christie’s in New York sold Claude Monet’s Grainstack for $81.4 million. The price, which broke the record for a Monet painting at auction, was more than six... | Ross King | https://aeon.co//essays/was-claude-monet-the-jeff-koons-of-his-day | |
Economic history | Unprecedented growth marked the era from 1948 to 1973. Economists might study it forever, but it can never be repeated. Why? | The second half of the 20th century divides neatly in two. The divide did not come with the rise of Ronald Reagan or the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is not discernible in a particular event, but rather in a shift in the world economy, and the change continues to shape politics and society in much of the world today. Th... | Marc Levinson | https://aeon.co//essays/how-economic-boom-times-in-the-west-came-to-an-end | |
Cognition and intelligence | Intelligence has always been used as fig-leaf to justify domination and destruction. No wonder we fear super-smart robots | As I was growing up in England in the latter half of the 20th century, the concept of intelligence loomed large. It was aspired to, debated and – most important of all – measured. At the age of 11, tens of thousands of us all around the country were ushered into desk-lined halls to take an IQ test known as the 11-Plus.... | Stephen Cave | https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-dark-history-of-intelligence-as-domination | |
The ancient world | Have archaeologists proven the ancient tale of mass suicide in the Judaean desert or twisted science for political end? | In 73 or 74 CE, 960 Jewish zealots – men, women and children – committed suicide on top of the mountain of Masada by the Dead Sea in Israel rather than be captured by the Romans. The story, told by the Roman historian Josephus, is one of the most famous from antiquity. But did it actually happen? Yigael Yadin, the late... | Eric H Cline | https://aeon.co//essays/decoding-the-ancient-tale-of-mass-suicide-in-the-judaean-desert | |
Stories and literature | Why would Odysseus dump a hot nymph? Or toyboys lust after his wife Penelope? Unveiling the erotic mysteries of the Odyssey | The Trojan Wars ended in Troy’s defeat at the hands of the Greeks, many of whom returned to their homes. But the great Odysseus was not among them. He became marooned on the faraway island of Ogygia, enjoying – or tiring of – the favours of the beautiful nymph Calypso. Homer’s Odyssey, as we all know, is the story of O... | C D C Reeve | https://aeon.co//essays/unveiling-the-erotic-mysteries-at-the-heart-of-homers-odyssey | |
Global history | In a time of great powers and empires, just one region of the world experienced extraordinary economic growth. How? | How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Learned tomes by historians, economists, political scientists and other scholars fill many bookshelves with explanations of how and why the process of modern economic growth or ‘the Great Enrichment’ exploded in western Europe in the 18th century.... | Joel Mokyr | https://aeon.co//essays/how-did-europe-become-the-richest-part-of-the-world | |
Economics | Blockchain enthusiasts crave a world without bankers, lawyers or fat-cat executives. There’s just one problem: trust | On 20 July 2016, something happened that was arguably the most philosophically interesting event to take place in your lifetime or mine. On that day, after much deliberation and hand-wringing, in the aftermath of a multimillion-dollar swindle from his automated, algorithm-driven, supposedly foolproof corporation, Vital... | E J Spode | https://aeon.co//essays/trust-the-inside-story-of-the-rise-and-fall-of-ethereum | |
Neuroscience | She can paint, but not name a painting; learn new music without knowing a tune. Lonni Sue is teaching us much about memory | Every so often over the past decade, I’ve spent time at an ashram – a Hindu religious retreat – in the Indian city of Rishikesh on the banks of the Ganges. (For those who remember the 1960s, the ashram, called Parmarth Niketan, is about a half-mile upriver from the one where the Beatles stayed during their visits to th... | Michael D Lemonick | https://aeon.co//essays/what-amnesiac-patients-can-tell-us-about-how-memories-are-made | |
Philosophy of mind | Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union tell inconsistent stories. What does this say about the nature of memory? | Human memory is a wonderful but fallible instrument… The memories residing within us are not engraved in stone. Not only do they tend to fade over the years; they often change or even grow to incorporate extraneous features.Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1986)‘They used to ask me if I remembered her… I don’t. W... | Helen Haft | https://aeon.co//essays/what-the-oral-histories-of-russian-jews-reveal-about-memory | |
Politics and government | The glamour, bullying and violence of the libertarian alt-Right has a direct political ancestor, and it’s not Nazi Germany | Fascism begins as something in the air. Stealthy as smoke in the darkness, easier to smell than to see. Fascism sets out an ethos, not a set of policies; appeals to emotion, not fact. It begins as a pose, often a deceptive one. It likes propaganda, dislikes truth, and invests heavily in performance. Untroubled by its o... | Jay Griffiths | https://aeon.co//essays/the-macho-violent-culture-of-italian-fascism-was-prophetic | |
Mathematics | The world is full of mundane, meek, unconscious things embodying fiendishly complex mathematics. What can we learn from them? | What does it mean to know mathematics? Since maths is something we teach using textbooks that demand years of training to decipher, you might think the sine qua non is intelligence – usually ‘higher’ levels of whatever we imagine that to be. At the very least, you might assume that knowing mathematics requires an abili... | Margaret Wertheim | https://aeon.co//essays/theres-more-maths-in-slugs-and-corals-than-we-can-think-of | |
Self-improvement | Millions believe that pop psychology can change their tennis skills, their love life or their moods. Are they all wrong? | ‘Double-fault!’… ‘Ju-ust out!’ Generally a calm man, I throw my tennis racquet against the thick green court curtains with disgust… Akh, the torture of tennis. I make a dejected approach to shake hands with my supercilious nemesis on the occasion of another easy victory. Maybe he feels sorry for me this time so, while ... | Rami Gabriel | https://aeon.co//essays/self-help-is-a-kind-of-magical-thinking-thats-why-it-works | |
