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Gender | For a new generation of trans parents and their children, the meaning of motherhood is undergoing a thorough renovation | At five years old, Fay Purdham announced that she wanted to be a mum. There was just one hitch: Fay was born Kevin. ‘And my mum said, no, no, no, you want to be a father,’ recalls Purdham. ‘I said, no, I want to be a mother. That’s when my mum knew: Oh, my child is different.’ Now in her late 20s, Purdham, who lives in... | Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore | https://aeon.co//essays/when-trans-people-become-parents-who-gets-called-mother | |
Food and drink | Pepperheads love the hit of a habanero, the kick of a bhut jolokia. But what’s the allure of a fruit designed to repel? | On drizzly gray Sundays, after a mid-morning stroll has left my bones damp, I nestle under the covers and curl into a ball. Laptop on bedspread, I wrap myself in the screen’s azure glow and scroll through images of the vox populi in search of warmth, flavour and spice. In short, I spend hours watching YouTube videos of... | Kendra Pierre-Louis | https://aeon.co//essays/what-kind-of-masochists-want-to-burn-their-mouths-off | |
Sleep and dreams | The world’s great religions and spiritual journeys emerged from dreams and visions. Neurochemistry tells us how | One evening in the year 1745, a distinguished scientist was dining in a private room at a tavern in London, when suddenly he noticed a man sitting in a corner and apparently speaking to him. Fearing for his sanity, the scientist hurried home and fell asleep. Later that night, the man from the tavern appeared in the sci... | Patrick McNamara | https://aeon.co//essays/why-are-dreams-such-potent-vehicles-for-the-supernatural | |
Information and communication | Technology promised to set us free. Instead it has trained us to withdraw from the world into distraction and dependency | It was a scene out of an Ambien nightmare: a jackal with the face of Mark Zuckerberg stood over a freshly killed zebra, gnawing at the animal’s innards. But I was not asleep. The vision arrived midday, triggered by the Facebook founder’s announcement – in spring 2011 – that ‘The only meat I’m eating is from animals I’v... | Nicholas Carr | https://aeon.co//essays/the-internet-as-an-engine-of-liberation-is-an-innocent-fraud | |
Thinkers and theories | For anyone who dares to voice dangerous ideas and risk imprisonment or exile, Giordano Bruno remains a hero | Go to Campo dei Fiori in Rome on 17 February and you will find yourself surrounded by a motley crowd of atheists, pantheists, anarchists, Masons, mystics, Christian reformers and members of the Italian Association of Free Thinkers, all rubbing shoulders with an official delegation from City Hall. Every year, this unlik... | Stephanie Merritt | https://aeon.co//essays/why-giordano-bruno-is-still-a-free-speech-hero-today | |
Ethics | Which world would be better: one in which all meat is grown in a lab or one which still contains humanely farmed animals? | Three years ago, a televised taste test of a lab-grown burger proved it was possible to grow a tiny amount of edible meat in a lab. This flesh was never linked to any central nervous system, and so there was none of the pain, boredom and fear that usually plague animals unlucky enough to be born onto our farms. That pa... | Rhys Southan | https://aeon.co//essays/what-makes-a-better-world-lab-grown-meat-or-humane-farming | |
Art | Collectors drive the art world, but what drives art collectors? It’s less about aesthetics than self-identification | The oil billionaire J Paul Getty was famously miserly. He installed a payphone in his mansion in Surrey, England, to stop visitors from making long-distance calls. He refused to pay ransom for a kidnapped grandson for so long that the frustrated kidnappers sent Getty his grandson’s ear in the mail. Yet he spent million... | Erin Thompson | https://aeon.co//essays/what-drives-art-collectors-to-buy-and-display-their-finds | |
Addiction | Most addicts just stop using in time, without needing costly treatment. Why do some people walk away while others can’t? | ‘I’m at the point in my life where I’ve been doing this 20 years or so. [It’s been] probably 22, 23 years, and I’m ready to quit,’ said Clyde, a long-time methamphetamine user now in his mid-40s. When we met in 2011, he was beginning to grow weary from decades of partying and staying up for days at a time. We sat in a ... | Stacey McKenna | https://aeon.co//essays/most-drug-users-stop-without-help-so-long-as-they-re-not-poor | |
Human reproduction | The proportion of twins in the population has waxed and waned in human history. For the first time we understand why | In Greek mythology, twins Castor and Pollux are so tightly bound that when mortal Castor dies, divine Pollux surrenders half his immortality to stay with him, and the pair are transformed into the constellation Gemini. In a modern reversal of the myth, twin astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly were reunited in March after S... | Laura Spinney | https://aeon.co//essays/twins-provide-a-mirror-for-societal-changes-and-human-nature | |
History | ‘The good old days’ is a virulent falsehood that infects those whose defences have been weakened by fear and insecurity | Golden was the first race of articulate folkCreated by the immortals who live on Olympos.They actually lived when Kronos was king of the sky,And they lived like gods, not a care in their hearts,Nothing to do with hard work or grief,And miserable old age didn’t exist for them.From fingers to toes they never grew old,And... | Alan Jay Levinovitz | https://aeon.co//essays/nostalgia-exerts-a-strong-allure-and-extracts-a-steep-price | |
Human rights and justice | Decriminalising the sex trade is touted as a means to empower women and rebrand a necessary service. This is utterly wrong | How should governments respond to the prostitution trade? It’s a question laced with deep-rooted contests – over power, money and the pursuit of equality. But as organisations and advocates increasingly line up behind opposing answers, it’s a question that is becoming difficult to ignore. The fault lines are clear: rec... | Kat Banyard | https://aeon.co//essays/the-sex-trade-can-never-be-legalised-without-hurting-women | |
Social psychology | Social scientists dismiss them, but rather than being universally inaccurate, stereotypes are often grounded in reality | There are good reasons for the bad reputation of stereotypes, which may give rise to malevolent propaganda about groups: disproportionate media representations of African-Americans as criminals, women as fit for nothing but child-rearing and homemaking, Arabs and Muslims as nothing but bloodthirsty terrorists, Jews as ... | Lee Jussim | https://aeon.co//essays/truth-lies-and-stereotypes-when-scientists-ignore-evidence | |
