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Wellbeing | ‘No kill’ animal shelters have unleashed an epidemic of suffering. Is a life of misery any better than a quick death? | In March 2013, my husband and I were on our way to a museum when we saw a sign advertising an adoption event at the Petco pet store on the Upper West Side in New York City. ‘Should we adopt another cat?’ my husband asked. We’d got our scaredy-cat Gilbert from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animal... | Sabine Heinlein | https://aeon.co//essays/no-kill-animal-rescue-is-a-disaster-for-animal-welfare | |
Death | With the rise of the internet has come a popular surge in people looking to be freaked out. Why? | Every day I experience a ghost. This ghost takes many different forms. Sometimes it’s a photograph uploaded to Facebook and stumbled upon at 2 or 3am, an old snapshot in which not all those photographed are still alive. At other times, the ghost is an email, a former acquaintance reaching out from beyond the grave of a... | Rhian Sasseen | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-the-internet-such-a-creepily-haunted-place | |
Travel | The Moon has always enchanted dreamers, but Apollo is a fading memory and routine lunar travel seems as remote as ever | One of the biggest thrills of my teenage life was being allowed to stay up all night to watch the Apollo 11 Moon landing (the first time I’d ever spent a whole night without going to bed). And something was very clear to me, back then on that long 1969 night: I would be going to the Moon too. Not soon, but before I die... | Brian Clegg | https://aeon.co//essays/will-we-ever-walk-again-on-the-surface-of-the-moon | |
Rituals and celebrations | Life can be a lonely journey. But at your local cigar bar, all the guys know your name – or give you a new one altogether | In New York City, smoking is banned in almost all indoor businesses. One notable exception is the cigar bar. For men, especially, these are good places to kick back and puff in company. They’re a rare sanctuary where guys can be more themselves than they are anywhere else. My brother-in-law Alan is a regular at the Cig... | Mark Teich | https://aeon.co//essays/where-a-man-can-smoke-and-relax-and-prank-his-buddies | |
Addiction | Passion stabs, unrequited love hurts and taboo desires can torment the spirit. Is it time to fix our love lives for good? | Omer Bonne means well; that much is certain. As director of psychiatry at Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Hospital, Bonne has seen patients – young men – come in again and again to treat the problem of their shameful, too-high sex drives. And Bonne has a ready solution: Prozac. Prozac is one of the antidepressants that... | Angela Chen | https://aeon.co//essays/how-far-should-medicine-go-to-cure-taboo-loves-and-desires | |
Earth science and climate | Half of the Earth’s surface and seas must be dedicated to the conservation of nature, or humanity will have no future | Unstanched haemorrhaging has only one end in all biological systems: death for an organism, extinction for a species. Researchers who study the trajectory of biodiversity loss are alarmed that, within the century, an exponentially rising extinction rate might easily wipe out most of the species still surviving at the p... | Edward O Wilson | https://aeon.co//essays/half-of-the-earth-must-be-preserved-for-nature-conservation | |
Human rights and justice | Modern feminism seeks equality with men. But in a dysfunctional society, that is nowhere near enough | In the spring of 1971, a group of 12 women moved into a brick house near Lincoln Park in Washington, DC and named themselves The Furies Collective. They were all white lesbians, under 30, most of them veterans of anti-war, Civil Rights, or community-organising movements, and they were beginning an experiment that promi... | Livia Gershon | https://aeon.co//essays/feminists-should-not-be-content-with-mere-equality | |
Philosophy of mind | Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it. We need a better way to define and test for consciousness | Usually when people imagine a self-aware machine, they picture a device that emerges through deliberate effort and that then makes its presence known quickly, loudly, and (in most scenarios) disastrously. Even if its inventors have the presence of mind not to wire it into the nuclear missile launch system, the artifici... | George Musser | https://aeon.co//essays/could-machines-have-become-self-aware-without-our-knowing-it | |