Demography and migration | And so is the past. Migration and mingling are essential to human success in the past, the present and into the future | In the future, a lot of people might look like Danielle Shewmake, a 21-year-old college student from Fort Worth, Texas. Shewmake has dark, curly hair, brown eyes, and an olive skin tone that causes many to mistake her heritage as Mediterranean. Her actual pedigree is more complex. Her father is half-Cherokee and half-C... | Scott Solomon | https://aeon.co//essays/the-future-is-mixed-race-and-thats-a-good-thing-for-humanity | |
Space exploration | Elon Musk and the rise of Silicon Valley’s strange trickle-down science | There are good reasons to worry about the future of humanity. Do we have a future, and if so, how much and what kind? For most people, it’s easier to feel these existential concerns for our species than it is to do something about them. But some are taking action. On 27 September 2016, the SpaceX founder Elon Musk made... | Andrew Russell & Lee Vinsel | https://aeon.co//essays/is-a-mission-to-mars-morally-defensible-given-todays-real-needs | |
Medicine | Are you average? Typical? Ideal? Adequate? The idea of ‘normal’ is a historical construct and it’s time we got rid of it | The problem of variation haunts medical science. In the 19th century, one of the founders of experimental medicine, the French physiologist Claude Bernard, claimed that individual variability was an obstacle to medical judgment. If we could show that the abnormal was a mere quantitative deviation from the normal, he wr... | Jonathan Sholl | https://aeon.co//essays/is-it-time-to-abandon-the-medical-construct-of-being-normal | |
Religion | How an obscure oriental cult in a corner of Roman Palestine grew to become the dominant religion of the Western world | The Roman empire became Christian during the fourth century CE. At the century’s start, Christians were – at most – a substantial minority of the population. By its end, Christians (or nominal Christians) indisputably constituted a majority in the empire. Tellingly, at the beginning of the century, the imperial governm... | Michael Kulikowski | https://aeon.co//essays/how-an-obscure-oriental-cult-converted-a-vast-pagan-roman-empire | |
Progress and modernity | The world feels caught between infinite possibility and limited resources. Thomas More and T R Malthus can help | You burn bright with hope. You live in a joyous arc of optimism, a rhapsody of can-do spirit. Not just you. Daily, earnestly, together, we plot human uplift. We teeter on the brink of bliss and then, splat, we land in its creamy centre. Plug the words ‘utopian’, ‘Malthusian’ and ‘dystopian’ into Google Ngram, and see. ... | Joyce E Chaplin | https://aeon.co//essays/how-more-and-malthus-light-the-way-towards-humanitys-future | |
Neuroscience | How animals navigate their way around provides clues to how the brain forms, stores and retrieves memories | In Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876), the hapless snark-hunting crew found themselves presented with a navigational challenge by their captain, the Bellman: He had bought a large map representing the sea,Without the least vestige of land:And the crew were much pleased when they found it to beA map they co... | Kate Jeffery | https://aeon.co//essays/how-cognitive-maps-help-animals-navigate-the-world | |
Progress and modernity | From transgender celebrities to fitness fads, pop culture loves reinvention. But the drive to ‘find yourself’ has a dark side | Every Tuesday on Instagram, millions of users, mostly in their teens to their early 30s, upload an image for #transformationtuesday. On one side of the shot, there’s a selfie of a young man, topless or in underwear, his body slim, pale and unflatteringly lit, phone in hand before a mirror; or a young woman, similarly u... | Michael Lovelock | https://aeon.co//essays/whats-behind-the-urge-to-uncover-an-authentic-self | |
Physics | That the world is not solid but made up of tiny particles is a very ancient insight. Is it humanity’s greatest idea? | According to tradition, in the year 450 BCE, a man embarked on a 400-mile sea voyage from Miletus in Anatolia to Abdera in Thrace, fleeing a prosperous Greek city that was suddenly caught up in political turmoil. It was to be a crucial journey for the history of knowledge. The traveller’s name was Leucippus; little is ... | Carlo Rovelli | https://aeon.co//essays/is-atomic-theory-the-most-important-idea-in-human-history | |
Cosmopolitanism | I left the US, the land of my birth, sickened by racial injustice. But the return to a homeland is not a simple matter | ‘Oh, you are beautiful.’ The security official tilts her head and breaks into a broad smile, a toothpick caught in the side of her mouth. The loose ends of her cornrows peek out from the back of her navy beret. The cotton of her light blue button-down is taut against her stomach. She is leaning casually against the X-r... | Enuma Okoro | https://aeon.co//essays/i-am-here-now-in-this-other-country-the-place-that-should-be-my-home | |
Family life | Sweden’s hands-on dads represent an alternative male form forged by lowered testosterone and the potent hormones of attachment | ‘Something happens to the men who come here,’ says Lisa Lindell, observing the first arrivals at her drop-in centre for new parents in Malmö, Sweden. One, a straggly haired Israeli scientist, has built a perfect pyramid out of Play-Doh for his daughter. A Swedish restaurant manager is sprawled on the floor as his son p... | Richard W Orange | https://aeon.co//essays/swedens-hands-on-dads-and-the-hormones-of-fatherhood | |
Metaphysics | Life’s most meaningful experiences can leave us tongue-tied. What can be said, let alone understood, about the unsayable? | In 2010, the artist Marina Abramović performed for 700 hours at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in a piece called The Artist is Present. It involved her sitting still in the middle of the gallery’s soaring atrium, wearing one of a selection of striking, block-colour dresses that pooled over her feet. Members of t... | Silvia Jonas | https://aeon.co//essays/what-if-anything-can-be-said-about-what-is-unsayable | |
Illness and disease | A bold theory places infection at the root of Alzheimer’s, explaining why decades of treatment have done little good | On Friday afternoons, Robert Moir, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, indulges in what he calls his ‘play hour’. He doesn’t go to the gym or head to the bar; he plops down in front of his computer – OK, yes, usually with a beer in hand – and directs his browser to PubMed, the US National Library... | Melinda Wenner Moyer | https://aeon.co//essays/how-microbial-infections-might-cause-alzheimers-disease | |