Psychiatry and psychotherapy | After decades of practising as a psychotherapist, I am convinced that our treatment of psychosis is thoroughly wrong-headed | What do you think of hallucinations? Do you wonder how they work? Recently I talked about this with a woman I know well, who was experiencing some as we spoke. Her hallucinations included ‘bugs’ – microphones that she saw scattered around the room that she assumed had been put there because she was coming in, by people... | James Carpenter | https://aeon.co//essays/treating-acute-psychosis-with-drugs-can-prolong-the-anguish | |
Physics | String wars among physicists have highlighted just how much science needs philosophy – and not just the amateur version | The general theory of relativity is sound science; ‘theories’ of psychoanalysis, as well as Marxist accounts of the unfolding of historical events, are pseudoscience. This was the conclusion reached a number of decades ago by Karl Popper, one of the most influential philosophers of science. Popper was interested in wha... | Massimo Pigliucci | https://aeon.co//essays/the-string-theory-wars-show-us-how-science-needs-philosophy | |
Politics and government | Little England may have undone Great Britain. Will a nation of dark fascism or one of green and pleasant lands emerge? | Twenty summers ago something strange and unexpected happened in England. As the country played host to the 1996 European football championship, the flag of St George started appearing. Hanging from windows, drawn across shop fronts, worn on T-shirts and waved at matches, the previously almost unseen red cross on a whit... | Paul Harris | https://aeon.co//essays/just-what-sort-of-nation-might-the-english-seek-to-create | |
History | We are not the first to think that the human being might be much improved with the judicious application of electricity | To celebrate the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900, a number of French artists were commissioned to produce a series of cigar box cards on the theme ‘En l’an 2000’. They came up with some fantastic imagery: in the future world they portrayed there was clearly going to be a great deal of aerial warfare and su... | Iwan Rhys Morus | https://aeon.co//essays/the-victorians-bequeathed-us-their-idea-of-an-electric-future | |
Biology | First we learned to fear germs, then we learned to love our microbiome. But both sides get the biology basically wrong | In the 1870s, German physician Robert Koch was trying to curtail an epidemic of anthrax that was sweeping local farm animals. Other scientists had seen a bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, in the victims’ tissues. Koch injected this microbe into a mouse – which died. He recovered it from the dead rodent and injected it in... | Ed Yong | https://aeon.co//essays/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-good-or-a-bad-microbe | |
Biography and memoir | I am my things and my things are me. I don’t want to give them up: they are narrative prompts for the story of my life | A cartoon from The New Yorker haunts me. Drawn with an economy of line that complements its subject matter, it depicts a Japanese couple wearing traditional dress standing in the doorway of their home. Before them is a rug with one of its corners flipped over. On it lies a toppled rice bowl, with chopsticks askew on th... | Lee Randall | https://aeon.co//essays/why-i-love-my-possessions-as-a-mirror-and-a-gallery-of-me | |
Travel | In thinking about faraway travel, the ability to assess risk falters. It’s probably safer than your morning commute | The forest transformed on the ‘B’ of the ‘Bang!’. One moment, all was languid, inert, drenched in tropical ennui. The next: thick with tension, hyper-alert, as if the percussive explosion had sucked every hum and thrum from the jungle, concentrating each speck of energy into one resonant echo fading away. It’s one of t... | Henry Wismayer | https://aeon.co//essays/that-faraway-trip-is-safer-than-you-think | |
Neuroscience | Imagine purging life’s disturbing events. If you could alter or mute your worst memories, would you still remain yourself? | Imagine you’re the manager of a café. It stays open late and the neighbourhood has gone quiet by the time you lock the doors. You put the evening’s earnings into a bank bag, tuck that into your backpack, and head home. It’s a short walk through a poorly lit park. And there, next to the pond, you realise you’ve been hea... | Lauren Gravitz | https://aeon.co//essays/would-you-purge-bad-memories-from-your-brain-if-you-could | |
Education | He knew how to protect democracy – not by rote and rules but by growing independent-minded kids. Let us not forget it | Did you attend a public school in the United States and perform in a school play, take field trips, or compete on a sports team? Did you have a favourite teacher who designed their own curriculum, say, about the Civil War, or helped you find your particular passions and interests? Did you take classes that were not aca... | Nicholas Tampio | https://aeon.co//essays/dewey-knew-how-to-teach-democracy-and-we-must-not-forget-it | |
Language and linguistics | Euphemisms are like underwear: best changed frequently. What work are they doing in our language and why do they expire? | What we would today call cash assistance for the differently abled could in a different era permissibly have been called welfare for cripples. The terms welfare and crippled sound somewhere between loaded and abusive today, and yet once were considered civil by educated, sensitive people. There actually was an organisa... | John McWhorter | https://aeon.co//essays/euphemisms-are-like-underwear-best-changed-frequently | |
Values and beliefs | Anger is the emotion that has come to saturate our politics and culture. Philosophy can help us out of this dark vortex | There’s no emotion we ought to think harder and more clearly about than anger. Anger greets most of us every day – in our personal relationships, in the workplace, on the highway, on airline trips – and, often, in our political lives as well. Anger is both poisonous and popular. Even when people acknowledge its destruc... | Martha C Nussbaum | https://aeon.co//essays/there-s-no-emotion-we-ought-to-think-harder-about-than-anger | |
Self-improvement | Fantasies about the future have a troubling effect on achieving actual goals. If positive thinking doesn’t work, what does? | Do you believe that positive thinking can help you achieve your goals? Many people today do. Pop psychology and the $12 billion self-help industry reinforce a widespread belief that positive thinking can improve our moods and lead to beneficial life changes. In her book The Secret Daily Teachings (2008), the self-help ... | Gabriele Oettingen | https://aeon.co//essays/thinking-positive-is-a-surprisingly-risky-manoeuvre | |
Death | It is a decision that no parent should have to make: should we let our very sick baby die before she is born? | A month before Nadia was born, I bought her a pair of tiny newborn shoes. Soon I was hit by artistic inspiration: I would grab my camera and make a composition of her tiny shoes, and my four-year-old Luca’s suddenly gigantic ones. The tug of that thought was followed by repulsion of another: let’s wait and see if she’s... | Ana Todorović | https://aeon.co//essays/my-daughter-came-out-they-handed-her-to-me-she-was-dead | |