Self-improvement | Habits – good or bad – were once a matter of ethical seriousness. Are they now just another technology of self-absorption? | With metronomic regularity, new books about both the strange and the mundane things human beings do with metronomic regularity become bestsellers. The American ‘habit’ industry produces a huge popular literature examining how habits are formed and how they are broken, how they enable and how they hinder, and how they a... | Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen | https://aeon.co//essays/when-did-the-self-help-movement-lose-its-ethical-seriousness | |
Language and linguistics | What makes swear words so offensive? It’s not their meaning or even their sound. Is language itself a red herring here? | In 2012, The Sun newspaper reported that the British MP Andrew Mitchell, then a prominent member of the UK government, had called a group of police officers ‘fucking plebs’. According to that story, the police thought about arresting him, but decided against it. In the wake of ‘plebgate’ (as this incident has become kn... | Rebecca Roache | https://aeon.co//essays/where-does-swearing-get-its-power-and-how-should-we-use-it | |
Human rights and justice | Those accused of crimes are often asked to apologise, but status and prejudice may shape the impact of those apologies | In the summer of 1977, a Yale graduate named Richard Herrin bashed in the head of his sleeping ex-girlfriend Bonnie Garland because she had dumped him. Garland’s parents found her still alive, only to watch her die from her injuries in hospital. The fugitive Herrin, meanwhile, found a priest, confessed to the killing a... | Jessica Pishko | https://aeon.co//essays/the-strange-currency-of-apologies-in-criminal-justice | |
Information and communication | The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do | Over the past century, more than a few great writers have expressed concern about humanity’s future. In The Iron Heel (1908), the American writer Jack London pictured a world in which a handful of wealthy corporate titans – the ‘oligarchs’ – kept the masses at bay with a brutal combination of rewards and punishments. M... | Robert Epstein | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts | |
Public health | Parents who reject vaccination are making a rational choice – they prefer to put their children above the public good | Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. On 19 December 1984, The New York Times ran a story about parents who feared the risks of routine vaccinations. The parent quoted in the article was a lawyer who blamed vaccines for the death of his daughter. The story was framed as a conflict between parents such as him and med... | Maggie Koerth-Baker | https://aeon.co//essays/anti-vaccination-might-be-rational-but-is-it-reasonable | |
Film and visual culture | The top of the globe has always meant fantasy, myth, adventure. What explains the icy northern grip on our imagination? | The night sky pulses with colour: streaks of viridian, azure, violet and crimson vivid against the bleached land. Leviathans roam the seas, singing in haunting voices, and white bears hunt toothed whales on land and water. Giants make their homes in the mountains; elves and trolls live among the rocks. Half the year is... | E R Truitt | https://aeon.co//essays/what-lies-beneath-the-ice-of-our-fascination-with-the-north | |
Astronomy | In a white dome on a bare mountain, six of us are road-testing life in a Martian colony. This is what I’ve learned so far | I don’t quite remember what it’s like to wake up on Earth. Five months after ‘landing on Mars’, my day begins in a white dome in the middle of a red lava field, and I wonder: do we have enough power to turn on the heat? Will the weather let us suit up and check the greenhouses? Are my air fans going to work? These thou... | Sheyna Gifford | https://aeon.co//essays/what-i-ve-learned-so-far-from-living-in-a-mars-simulation | |
Travel | Sure it’s progressive to sympathise with young undocumented migrants, but it also locks them into a victimhood narrative | I had been travelling around the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca in Mexico for months, talking to returned migrants – men who spent decades in laundromats in Los Angeles or shovelling snow off the highways of Indianapolis or serving burritos to the paunchy Republicans of Cincinnati – before I wound up in the tiny mountain villa... | Sarah Menkedick | https://aeon.co//essays/young-migrants-are-individuals-above-all-else-not-victims | |