Logic and probability | Is logical thinking a way to discover or to debate? The answers from philosophy and mathematics define human knowledge | The history of logic should be of interest to anyone with aspirations to thinking that is correct, or at least reasonable. This story illustrates different approaches to intellectual enquiry and human cognition more generally. Reflecting on the history of logic forces us to reflect on what it means to be a reasonable c... | Catarina Dutilh Novaes | https://aeon.co//essays/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-logic | |
Family life | His duties are many, his challenges weighty, but his glory can be great. A guide to family management, by a Roman nobleman | Raising a family is the most important duty a man has. Without children the state has no future, and if those children are not brought up properly then that future is bleak. When there is so much at stake it is vital to get it right, and in this article I will explain how to make sure your family is a source of great p... | Marcus Sidonius Falx & Jerry Toner | https://aeon.co//essays/lessons-in-family-management-from-a-roman-of-noble-birth | |
Philosophy of language | I took on Noam Chomsky’s ideas about language and unleashed a decade of debate and ridicule. But is my argument wrong? | Few scientific disagreements lead to public controversy. But there are times when the subject or the participants in a debate so capture the public imagination that otherwise dry, technical matters of discord among researchers erupt into the media, eliciting a wide array of opinions from experts and non-experts. Gettin... | Daniel Everett | https://aeon.co//essays/why-language-is-not-everything-that-noam-chomsky-said-it-is | |
Teaching and learning | The authoritative statement of scientific method derives from a surprising place — early 20th-century child psychology | There is a theory in psychology called the theory theory. It’s a theory about theories. While this might sound obvious, the theory theory leads to counterintuitive conclusions. A quarter-century ago, psychologists began to point out important links between the development of scientific theories and how everyday thinkin... | Henry Cowles | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-scientific-method-came-from-watching-children-play | |
Meaning and the good life | Few of the great existentialists had children. How can their philosophy help with the anxiety and dread of fatherhood? | A meeting of existential philosophers tends to be the spectacle one might expect: black berets whisper in hushed tones about death and anxiety; nervous hands and pursed lips smoke cigarettes in hotel rooms; throats are cleared to deliver scholarly papers to the chosen few. (What exactly would ‘The Patency of Art: Trans... | John Kaag & Clancy Martin | https://aeon.co//essays/what-the-childless-fathers-of-existentialism-teach-real-dads | |
History | LSD in the ’60s; ecstasy in the ’80s; ‘smart’ drugs today: how we get high reflects the desires and fears of our times | Few people’s views on drugs have changed so starkly as those of Aldous Huxley. Born in 1894 to a high-society English family, Huxley witnessed the early 20th-century ‘war on drugs’, when two extremely popular narcotics were banned within years of one another: cocaine, which had been sold by the German pharmaceutical co... | Cody Delistraty | https://aeon.co//essays/how-each-generation-gets-the-drugs-it-deserves | |
Technology and the self | Unburdening ourselves online can feel radical and liberating. But is baring and sharing all as emancipatory as it seems? | There’s a well-known contradiction in the way many of us behave online, which is this: we know we’re being watched all the time, and pay lip service to the evils of surveillance by Google and the government. But the bounds of what’s considered too personal, revealing or banal to be uploaded to an app or shared with a c... | Firmin deBrabander | https://aeon.co//essays/how-baring-and-sharing-online-increases-social-conformity | |
Neuroscience | Filmmakers have tapped laws of perception still unexplored by neuroscience to create a visual feast in the brain | About 25 minutes into the action film Iron Man 2 (2010), there is an explosive sequence in the middle of an auto race through the streets of Monaco. The scene is a technical tour de force, with explosions, cars flipping and fire everywhere, all in front of thousands of panicked race spectators. At a 2014 event at the A... | Jeffrey M Zacks | https://aeon.co//essays/how-filmmakers-push-your-eyes-around-the-screen-at-will | |
Illness and disease | A potent toxin that alters hormones and metabolism, sugar sets the stage for epidemic levels of obesity and diabetes | ‘Virtually zero.’ That’s a reasonable estimate of the probability that public health authorities in the foreseeable future will successfully curb the worldwide epidemics of obesity and diabetes, at least according to Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) – a person who should know. ... | Gary Taubes | https://aeon.co//essays/sugar-is-a-toxic-agent-that-creates-conditions-for-disease | |
Ethics | When someone changes for the worse, we see a totally different person. But what happens if the change is for the better? | What does it take to be the same person over time? This question has vexed philosophers for millennia. If an individual’s character changes enough, can this disrupt identity to such an extent that it no longer makes sense to say that we are dealing with the same person? That seems a reasonable conclusion to draw when t... | Kevin Tobia | https://aeon.co//essays/how-a-change-for-the-worse-makes-for-a-different-person | |
Deep time | Humans have been altering Earth for millennia, but only now are we wise to what we’re doing. How will we use that wisdom? | As a planetary astrobiologist, I am focused on the major transitions in planetary evolution and the evolving relationship between planets and life. The scientific community is converging on the idea that we have entered a new epoch of Earth history, one in which the net activity of humans has become an agent of global ... | David Grinspoon | https://aeon.co//essays/enter-the-sapiezoic-a-new-aeon-of-self-aware-global-change | |