History of science | Too much research is done on Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic students. Can science widen its base? | If a boy is to become a man among the Etoro people of New Guinea, he must ingest the semen of an elder member of the tribe, via ritualised fellatio. The same belief is held by the nearby Kaluli. But in their case, the ceremonies require the semen to be delivered via the initiate’s anus, not his mouth. The Etoro despise... | Robert Colvile | https://aeon.co//essays/american-undergrads-are-too-weird-to-stand-for-all-humanity | |
History | A diplomat in British India blundered a border. The consequences continue to shape world politics | By the year 1871, British officials stationed in India had learned to ride elephants. This was in fact exactly what Sir Henry Durand, Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, was doing when he fell to his death. In the sad record of the event, Sir Henry is described riding in a howdah atop an elephant while traveling through the... | Rafia Zakaria | https://aeon.co//essays/how-a-colonial-blunder-grew-into-a-part-of-the-war-on-terror | |
Travel | If there is a greater thrill of travelling than the discovery of unfamiliar places, for me it’s getting there by train | The moment I step inside Puerta de Atocha – Madrid’s central railway station – I feel a familiar pang of excitement. My heart flutters, my pulse speeds, and my mood goes up a few points, much the same way that the outside temperature climbs when the sun peeks from the clouds. I am not here to greet a long-lost friend, ... | Margarita Gokun Silver | https://aeon.co//essays/what-makes-train-travel-such-an-antidote-to-life-s-stresses | |
Information and communication | Ever-faster feedback loops and micro-targeted digital porn are pushing human sexuality into some seriously weird places | It was only a couple of decades ago, before WiFi or the static death shriek of dial-up modems, that fetishes were hard-won secrets. The porno most of us stumbled across in our formative pubescence – a Playboy left on a rural Greyhound bus, or a waterlogged bodice-ripper in a back-alley dumpster – was all hard silicon p... | Mark Hay | https://aeon.co//essays/micro-targeted-digital-porn-is-changing-human-sexuality | |
Mood and emotion | Loneliness is hell: debilitating yet formative. Can we avoid the pains of loneliness yet enjoy the pleasures of solitude? | On a humid July evening, a young woman in a red dress made her way along the banks of the Seine, walked beneath the Pont Neuf and, tucking auburn tresses behind her ears, sat down next to me. She held her shorthaired terrier under one arm and Susan Sontag’s The Benefactor (1963) under the other. She introduced herself ... | Cody Delistraty | https://aeon.co//essays/how-loneliness-generates-empathy-and-shapes-identity | |
Religion | Even the pilgrimage to Mecca exposes the myth of a united Islam and the formative power of the wider world | Even sophisticated people speak of Islam as if it is one thing. The devout, the haters and the indifferent often share this belief in Muslim unity. And for them all there is no greater display of Muslim unity than the Hajj. The Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, is a grand and dramatic display of Islamic brotherhood withou... | Faisal Devji | https://aeon.co//essays/the-idea-of-unifying-islam-is-a-recent-invention-and-a-bad-one | |
Sleep and dreams | When wakefulness is seen as the main event, no wonder so many have trouble sleeping. Can we rekindle the joy of slumber? | In Evelyn De Morgan’s numinous painting, Night and Sleep (1878), Nyx, the mighty Greek goddess of night, hovers across a dusky sky with her beloved son Hypnos, the sweet-natured god of sleep. The painting and the Greek gods it captures depict a radically different way of understanding and relating to sleep. In antiquit... | Rubin Naiman | https://aeon.co//essays/the-cure-for-insomnia-is-to-fall-in-love-with-sleep-again | |
Neurodiversity | Eugenic ideas about criminal genes have been repudiated for decades, but a new biological approach to crime is emerging | In 1871, while performing an autopsy on a notorious bank robber, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso saw something unusual. It was a small hollow at the base of the skull, under which lay an enlarged section of the spinal cord. The feature was rare in Europeans, but he had seen it in lower apes and certain ‘infer... | Douglas Starr | https://aeon.co//essays/linking-crime-and-genetics-need-not-be-an-act-of-eugenics | |
Social psychology | Crowds aren’t as smart as we thought, since some people know more than others. A simple trick can find the ones you want | A few weeks ago, I thought I’d do a demonstration of the wisdom of crowds. I was at a bat mitzvah reception and, as a game, the hosts asked each table to guess the number of Skittles in a big Tupperware bowl. I got everyone at our table to write down a guess and then averaged the results. Based on what social scientist... | George Musser | https://aeon.co//essays/a-mathematical-bs-detector-can-boost-the-wisdom-of-crowds | |
Politics and government | On the Left, ‘neoliberal’ is an epithet but, not long ago, everyone wanted to be liberal. Will anyone claim liberalism? | Today, Americans think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal – the historic 20th-century expansion of the social state in the United States – as definitive of liberalism. At the time, however, both pro- and anti-New Dealers called themselves liberal. New Dealers accused opponents of their expanded social state of han... | Lawrence Glickman | https://aeon.co//essays/everyone-was-a-liberal-now-no-one-wants-to-be | |
Religion | Protective, omnipotent, scary and very territorial. The monotheistic God is modelled on a harem-keeping alpha male | Imagine a Martian zoologist, visiting Earth and observing Homo sapiens for the first time. He, she or it would see a species of primate that differs from the others in many ways, all of them involving our complex cultural, intellectual, linguistic, symbolic and technologic lifestyles. But looking at us through a zoolog... | David P Barash | https://aeon.co//essays/how-monotheists-modelled-god-on-a-harem-keeping-alpha-male | |
War and peace | Killing people is hard and horrible. No wonder that warriors, from berserkers to jihadis, need drugs to get in the mood | ‘All of Gaul is divided into three parts,’ wrote Julius Caesar at the start of his Gallic Wars. ‘No, four,’ corrected one author writing slightly later, ‘for one small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the Roman invaders.’ It was, of course, the French comic-book hero Asterix’s unnamed Breton village... | Peter Frankopan | https://aeon.co//essays/berserkers-and-jihadis-alike-have-used-drugs-to-help-wage-war | |