Biology | The ant colony has often served as a metaphor for human order and hierarchy. But real ant society is radical to its core | It’s easy to find familiar examples of division of labour. In a corporation, some people work in sales and others in accounting; in an orchestra, some play the bassoon and others the violin. Since no one is born an accountant or a bassoonist, in a system with division of labour, differentiated skills must be acquired. ... | Deborah M Gordon | https://aeon.co//essays/how-ant-societies-point-to-radical-possibilities-for-humans | |
Palaeontology | Did Neanderthals speak? Did dinosaurs roar? And when did birds begin to sing? The soundscape of deep time is coming back | In late 2016, a team of palaeontologists, led by Julia Clarke from the University of Texas at Austin, confirmed they had discovered the oldest known fossil of a bird’s voice box, known as a syrinx. It was found in the remains of an extinct Antarctic bird named Vegavis, which died at least 66 million years ago and lived... | Alex Riley | https://aeon.co//essays/how-palaeontologists-recreate-the-sounds-of-the-deep-past | |
Addiction | Addiction changes the brain but it’s not a disease that can be cured with medicine. In fact, it’s learned – like a habit | Three years ago, I put out a call to my blog community: would anyone be willing to tell me the story of their addiction, from start to finish, in all of its gory detail, for the book I am writing? The book would combine an account of brain change in addiction with subjective descriptions of what it’s like to live insid... | Marc Lewis | https://aeon.co//essays/why-its-high-time-that-attitudes-to-addiction-changed | |
Mathematics | Facts about the past and present are either true or false. Can knowledge of the future offer the same degree of certainty? | Que sera seraWhatever will be will beThe future’s not ours to seeQue sera sera. So sang Doris Day in 1956, expressing a near-universal belief of humankind: you can’t know the future. Even if this is not quite a universal belief, then the universal experience of humankind is that we don’t know the future. We don’t know ... | Anthony Sudbery | https://aeon.co//essays/does-knowledge-of-the-past-and-present-determine-the-future | |
Love and friendship | Even the best of friends can fill you with tension and make you sick. Why does friendship so readily turn toxic? | Think of a time when you sat across from a friend and felt truly understood. Deeply known. Maybe you sensed how she was bringing out your ‘best self’, your cleverest observations and wittiest jokes. She encouraged you. She listened, articulated one of your patterns, and then gently suggested how you might shift it for ... | Carlin Flora | https://aeon.co//essays/when-a-friendship-turns-sour-more-than-feelings-get-hurt | |
Biology | Animal consciousness is taboo in many areas of biological science. What’s so hard about the inner lives of other species? | I have recently decided to bring two small parrots into my home. They are celestial parrotlets, originally from Ecuador and Peru, and one of the smallest parrot species that can cohabit with humans. I call them Dandolo and Madeleine. They fit well into my apartment life in Oxford, despite the burgeoning beak-scars on m... | Antone Martinho-Truswell | https://aeon.co//essays/why-wont-biologists-say-that-animals-might-be-conscious | |
Global history | If the sultan of Mysore had had a bit more luck, George Washington might be known as the Haider Ali of North America | If the sultan of Mysore had had a bit more luck, George Washington might be known as the Haider Ali of North America. As the ruler of Mysore, a kingdom in what is now southwestern India, Haider fought a series of wars with Great Britain in the latter half of the 18th century, at the onset of the Age of Revolution. Whil... | Blake Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/why-american-revolutionaries-admired-the-rebels-of-mysore | |
Stories and literature | Artificial intelligence sheds new light on classic texts. Literary theorists who don’t embrace it face obsolescence | Where do witches come from, and what do those places have in common? While browsing a large collection of traditional Danish folktales, the folklorist Timothy Tangherlini and his colleague Peter Broadwell, both at the University of California, Los Angeles, decided to find out. Armed with a geographical index and some 3... | Inderjeet Mani | https://aeon.co//essays/how-ai-is-revolutionising-the-role-of-the-literary-critic | |
Medicine | A new medical device enables the expulsion of stomach contents for weight loss. Are you feeling disgusted? Should you be? | The AspireAssist could be the most intuitive weight-loss therapy ever proposed. It works as a feeding tube in reverse: with the aid of an endoscope and a tiny blade, a physician places an internal catheter into the stomach and pulls it out through the skin. Shortly thereafter, the patient wakes up and goes home with a ... | Nitin K Ahuja | https://aeon.co//essays/does-a-stomach-pump-for-weight-loss-fuel-the-obesity-stigma | |
Ethics | Tight-lipped, frosty and fake, the passive-aggressive person never quite takes the blame. Is this always a bad thing? | Imagine the following. I’m planning a birthday celebration, and everyone’s invited. I start a group chat on Facebook to discuss the arrangements. While all this is going on, my sister, Fleur, does something to upset me. Genuinely remorseful, she later apologises and I tell her – a little frostily, perhaps – that it’s f... | Rebecca Roache | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-worse-a-passive-aggressive-silence-or-an-outright-shout | |
Home | From the footloose networker to the exiled migrant, home has been displaced by an idea that’s both elusive and contested | The tiny home is one of the many oxymorons of our strange times. Thousands of people, mainly on the west coast of North America, have built small homes, little bigger than a garden shed, that they tow around on trailers. Since they first started appearing a few years ago, tiny homes have become an open-source ‘maker mo... | Charles Leadbeater | https://aeon.co//essays/why-theres-no-place-like-home-for-anyone-any-more | |
Poverty and development | Thirty years after the nuclear disaster, local berry-pickers earn a good living. What’s the hidden cost of their wares? | You can’t miss the berry-pickers in the remote forests of northern Ukraine, a region known as Polesia. They ride along on bicycles or pile out of cargo vans. They are young, mostly women and children, lean and suntanned, with hands stained a deep purple. And they are changing the landscape around them. Rural communitie... | Kate Brown & Olha Martynyuk | https://aeon.co//essays/ukraine-s-berry-pickers-are-reaping-a-radioactive-bounty | |
Genetics | How and why did humans domesticate animals – and what might this tell us about the future of our own species? | One day in London in 1855, during an unusually cold winter, Charles Darwin went for a walk. As he strolled along the banks of the ice-bound Thames, he noticed some pigeons foraging for food. He began to wonder about their relationship to so-called ‘fancy pigeons’, the more exotic varieties favoured by fanciers and bree... | Jacob Mikanowski | https://aeon.co//essays/how-domestication-changes-species-including-the-human | |
Work | Economists believe in full employment. Americans think that work builds character. But what if jobs aren’t working anymore? | Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and inco... | James Livingston | https://aeon.co//essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but-the-problem | |
History of ideas | Saturday mornings with J L Austin in postwar Oxford were a golden time for wordplay, silly jokes and serious philosophy | In the late 1940s, Oxford was bursting with youth. A veritable ghost town during the war years, now the city was abuzz again. Young men who had survived years of combat or had just been released from prisoner-of-war camps were returning to complete the degrees they’d had to abandon. Faced with this surfeit, the college... | Nikhil Krishnan | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-thought-acts-of-the-oxford-don-j-l-austin-live-on | |
Mental health | Like a reptile lodged within me, paranoia hatches unbelievable conspiracies that my mind embraces with stunning naivety | Hatred is different from paranoia. Hatred can engulf a nation in a millions-strong frenzy of self-righteousness. Hatred can be held by one person all the way to the grave. It can be suddenly relinquished (sometimes beautifully); or it can just wear itself down like an overused axe blade. Paranoia, on the other hand, is... | Roberta Payne | https://aeon.co//essays/what-it-is-really-like-to-suffer-from-schizophrenic-paranoia | |
Work | It takes diplomacy, anthropology and psychology to serve the world’s super-rich. But only trust opens their purse strings | If you want to understand rich people, talk to their servants. This was the intuition that made a cultural phenomenon of Upstairs, Downstairs in the 1970s, and Downton Abbey 40 years later. The same idea underlies the drama of Bleak House (1853), Charles Dickens’s novel of wealth and family intrigue: the servants know ... | Brooke Harrington | https://aeon.co//essays/how-wealth-managers-earn-the-trust-of-the-world-s-super-rich | |
Demography and migration | The idea that American life is increasingly transient and uprooted is a myth: people are moving less, but worrying more | In 1971, the great Carole King sang: ‘So far away/ Doesn’t anyone stay in one place anymore?’ Thirty years later, the editors of The New York Times explained that families in the United States are changing because of ‘the ever-growing mobility of Americans’. And in 2010, a psychologist argued that ‘an increased rate of... | Claude S Fischer | https://aeon.co//essays/the-increasingly-mobile-us-is-a-myth-that-needs-to-move-on | |
Bioethics | From morbid anatomy museums to modern consent forms, medicine wants ever more control over your body – and its parts | When I met the retired ballerina Toni Bentley at a reception in 2008, and she found out that I am a historian and philosopher of anatomy, she told me enthusiastically about how she had boiled her hip bone in a soup pot. Well, bones, really. The surgeon who had replaced Bentley’s dance-scarred, arthritic right hip with ... | Alice Dreger | https://aeon.co//essays/dead-or-alive-medicine-wants-your-parts | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Coyotes, dingoes and wolves are all dogs, as intelligent and loyal as our familiars. Our treatment of them is unconscionable | Drinking her coffee one sunny winter morning, Pamela Karaz looked out the window of her home in upstate New York and saw a coyote walking up the driveway. It was an uncommon sight – coyotes tend to be secretive – but what happened next was even more surprising. The coyote marked a tree with his scent, strolled across h... | Brandon Keim | https://aeon.co//essays/why-aren-t-coyotes-dingoes-and-wolves-treated-like-our-dogs | |
Neuroscience | Look into my eyes: the fantastical history, mysterious healing power and emergent neuroscience of hypnosis | It’s surprising how stressful the first time can be. For months now, I’ve been researching the history of hypnosis for a book on the power of suggestion. But no study of hypnosis would be complete without trying it myself. Which is what led me to the door of my friend, the photographer Meghan Dhaliwal, with butterflies... | Erik Vance | https://aeon.co//essays/look-into-my-eyes-how-hypnosis-works-is-a-partnership | |
Stories and literature | Literary criticism taught me to scrub my feelings out of my reading, but a medieval mystic showed me how to put them back in | In his essay ‘Uncritical Reading’ (2004), the Yale English professor Michael Warner writes about the way that universities break students of disreputable reading habits. When students first enter the classroom, he writes: They identify with characters. They fall in love with authors… they shop around among taste-public... | Anna Wilson | https://aeon.co//essays/how-a-medieval-mystic-was-the-first-creator-of-fanfiction | |
Genetics | Darwin’s theory that natural selection drives evolution is incomplete without input from evolution’s anti-hero: Lamarck | The unifying theme for much of modern biology is based on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, the process of natural selection by which nature selects the fittest, best-adapted organisms to reproduce, multiply and survive. The process is also called adaptation, and traits most likely to help an individual survive are... | Michael Skinner | https://aeon.co//essays/on-epigenetics-we-need-both-darwin-s-and-lamarck-s-theories | |
Illness and disease | Some say that illness is morally improving, others that there is nothing good about being sick. Can philosophy adjudicate? | One evening, on the way home from a tiring conference, the philosopher Havi Carel, a professor at the University of Bristol, fell into conversation with her taxi driver. He was curious about the oxygen cylinder she carried. I have a chronic lung condition, Carel explained, the tubes of the cylinder hissing in the still... | Ian J Kidd | https://aeon.co//essays/can-there-be-anything-good-in-the-experience-of-illness | |