Economic history | The 18th-century thinkers behind laissez-faire economics saw slavery as a great example of global free trade | For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of people into bondage. Scholars estimate that around 1.5 million people perished in the brutal middle passage across the Atlantic. The slave trade linked Africa, Europe and the Americas in a horrific enterprise of death and torture and profit. Yet, i... | Blake Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-original-laissez-faire-economists-loved-slavery | |
Gender and identity | The idea that ‘gender is a spectrum’ is supposed to set us free. But it is both illogical and politically troubling | What is gender? This is a question that cuts to the very heart of feminist theory and practice, and is pivotal to current debates in social justice activism about class, identity and privilege. In everyday conversation, the word ‘gender’ is a synonym for what would more accurately be referred to as ‘sex’. Perhaps due t... | Rebecca Reilly-Cooper | https://aeon.co//essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-gender-prison | |
Gender and identity | Mass shootings have one thing in common: toxic masculinity. Where does it come from and what can be done to stop it? | The shooter is almost always male. Of the past 129 mass shootings in the United States, all but three have been men. The shooter is socially alienated, and he can’t get laid. Every time you scratch the surface of the latest mass killing, in a movie theatre, a school, the streets of Paris or an abortion clinic, you find... | Stephen T Asma | https://aeon.co//essays/humiliation-and-rage-how-toxic-masculinity-fuels-mass-shootings | |
History | A group of gentlemen antiquaries wanted to unite Britain. They turned to natural history, archaeology and linguistics | Britons have been on the move for centuries. In the 17th century, they began to cross the seas and people other continents, seeking both economic opportunities and religious independence. Nonconformist Protestants from East Anglia and the younger sons of the West Country departed to establish colonies in New England an... | Elizabeth Yale | https://aeon.co//essays/natural-history-and-the-invention-of-great-britain | |
History | When the first ‘how-to’ books began to explain the way the world worked, they paved the way for science and secularism | Every presidential election cycle brings candidates touting their religious convictions. Being too secular is rarely a winning political strategy. In fact, Bernie Sanders might have been the first openly secular major presidential candidate in the history of the United States. Even Thomas Jefferson, though not a Christ... | William Eamon | https://aeon.co//essays/six-centuries-of-secularity-began-with-the-first-how-to-books | |
Virtues and vices | Condemned, celebrated, shunned: masturbation has long been an uncomfortable fact of life. Why? | The anonymous author of the pamphlet Onania (1716) was very worried about masturbation. The ‘shameful vice’, the ‘solitary act of pleasure’, was something too terrible to even be described. The writer agreed with those ‘who are of the opinion, that… it never ought to be spoken of, or hinted at, because the bare mention... | Barry Reay | https://aeon.co//essays/the-body-as-amusement-park-a-history-of-masturbation | |
Self-improvement | Learning to be kind to yourself when you (inevitably) make mistakes could have a remarkable effect on your happiness | Human beings are the only creatures who can make themselves miserable. Other animals certainly suffer when they experience negative events, but only humans can induce negative emotions through self-views, judgments, expectations, regrets and comparisons with others. Because self-thought plays such a central role in hum... | Mark Leary | https://aeon.co//essays/learning-to-be-kind-to-yourself-has-remarkable-benefits | |
Information and communication | The sum of our clickstreams is not an objective measure of who we are, but a personal portrait of our hopes and desires | We live in what is sometimes called the ‘petabyte era’, and this pronouncement has provoked much discussion of the sheer size of data stores being created, as well as their rapid growth. Claims circulate along the lines of: ‘Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data – so much that 90 per cent of the data in th... | Rebecca Lemov | https://aeon.co//essays/why-big-data-is-actually-small-personal-and-very-human | |
History of science | The Fukushima disaster shows why the line between high and low risk is individual. Can we learn to manage our own safety? | People are understandably concerned about health and safety. They worry about hoverboards that threaten to burst into flames, or a Zika virus infection that could harm their unborn children. They worry ceaselessly about health threats and industrial hazards and accidents that they can do nothing to prevent, and they wa... | Timothy Jorgensen | https://aeon.co//essays/should-we-trust-others-to-manage-our-own-safety-risks | |
Archaeology | Graffiti on the walls of Europe’s old churches reveals the real Middle Ages – a world far removed from knights and damsels | All of us can imagine the medieval world. Our imagination was created by our upbringing, the books we read, and the films we saw. Imagining the Middle Ages is an act that usually starts in childhood, and changes slowly as we grow older. From the brightly coloured pages of a child’s history book to the visceral panorama... | Matthew Champion | https://aeon.co//essays/medieval-graffiti-brings-a-new-understanding-of-the-past | |
Cognition and intelligence | Brain-training games won’t boost your IQ, but a host of strategies can improve your cognitive abilities one piece at a time | Is it just me, or is everybody out there looking for a quick fix? There is something highly compelling about the idea that there is a secret switch we can flip to become suddenly smarter, to reveal cognitive abilities hidden inside each of us. It is a notion that certainly has commercial appeal. Over just seven years, ... | Jeffrey M Zacks | https://aeon.co//essays/there-s-a-better-way-to-get-smarter-than-brain-training-games | |
Travel | High above London, Tokyo and Cairo, the language of the cockpit is technical, obscure, geeky – and irresistibly romantic | The day I first flew in the cockpit of an airliner, I fell in love with the sights, of course, but also the sounds. I wasn’t a pilot then, not yet. I was a passenger on a British Airways Boeing 747, on a flight from Tokyo to London. I was a business traveller in those days, a management consultant and accustomed to fly... | Mark Vanhoenacker | https://aeon.co//essays/the-language-of-the-cockpit-is-technical-obscure-and-irresistibly-romantic | |
Education | There’s a way to teach children without colonising their minds: the lifelong way of the indigenous people of Mexico | In Mexico City, the cathedral – this stentorian thug of a cathedral – is sinking. Built to crush the indigenous temple beneath it, while its decrees pulverised indigenous thinking, Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral is sinking under the weight of its own brutal imposition. Walking nearby late one night, I was captivate... | Jay Griffiths | https://aeon.co//essays/schooling-comes-naturally-to-mexico-s-indigenous-people | |