Global history | Haiti, not the US or France, was where the assertion of human rights reached its defining climax in the Age of Revolution | Here is the challenge: to write a history of modern political thought and culture that can simultaneously – and equally – embody and communicate the perspectives of those who arrived in Virginia in the hold of the slave ship São João Bautista, of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Napole... | Laurent Dubois | https://aeon.co//essays/why-haiti-should-be-at-the-centre-of-the-age-of-revolution | |
Deep time | Does history unfold randomly and by chance, or are there underlying patterns and deep connections between its parts? | When one looks at the long sweep of Big History – a panoramic view of the history of everything from the unfolding of the Universe to the evolution of life to the small human story, with its dazzling technology and bloody wars – a question emerges: do we see regularities in the unfolding of the past, or is history all ... | Walter Alvarez | https://aeon.co//essays/how-chance-and-probability-affect-the-path-of-big-history | |
Neuroscience | It looks like scientists and philosophers might have made consciousness far more mysterious than it needs to be | What is the best way to understand consciousness? In philosophy, centuries-old debates continue to rage over whether the Universe is divided, following René Descartes, into ‘mind stuff’ and ‘matter stuff’. But the rise of modern neuroscience has seen a more pragmatic approach gain ground: an approach that is guided by ... | Anil K Seth | https://aeon.co//essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one | |
Family life | Like any adult, my son wants to work, travel and socialise, and his Down syndrome won’t stop him. But can he live independently? | When Jamie was in his tween years, not long after we moved to the town of State College in Pennsylvania from Champaign, Illinois, I was asked to serve on the board of the local chapter of The Arc – formerly known as the Association of Retarded Citizens. (Nobody misses the ‘retarded’ part, but I wish we could still say ... | Michael Bérubé | https://aeon.co//essays/the-song-of-independence-calls-to-disabled-people-too | |
Ethics | The Confucian philosopher Mengzi provides an intriguing (and oddly modern) alternative to Aristotelian accounts of human virtue | A man is hiking in the countryside when he suddenly sees a toddler about to fall into an abandoned well. What will he do? Many people will instinctively run toward the toddler to save him. However, some people will simply panic, freezing in the moment of crisis. A handful of people might start to move toward the child,... | Bryan W Van Norden | https://aeon.co//essays/the-influential-confucian-philosopher-you-ve-never-heard-of | |
Future of technology | Predictive policing uses algorithms to analyse data and cut crime. But does it really work, and should it be trusted? | In an age of anxiety, the words sound so reassuring: predictive policing. The first half promises an awareness of events that have not yet occurred. The second half clarifies that the future in question will be one of safety and security. Together, they perfectly match the current obsession with big data and the mathem... | Sidney Perkowitz | https://aeon.co//essays/should-we-trust-predictive-policing-software-to-cut-crime | |
Childhood and adolescence | In the 20th century it offered a bridge from the innocence of childhood to the responsibilities of adult life. Not any more | Adolescence as an idea and as an experience grew out of the more general elevation of childhood as an ideal throughout the Western world. By the closing decades of the 19th century, nations defined the quality of their cultures by the treatment of their children. As Julia Lathrop, the first director of the United State... | Paula S Fass | https://aeon.co//essays/adolescence-is-no-longer-a-bridge-between-childhood-and-adult-life | |
History of technology | He’s a forgotten hippie idol, a sage of 1960s counterculture. What can we learn from Bucky Fuller’s faith in technology? | The old mill town of Winooski in Vermont gets an average of 75 inches of snow per year, and temperatures in January fall below -10ºC. In 1979, in the clutch of a global oil shock, Winooski’s 7,500 citizens found themselves paying an annual $4 million for heating – around $13 million in today’s money. Desperate to spend... | Samanth Subramanian | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-high-tech-ideas-of-bucky-fuller-are-back-in-vogue | |
Neuroscience | The most vivid part of the mind bubbles up through sensation and new experience when unencumbered by analytical thought | For some 2,500 years, humans have located the mind in the brain inside our heads. But we ought to consider the origin of mind with an open mind. Is the mind truly within the brain? Or is this an illusion? I gained some insight back in the 1980s, as college drew to a close. I was in my 20s and working in Mexico for the ... | Daniel J Siegel | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-old-and-the-new-make-the-mind-ebb-and-flow | |
Stories and literature | The book has always been a sign of status and refinement; a declaration of self-worth – even for those who hate to read | It is Saturday, 1 November 2014. I am book-browsing at Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue in New York City when my attention is caught by a collection of beautifully produced volumes. I look closer and realise that these books are part of what’s called the Leatherbound Classic series. An assistant informs me that these f... | Frank Furedi | https://aeon.co//essays/are-book-collectors-real-readers-or-just-cultural-snobs | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | From algorithms to aliens, could humans ever understand minds that are radically unlike our own? | In 1984, the philosopher Aaron Sloman invited scholars to describe ‘the space of possible minds’. Sloman’s phrase alludes to the fact that human minds, in all their variety, are not the only sorts of minds. There are, for example, the minds of other animals, such as chimpanzees, crows and octopuses. But the space of po... | Murray Shanahan | https://aeon.co//essays/beyond-humans-what-other-kinds-of-minds-might-be-out-there | |