Art | Stuart Franklin has photographed conflict, nature and people. He discusses what makes a memorable image | You’ve probably looked at millions of images in your professional life, and you’ve taken many, many thousands. What makes some of them stand out? It’s not just photographs. You have to think why pictures stick, why we remember some of them so well, and others less well. Think of the Vermeer painting Girl with a Pearl E... | Stuart Franklin & Nigel Warburton | https://aeon.co//essays/what-makes-a-memorable-image-q-a-with-stuart-franklin-of-magnum | |
Social psychology | Our ancestors reacted to parasites with overwhelming revulsion, wiring the brain for morals, manners, politics and laws | The young man was having sex with his dog. In fact, he’d lost his virginity to it. Their relationship was still very good; the dog didn’t seem to mind at all. But the man’s conscience was eating at him. Was he acting immorally? In search of sage counsel, he sent an email to David Pizarro, who teaches a class on moral p... | Kathleen McAuliffe | https://aeon.co//essays/how-disgust-made-humans-cooperate-to-build-civilisations | |
Sleep and dreams | The ticking of the bodyclock can help us fight cancer, safeguard our hearts, time our meals, and enhance our intelligence | It was just a regular shipment of golden hamsters from the breeding colonies, except for one male animal. While all the other hamsters aligned on the shelf in the lab of Michael Menaker, then professor of biology at the University of Oregon, showed a regular 24-hour activity rhythm, the mutant and his descendants lived... | Jessa Gamble | https://aeon.co//essays/soon-we-will-see-chrono-attached-to-every-form-of-medicine | |
Social psychology | Has evolution programmed us to shun and turn our backs on refugees – even when they might die without our help? | Wednesday, 2 September 2015. In whatever way one got news – Facebook, email, Twitter, newspaper or traditional broadcast bulletin – it was there. An indelible image that made millions stop and look in a way they never had. A little boy lay belly-down in the sand. Gentle waves lapped his face. The beach was dour and ove... | Avan Judd Stallard | https://aeon.co//essays/does-evolution-explain-the-social-antipathy-to-refugees | |
History of science | Harassment drove me out of physics 30 years ago and little has changed. Why is scientific sexism so intractable? | In the final months of my physics degree, one of my professors asked me into his office – an exciting prospect, given that I assumed we’d be discussing subjects for my potential honours theses. He closed the door, invited me to sit, and declared he’d fallen in love. He wanted to have an affair, he said, and if I couldn... | Margaret Wertheim | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-scientific-sexism-so-intractably-resistant-to-reform | |
History | The founding moment of the United States brought a society newly freed from religion. What went wrong? | In the beginning was the thing, and the thing was against God. So might begin the gospel of American secularism. The sudden flourish of secularism at the time of the United States’ foundation is incongruous, a rogue wave of rationality in a centuries-long sea of Protestant evangelising, sectarianism and God-talk. But i... | Sam Haselby | https://aeon.co//essays/why-did-the-secular-ambitions-of-the-early-united-states-fail | |
Biology | Wolves’ howls are eerie, beautiful and wild. But what are they actually saying to each other? | As the heroes fled the dark castle for the darker woods, Count Dracula’s ‘children of the night’ began to make their ‘music’: a distant chorus of lupine howls, echoing through the Transylvanian night. I paused the movie. ‘That’s not a European wolf, the howl’s all wrong!’ I told my long-suffering companion. ‘That wolf ... | Holly Root-Gutteridge | https://aeon.co//essays/we-learn-more-about-our-language-by-listening-to-the-wolves | |
Anthropology | Ancient Babylonia’s magic bowls offer a glimpse into the society of the Talmud, and today’s shadowy antiquities market | Sometime around 650 CE, Mahdukh, daughter of Newandukh, had a headache. I first read about Mahdukh’s migraines – excruciating and debilitating – on the inside of a bowl. Her name is written in black ink among spiralling, partially faded lines of Jewish Aramaic, the language of late antique Mesopotamia’s Jews, on an ung... | Samuel Thrope | https://aeon.co//essays/what-should-be-done-with-the-magic-bowls-of-jewish-babylonia | |
Sleep and dreams | Dreams might not be omens or prophecies in a mystical sense, but they do have a distinct psychological predictive power | Perhaps the most famous dream prediction comes from the Bible. Pharaoh dreams of standing by the Nile. Seven sleek, fat cows emerge from the river, followed by seven scrawny, ugly cows that eat the plump, succulent ones. But what does it mean? There’s a pattern, isn’t there? Good is followed and overwhelmed by bad. And... | Sue Llewellyn | https://aeon.co//essays/how-dreams-predict-the-future-by-making-sense-of-the-past | |
Design and fashion | Clothes can be forms of thought as articulate as a poem or equation. Why then does philosophy like to dress them down? | Sometime in 1932, Salvador Dalí met with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. A deliciously queer photograph records them loitering together in a Parisian street, swaddled in fur coats so sumptuous that Liberace would have died of envy. Dalí’s is draped insouciantly across his shoulders like a black cape, his straggly coll... | Shahidha Bari | https://aeon.co//essays/why-does-philosophy-hold-clothes-in-such-low-regard | |
Neuroscience | Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer | No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the thin... | Robert Epstein | https://aeon.co//essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer | |
Economic history | For more than two centuries the huge profits and profound suffering of the Manila Galleons helped create global capitalism | Gemelli Careri, an Italian adventurer, circled the world in the late 17th century. No part of his journey was more dangerous than the trip from Manila to Acapulco, made in 1697 on one of the deep-drafted, many-sailed boats known as the Manila Galleons. These trading ships spent more than two centuries delivering spices... | David Z Morris | https://aeon.co//essays/the-manila-galleons-that-oceaneered-for-plague-and-profit | |
Biotechnology | Half-human soldiers, robot servants and eagle drones – the Greeks got there first. Could an AI learn from their stories? | The question of what it meant to be human obsessed the ancient Greeks. Time and again, their stories explored the promises and perils of staving off death, extending human capabilities, replicating life. The beloved myths of Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, the sorceress Medea, the engineer Daedalus, the inventor-god... | Adrienne Mayor | https://aeon.co//essays/replicants-and-robots-what-can-the-ancient-greeks-teach-us | |