Death | Being with someone in death entails more than just physical wellbeing. Can end-of-life care make space for spirituality? | Nurses rushed around the man in a blur of hyperactive clothes-changing and sheets-changing. He looked up. ‘It’s the cancer, you know. It’s spreading all around.’ He was talking to the only nurse in the room who wasn’t on duty. She was there to observe the workings of the hospice staff, as part of her research. But for ... | Christopher Harding | https://aeon.co//essays/how-being-not-doing-makes-space-for-spirituality-in-dying | |
History of technology | Soviet scientists tried for decades to network their nation. What stalemated them is now fracturing the global internet | On the morning of 1 October 1970, the computer scientist Viktor Glushkov walked into the Kremlin to meet with the Politburo. He was an alert man with piercing eyes rimmed in black glasses, with the kind of mind that, given one problem, would derive a method for solving all similar problems. And at that moment the Sovie... | Benjamin Peters | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-internet-and-why-it-didnt-work | |
Global history | Multilateral imperial politics triggered an indigenous arms race and led to the violent transformation of Native America | It has become commonplace to attribute the European conquest of the Americas to Jared Diamond’s triumvirate of guns, germs and steel. Germs refer to plague, measles, flu, whooping cough and, especially, the smallpox that whipsawed through indigenous populations, sometimes with a mortality rate of 90 per cent. The epide... | David J Silverman | https://aeon.co//essays/how-did-the-introduction-of-guns-change-native-america | |
History of technology | If we abandon the cult of the Great White Innovator, we will understand the history of technology in a much deeper way | Innovation has become a defining ideology of our time. Be disruptive, move fast, break things! And everyone knows – right? – what innovation looks like. Just Google the word. You’ll see lots of lightbulbs. Lightbulbs represent a sudden flash of inventiveness experienced by Thomas Edison or other mythic geniuses. Innova... | W Patrick McCray | https://aeon.co//essays/most-of-the-time-innovators-don-t-move-fast-and-break-things | |
Mathematics | Academic psychology and medical testing are both dogged by unreliability. The reason is clear: we got probability wrong | The aim of science is to establish facts, as accurately as possible. It is therefore crucially important to determine whether an observed phenomenon is real, or whether it’s the result of pure chance. If you declare that you’ve discovered something when in fact it’s just random, that’s called a false discovery or a fal... | David Colquhoun | https://aeon.co//essays/it-s-time-for-science-to-abandon-the-term-statistically-significant | |
Illness and disease | At least one in three Europeans and untold millions in Asia died. What was the source of this brutal, lethal efficiency? | In what annals has it ever been read that houses were left vacant, cities deserted, the country neglected, the fields too small for the dead and a fearful and universal solitude over the whole earth?… Oh happy people of the future, who have not known these miseries and perchance will class our testimony with the fables... | Wendy Orent | https://aeon.co//essays/what-caused-the-black-death-and-could-it-strike-again | |
Teaching and learning | Students are working harder than ever to pass tests but schools allow no time for true learning in the Socratic tradition | Daydream with me for a moment while I imagine my ideal classroom. The first thing that strikes you when you walk in is the arrangement of the room. Not serried ranks of desks lined up before a blackboard but comfortable seats placed in a large circle. This arrangement sends a message: here is a space for open discussio... | John Taylor | https://aeon.co//essays/can-school-today-teach-anything-more-than-how-to-pass-exams | |
History | In treating the nation’s founders as holy relics, America forgets they were revolutionaries and risk-takers | In the national mythology of the United States, the American revolutionaries were sure about everything. They wrote the Declaration of Independence, not the Suggestion of Independence. They trafficked in the rugged cargo of self-evident truths and common sense. ‘I dwell not upon the vapours of imagination,’ wrote Thoma... | Caroline Winterer | https://aeon.co//essays/america-treats-its-bold-revolution-as-a-reliquary | |
Making | Your balcony fell off? Chabuduo. Vaccines are overheated? Chabuduo. How China became the land of disastrous corner-cutting | In our apartment in central Beijing, we fight a daily rearguard action against entropy. The mirror on my wardrobe came off its hinges six months ago and is now propped up against the wall, one of many furnishing casualties. Each of our light fittings takes a different bulb, and a quarter of them are permanently broken.... | James Palmer | https://aeon.co//essays/what-chinese-corner-cutting-reveals-about-modernity | |
Social psychology | Groupthink can be stultifying. So how do the most successful groups elicit collective intelligence from their members? | As the proverb goes, it takes a village – not just to raise a child, but to keep the village alive. We need planners and engineers to work together to maintain the infrastructure of the village, parents and teachers to jointly care for our children, and juries and judges to decide our court cases. Working together is a... | Jane C Hu | https://aeon.co//essays/how-collective-intelligence-overcomes-the-problem-of-groupthink | |
Values and beliefs | Throughout human history there have been individuals who have been ready to risk everything for their beliefs | ‘Nothing is more difficult,’ wrote the German political essayist Kurt Tucholsky in 1921, ‘and nothing requires more character, than to find yourself in open contradiction to your time and loudly to say: No.’ First of all, it is intellectually and psychologically difficult to step outside the received wisdom of your tim... | Timothy Garton Ash | https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-it-take-to-make-a-stand-for-free-speech | |