War and peace | Resilience is the fashionable prescription for trauma. But bouncing back is not the only – or best – way to bear sorrow | In the Gardens of Babur in the Afghan city of Kabul stands a tree. It is now a bullet-riddled trunk in a garden originally built by the founder of the Mughal Empire. When the Taliban ruled Kabul, municipal services faltered, and the cold winters forced neighbours to cut down many of the garden’s trees for fuel. Today, ... | Samira Thomas | https://aeon.co//essays/how-patience-can-be-a-better-balm-for-trauma-than-resilience | |
Space exploration | If head-on problem-solving can’t save the Earth, maybe lateral innovation can. Will low-cost space research pave the way? | Al Gore often ends his presentations on climate change by showing a classic image of the Blue Marble – the full sunlit disk of the Earth, hanging vulnerably against the blackness of space – before adding some cautionary words: ‘Don’t let anyone tell you we can escape to Mars; we couldn’t even evacuate New Orleans. The ... | Joe Mascaro | https://aeon.co//essays/how-going-to-mars-can-pave-the-way-to-saving-the-earth | |
Neuroscience | Untold thousands of patients misdiagnosed as vegetative are actually aware. Theirs is the civil rights fight of our times | A seasoned nurse came up to me after a lecture I’d given at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She seemed shaken by my talk and I was surprised. She worked on the palliative care service, and cared for dying patients and their families with a calm that was always reassuring. So it was strange to see he... | Joseph J Fins | https://aeon.co//essays/thousands-of-patients-diagnosed-as-vegetative-are-actually-aware | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | Machines seem to be getting smarter and smarter and much better at human jobs, yet true AI is utterly implausible. Why? | Suppose you enter a dark room in an unknown building. You might panic about monsters that could be lurking in the dark. Or you could just turn on the light, to avoid bumping into furniture. The dark room is the future of artificial intelligence (AI). Unfortunately, many people believe that, as we step into the room, we... | Luciano Floridi | https://aeon.co//essays/true-ai-is-both-logically-possible-and-utterly-implausible | |
The environment | Mimic the dance between carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and you can tap into clean solar energy and ease climate change | When I think about the future of renewable energy, I picture the inner workings of a leaf – any leaf. A green plant is a remarkable solar-energy collector, effortlessly pulling sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide from the environment, and converting it into stored chemical energy. And the total amount of energy process... | Peter Forbes | https://aeon.co//essays/could-we-mimic-photosynthesis-to-tap-into-the-sun-s-energy | |
Language and linguistics | Human communication is a glorious chaos. And images, from art to emojis, sometimes say it so much better than language can | ‘If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.’ These words are attributed to the realist painter Edward Hopper. Few can paint like Hopper could, but all of us can relate to the feeling that words are sometimes not enough. Having said that, what makes images any better? Words are, after all, incredib... | Thom Scott-Phillips | https://aeon.co//essays/when-words-are-not-enough-gestures-or-images-can-say-more | |
Logic and probability | Ockham’s Razor says that simplicity is a scientific virtue, but justifying this philosophically is strangely elusive | Two of Barcelona’s architectural masterpieces are as different as different could be. The Sagrada Família, designed by Antoni Gaudí, is only a few miles from the German Pavilion, built by Mies van der Rohe. Gaudí’s church is flamboyant and complex. Mies’s pavilion is tranquil and simple. Mies, the apostle of minimalist... | Elliott Sober | https://aeon.co//essays/are-scientific-theories-really-better-when-they-are-simpler | |
Stories and literature | A gifted child, an adventure, a dark time, and then … a pivot? How Silicon Valley rewrote America’s redemption narrative | Like the great entrepreneurs who came before him, Elon Musk’s life story reads like myth. Or maybe a comic book. He was a precocious child of extreme intelligence who read the encyclopedia for fun; not surprisingly, he was picked on relentlessly. Bullies once pushed him down a flight of stairs and beat him so badly he ... | Kat McGowan | https://aeon.co//essays/how-silicon-valley-rewrote-america-s-redemption-narrative | |
History of ideas | At a time of religious zealotry, Spinoza’s fearless defence of intellectual freedom is more timely than ever | In July 1656, the 23-year-old Bento de Spinoza was excommunicated from the Portuguese-Jewish congregation of Amsterdam. It was the harshest punishment of herem (ban) ever issued by that community. The extant document, a lengthy and vitriolic diatribe, refers to the young man’s ‘abominable heresies’ and ‘monstrous deeds... | Steven Nadler | https://aeon.co//essays/at-a-time-of-zealotry-spinoza-matters-more-than-ever | |
The environment | We are quick to condemn a hunter posing with his prey, but all too slow to cultivate a chronic passion for wild things | Ten years ago this spring, in the darkness before dawn, I switched on my headlamp, dialled in my compass, and set forth into a chilly Arkansas swamp. Dressed head to toe in camouflage and lugging an arsenal of camera gear, I wandered alone that day through lowlands of oak, cypress and sycamore, through muck and icy wat... | Bryan Pfeiffer | https://aeon.co//essays/we-need-a-chronic-passion-for-nature-not-a-passing-storm | |
Stories and literature | The unfashionable world of Blyton’s school stories still has much to say about what it means to live an ethical life | Alan Bennett describes the experience perfectly: you’re halfway through a book by a long-dead stranger, and there it is: an idea or feeling ‘you had thought special and particular to you… set down by someone else … as if a hand has come out and taken yours’. I remember the first time this happened to me. Growing up as ... | Nikhil Krishnan | https://aeon.co//essays/what-enid-blyton-s-school-stories-taught-me-about-ethics | |
Physics | From past to present, into the future: the flow of time is central to human experience. Why isn’t it central to physics? | ‘What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.’ – from Confessions (397-400 CE) by Saint Augustine‘Out of fear of dying, the art of storytelling was born.’ – from Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (2009) by Eduardo GaleanoI have a memory, a vivid... | Gene Tracy | https://aeon.co//essays/why-doesn-t-physics-help-us-to-understand-the-flow-of-time | |
Death | Even without a hereafter, dying gets a bad rap. But why exactly is it no good – because of what happens, or what doesn’t? | Most of us think it’s a bad thing to die. I certainly don’t want to die any time soon, and you probably don’t either. There are, of course, exceptions. Some people actively want to die. They might be unbearably lonely, or in chronic pain, or gradually sliding into senile dementia that will destroy their intellect witho... | Eric Olson | https://aeon.co//essays/we-might-agree-that-death-is-bad-but-why-exactly | |
Information and communication | Blockchain technology will revolutionise far more than money: it will change your life. Here’s how it actually works | The impact of record-keeping on the course of history cannot be overstated. For example, the act of preserving Judaism and Christianity in written form enabled both to outlive the plethora of other contemporary religions, which were preserved only orally. William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, was sti... | Dominic Frisby | https://aeon.co//essays/how-blockchain-will-revolutionise-far-more-than-money | |
Human rights and justice | Gay liberation didn’t begin with marches and political rallies, but with a revolution in thought | The historic achievement of marriage equality in the United States last year threw the 1969 Stonewall uprising back onto the public stage. In hundreds, perhaps thousands of media reports, commentators gave the world a story of gay liberation that, more often than not, began in 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Vi... | Jim Downs | https://aeon.co//essays/the-radical-roots-of-gay-liberation-are-being-overlooked | |
Cognition and intelligence | Rousseau’s non-linear style of thought, restless spirit and chaotic mood swings also made him one of history’s greats | By the time the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau arrived in Paris, aged 30, hoping to make his name with a new system of musical transcription, he had accomplished nothing of any note. In the 15 years since fleeing his home city of Geneva – leaving friends, family and country simply to avoid a beating from the engrave... | Richard W Orange | https://aeon.co//essays/was-rousseau-s-restless-genius-a-symptom-of-adhd | |
Evolution | Male flamboyance does more than ruffle a few feathers – it helps the female choose a mate in top metabolic health | For a large part of his life, Charles Darwin didn’t like peacocks. It wasn’t their loud vocalisations – a high-pitched, piercing combo of laughter and screaming. That he could deal with. What kept him up at night was the peacocks’ tails. As he wrote to a friend in 1860, the sight of those ornate feathers made him feel ... | Alex Riley | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-the-most-flamboyant-males-have-the-evolutionary-edge | |
Religion | Christian Domestic Discipline and the erotics of religious submission raise the possibility of a new concept of God | ‘What does the Bible say about the tongue?’[Her] mind groped for the scriptures she knew by heart, but could not remember a single one.‘I… I can’t remember,’ she cried. ‘Please, I’m sorry…’ Another streak of fire lashed her bottom, causing her to scream.‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity… for he that will love ... | Tara Isabella Burton | https://aeon.co//essays/can-religious-submission-in-marriage-foster-a-new-divinity | |
The environment | Private land ownership is a beautiful dream gone badly wrong. It’s time to reinstate the forgotten ideal of the commons | My mother likes to say she was born out of the back of a ’39 Ford. She wasn’t, actually. She was born in a hospital in Chicago. But less than a year later she and her parents returned to the Montana ranch that her family had homesteaded in the early 1900s, and where they still lived. That is where my mother counts her ... | Antonia Malchik | https://aeon.co//essays/is-it-time-to-upend-the-idea-that-land-is-private-property | |
History of science | For a thrilling moment, it looked as though Joe Weber had bagged the biggest discovery in physics | In February 2016, physicists working on the LIGO experiment reported the discovery of gravitational waves, spacetime ripples predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It was instantly hailed as a sure bet for a Nobel Prize. But 47 years earlier, a now-forgotten pioneer wowed the world with exactly th... | Janna Levin | https://aeon.co//essays/how-joe-weber-s-gravity-ripples-turned-out-to-be-all-noise | |
History | In the light of the Syrian refugee crisis, how long can we cling to our traditional ideas of ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’? | On 17 October 2015, a ferry collided with a dinghy just off the coast near the Turkish port of Çanakkale. All 13 of the dinghy’s passengers drowned. They were Syrians heading for the Greek island of Lesbos, which has become the de facto gateway to the European Union for refugees from the dire Syrian civil war and the p... | Tim Whitmarsh | https://aeon.co//essays/the-boundary-between-europe-and-asia-is-a-cultural-fiction | |
Future of technology | Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance, and for most lives it is maintenance that matters more | Innovation is a dominant ideology of our era, embraced in America by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Washington DC political elite. As the pursuit of innovation has inspired technologists and capitalists, it has also provoked critics who suspect that the peddlers of innovation radically overvalue innovation. What ... | Andrew Russell & Lee Vinsel | https://aeon.co//essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more | |
Self-improvement | Why the punishment and humiliation of reality TV contestants provides such a satisfying and deep pleasure | Just as the thrum of spectators in a Roman amphitheatre must have once climbed a steady crescendo in anticipation of a beloved gladiator; as the noise in the groundlings pit of Shakespeare’s Globe must have risen in advance of the actors taking their places; or as the hordes who thronged New York’s docks begged sailors... | Batya Ungar-Sargon | https://aeon.co//essays/is-reality-tv-a-kind-of-bite-size-greek-tragedy | |
Economics | By fetishising mathematical models, economists turned economics into a highly paid pseudoscience | Since the 2008 financial crisis, colleges and universities have faced increased pressure to identify essential disciplines, and cut the rest. In 2009, Washington State University announced it would eliminate the department of theatre and dance, the department of community and rural sociology, and the German major – the... | Alan Jay Levinovitz | https://aeon.co//essays/how-economists-rode-maths-to-become-our-era-s-astrologers | |
History of ideas | Busy, distracted, inattentive? Everybody has been since at least 1710 and here are the philosophers to prove it | The rise of the internet and the widespread availability of digital technology has surrounded us with endless sources of distraction: texts, emails and Instagrams from friends, streaming music and videos, ever-changing stock quotes, news and more news. To get our work done, we could try to turn off the digital stream, ... | Frank Furedi | https://aeon.co//essays/busy-and-distracted-everybody-has-been-since-at-least-1710 | |