Biology | Trees lay down rings, the Earth tells its story in geological strata and now we’ve found the secret archive of the whale | ‘It’s hard to believe that a 40-ton animal can get hidden. They’re sneaky.’ Charles ‘Stormy’ Mayo was scanning the sea from the deck of the R/V Shearwater searching for omens: a cloud of vapour, a patch of white water, a fluke. A few minutes earlier someone had spotted the first North Atlantic right whales of the day. ... | Rebecca Kessler | https://aeon.co//essays/the-natural-history-of-whales-is-written-in-their-baleen | |
Work | How organisations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door | Each summer, thousands of the best and brightest graduates join the workforce. Their well-above-average raw intelligence will have been carefully crafted through years at the world’s best universities. After emerging from their selective undergraduate programmes and competitive graduate schools, these new recruits hope... | André Spicer | https://aeon.co//essays/you-don-t-have-to-be-stupid-to-work-here-but-it-helps | |
Language and linguistics | People who can switch between street dialects and standard language might have the same cognitive advantage as bilinguals | By now we’re familiar with the idea that speaking more than one language confers cognitive benefits. For a long time, we’ve been hearing that bilinguals have superior executive function skills. They are also more flexible in their ability to see another person’s perspective; they’re better problem-solvers; and they see... | Michael Erard | https://aeon.co//essays/do-dialect-speakers-get-the-same-benefits-as-bilinguals | |
Beauty and aesthetics | Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ is not just a radical kind of art. It’s a philosophical dialetheia: a contradiction that is true | In 1917 a pivotal event occurred for art and philosophy: Marcel Duchamp unveiled his artwork Fountain in Alfred Stieglitz’s New York studio. This was simply a porcelain urinal, signed ‘R. Mutt’. Fountain was notorious, even for avant-garde artists. It has become one of the most discussed works of art of the 20th centur... | Damon Young & Graham Priest | https://aeon.co//essays/how-can-duchamp-s-fountain-be-both-art-and-not-art | |
Stories and literature | There is something deeply revealing about the books one truly loves in childhood and adolescence | How does a book get on The New York Times bestsellers lists? For those outside the publishing industry, the question seems tautological. You get on a bestseller list by being among the top 10 bestselling books in your category. Obviously. With certain caveats, that’s true. (Among those caveats – you can’t be a perennia... | Adam Gidwitz | https://aeon.co//essays/what-favourite-childhood-books-reveal-about-the-psyche | |
Human rights and justice | Conventional wisdom sees Socrates as a martyr for free speech, but he accepted his death sentence for a different cause | Some 2,400 years ago, in 399 BCE, Athens put Socrates on trial. The charge was impiety, and the trial took place in the People’s Court. Socrates, already 70 years old, had long been a prominent philosopher and a notorious public intellectual. Meletus, the prosecutor, alleged that Socrates had broken Athenian law by fai... | Josiah Ober | https://aeon.co//essays/the-civic-drama-of-socrates-trial | |
Mood and emotion | A bear chasing you is simply scary but a guy with a big mouse’s head can give you the creeps. What’s the difference? | Imagine looking down to see a severed hand scuttling toward you across the floor like a large, fleshy spider. Imagine a dog trotting up to you, amiably wagging its tail – but as it gets near you notice that, instead of a canine head, it has the head of an enormous green lizard. Imagine that you are walking through a ga... | David Livingstone Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/what-makes-clowns-vampires-and-severed-hands-creepy | |
Religion | Most Japanese reject religious belief while embracing multiple forms of ritual practice. Are they religious or secular? | Since the dawn of anthropology, sociology and psychology, religion has been an object of fascination. Founding figures such as Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber all attempted to dissect it, taxonomise it, and explore its psychological and social functions. And long before the advent of the modern social scien... | Christopher Kavanagh | https://aeon.co//essays/can-religion-be-based-on-ritual-practice-without-belief | |
Physics | Reconciling Einstein with quantum mechanics may require abandoning the notion that cause always precedes effect | Isaac Newton had a problem with the concept of action-at-a-distance. On one hand, like other 17th-century mechanist philosophers, he was deeply suspicious of the idea. As he wrote to the theologian Richard Bentley in 1693: [T]hat one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any... | Huw Price & Ken Wharton | https://aeon.co//essays/can-retrocausality-solve-the-puzzle-of-action-at-a-distance | |
History of technology | The most important moments in invention are sometimes the imaginative leaps – even when they turn out to be dead-ends | Behind the drawn curtains of his home in Palo Alto, California, the railroad magnate Leland Stanford waited for his horse to be brought to life. A white sheet hung against one wall, and in the gloaming the only light came from a wood-and-brass construction at the back of the room. Suddenly, with a mechanical clatter an... | Brian Clegg | https://aeon.co//essays/the-history-of-inventing-shows-our-poor-grasp-of-creativity | |
Information and communication | My college students are never entirely present in class, addicted to texts and tech. Is there any hope left for learning? | I have a rule about cellphones in class: if one disrupts us by ringing, vibrating or sounding an alarm, the owner has to sing a song or bust some dance moves in front of the class. At first, this provision in the syllabus elicits snickers, but it’s no laughing matter. You need to be able to turn off your phones and pay... | Joelle Renstrom | https://aeon.co//essays/can-students-who-are-constantly-on-their-devices-actually-learn | |
Ethics | A morally just world would have no pets, no aquaria, no zoos. No fields of sheep, no barns of cows. That’s true animal rights | We live with six rescued dogs. With the exception of one, who was born in a rescue for pregnant dogs, they all came from very sad situations, including circumstances of severe abuse. These dogs are non-human refugees with whom we share our home. Although we love them very much, we strongly believe that they should not ... | Gary L Francione & Anna E Charlton | https://aeon.co//essays/why-keeping-a-pet-is-fundamentally-unethical |
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