Quantum theory | Might nature’s bottomless pits actually be ultra-efficient quantum computers? That could explain why data never dies | After you die, your body’s atoms will disperse and find new venues, making their way into oceans, trees and other bodies. But according to the laws of quantum mechanics, all of the information about your body’s build and function will prevail. The relations between the atoms, the uncountable particulars that made you y... | Sabine Hossenfelder | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-black-hole-at-our-galaxy-s-centre-a-quantum-computer | |
Religion | With its subversive poetry, rejection of politics, and ecstatic rituals, Sufi Islam continues to surprise and to thrive | I was lying in the dust, staring into the African sun, when their swords came down on me. The crowd was about a hundred strong, all of them Muslims shouting in a sonic blur. First they began slicing my arms. Next, pulling my shirt open, they cut into my torso. My eyes were closed with pain by the time I felt a blade mo... | Nile Green | https://aeon.co//essays/sufi-islam-thrives-humorous-eloquent-and-poetic-as-ever | |
Illness and disease | It is time to disarm the military metaphor of the body as a battleground, with immune cells as the first line of defence | My whole life has been riddled with conflict. I’m caught up in a war not of my own making, and must be combat-ready at any time. Or so it seems, to my disquiet, whenever I hear about my immune system: my days appear placid, yet under the surface my body seethes with threats and counter-measures. This militarisation of ... | Jon Turney | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-should-guard-against-military-notions-of-immunity | |
Stories and literature | To the ancient Greeks, Ocean – at once a monster and a god – was what the Big Bang is to cosmologists today | Monsters were not normally welcome in ancient Greek wedding processions, especially at weddings attended mostly by the Olympian gods. Yet there he is, on an archaic mixing bowl called a dinos, painted by Sophilos around 600 BC: a horned figure, half-man half-eel, slithering along right behind a chariot that bears the v... | James Romm | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-god-ocean-filled-the-blank-between-land-and-heaven | |
Biology | Intelligence could have been moving back and forth between biological beings and machine receptacles for aeons | As a species, we humans are awfully obsessed with the future. We love to speculate about where our evolution is taking us. We try to imagine what our technology will be like decades or centuries from now. And we fantasise about encountering intelligent aliens – generally, ones who are far more advanced than we are. Lat... | Caleb Scharf | https://aeon.co//essays/intelligent-machines-might-want-to-become-biological-again | |
Social psychology | The studies just keep coming. Unconscious racism is pervasive. It starts early. And it creates a deadly empathy gap | Last spring in Madison, Wisconsin, I skipped my academic duties as a neuroscience graduate student to attend a protest demanding justice for Tony Robinson, a black 19-year-old who lived about a block away from me. Robinson was a local kid who often hung out skateboarding on Willy Street, the main drag of an especially ... | Princess Ojiaku | https://aeon.co//essays/unconscious-racism-is-pervasive-starts-early-and-can-be-deadly | |
Cosmology | Could meteorites be akin to lifeboats from other planets? Or do they reveal more about life on Earth than off it? | Scientists discovered alien life in 1961. What, you don’t remember? There was even a drawing of them in the prestigious science journal Nature. True, you might not have known that from the decorous title of the paper in which it appeared – and the aliens were disappointingly microscopic in size. But early the following... | Philip Ball | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-meteorites-tell-us-about-life-on-and-beyond-earth | |
Economic history | The Silk Road – from the Eastern Mediterranean to China’s Pacific shore – is once again the centre of the world | Successful empires and kingdoms are good at building infrastructure and sharpening the best ideas. The inscription along the magnificent colonnade above the James A Farley building in central Manhattan, the largest post office in the United States, reads: ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these c... | Peter Frankopan | https://aeon.co//essays/the-silk-road-is-once-more-the-centre-of-the-world | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | If rational persuasion fails to make people behave environmentally, could rituals and a dash of guilt do a better job? | We had expected something wilder – sillier, perhaps, with dancing and swivelling eyes. But Deva the tall, clean-shaven shaman could have passed for a web designer, if not for the drum he was beating and the fact that we were lying on the floor in a cavernous hall of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin between a stu... | Stephen Cave & Sarah Darwin | https://aeon.co//essays/rituals-and-guilt-can-these-save-environmentalism | |
Food and drink | Who should we admire more: the Michelin-starred chef with his teams and glamour, or the unsung but brilliant cook? | Tiziano Gérard might be the greatest chef you’ve never heard of. He combines the skills and repertoire acquired in the kitchens of five-star hotels in Monte Carlo, Milan and Sardinia with the traditional cuisine of the Aosta Valley in northwest Italy, where he grew up and learned to cook. Alongside his version of regio... | Julian Baggini | https://aeon.co//essays/is-success-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder-or-an-inner-feeling | |
Human rights and justice | Nonviolent politics have unique power to change the world, but they require strategic suffering and ascetic self-mastery | No political action seems to enjoy greater moral authority than the nonviolent methods Mahatma Gandhi inaugurated more than a century ago. Gandhi’s neologism for nonviolent direct action was satyagraha, which roughly translates to ‘holding fast to truth’. While this term itself never caught on, in principle or form, no... | Karuna Mantena | https://aeon.co//essays/nonviolence-has-returned-from-obscurity-to-become-a-new-force | |
Pleasure and pain | The relentless pursuit of success is valorised in our culture, but taking the long way around is often the best | On 11 October 1726, Benjamin Franklin stepped off the Berkshire and breathed in ‘the fine weather’ of Philadelphia. After spending two years in London learning the printing trade, he had crossed back over the Atlantic on a 12-week voyage that left him nauseated but craving the comforts of America. Within three years he... | Cody Delistraty | https://aeon.co//essays/the-road-to-excellence-is-paved-with-a-few-lapses-on-the-way |
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