Ethics | Why, in the entire history of human life, did awesomeness become the great virtue of our age (and suckiness its vice)? | During halftime at a Celtics basketball game in 2009, the Bon Jovi song Living on a Prayer came blasting through the loudspeakers. As people relaxed in their seats, chatting, eating and drinking, the stadium’s ‘Fan Cam’ zeroed in on the audience, projecting their images onto the jumbo screen for everyone to see. Most o... | Nick Riggle | https://aeon.co//essays/how-being-awesome-became-the-great-imperative-of-our-time | |
Film and visual culture | It’s not just your imagination. Horror films are much more scary than they were in the past. Here’s how they do it | Lynne Ramsay’s film We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) is an exquisite study in fear. Based on Lionel Shriver’s novel of the same name, about a teen on a killing spree, it opens with the nightmare of his mother (Tilda Swinton) drowning in the red juices of a tomato-throwing festival; she wakes up to find her house and ... | Patricia Pisters | https://aeon.co//essays/horror-films-are-far-scarier-than-in-the-past-here-s-how | |
Art | Museums display perfect reproductions of fragile works and visitors can’t tell the difference. Is nothing in art sacred? | I have just under an hour to spare, between interviews with Austrian television and my evening talk at the Albertina Museum in Vienna on the subject of art forgery. Just enough time, I think, to see the collection for the first time. The Albertina contains much of the Habsburg family’s riches, including around 900,000 ... | Noah Charney | https://aeon.co//essays/is-there-a-place-for-fakery-in-art-galleries-and-museums | |
Fairness and equality | Wisdom from classical Greece: democracy and liberalism are both better off if we understand the difference between them | A quarter-century ago, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama announced that history had ended. The long search for the best possible political order had come to a close. Liberal democracy – defined as popular sovereignty plus individual autonomy and human rights – was the answer. Today, in an age of terrori... | Josiah Ober | https://aeon.co//essays/the-marriage-of-democracy-and-liberalism-is-not-inevitable | |
Film and visual culture | The human world has become bafflingly complex and strangely fragile making apocalypse the easiest thing to imagine | One day in the early 1980s, I was flipping through the TV channels, when I stopped at a news report. The announcer was grey-haired. His tone was urgent. His pronouncement was dire: between the war in the Middle East, famine in Africa, AIDS in the cities, and communists in Afghanistan, it was clear that the Four Horseme... | Frank Bures | https://aeon.co//essays/is-there-something-weird-about-our-taste-for-apocalypse-stories | |
Astronomy | Quantum effects are not just subatomic: they can be expressed across galaxies, and solve the puzzle of dark matter | Most of the matter in the Universe is invisible, composed of some substance that leaves no mark as it breezes through us – and through all of the detectors the scientists have created to catch it. But this dark matter might not consist of unseen particle clouds, as most theorists have assumed. Instead, it might be some... | Sabine Hossenfelder | https://aeon.co//essays/is-dark-matter-subatomic-particles-a-superfluid-or-both | |
Cognition and intelligence | My father was hopelessly, joyously addicted to gambling and I his moral critic. How did I end up playing pro blackjack? | There was a time in my life when gaming was the order and substance of my day – every day, and most nights too. I practically lived in casinos. As part of a pro blackjack team who shared lodgings and ate meals together, like family, I pursued an itinerant loop that took in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, London, Strasbourg, ... | Marina Benjamin | https://aeon.co//essays/is-gambling-a-kind-of-play-or-a-narcotic-trap-for-the-soul | |
Deep time | Dinosaur collecting isn’t just for museums any more – film stars and sheikhs do it too. What drives a man to covet big bones? | The world’s most famous palaeontologist doesn’t understand why anyone wants to collect dinosaurs. Mark Norell sits across from me in his expansive corner office at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and launches right in: ‘People are weird. I think: “Who is buying this shit?” No accounting for peop... | Laurie Gwen Shapiro | https://aeon.co//essays/what-drives-dinosaur-collectors-to-covet-big-bones | |
Childhood and adolescence | Parents expect to know everything about their children’s lives. They need to remember that secrets are part of growing up | At the heart of The Secret Garden, the much-loved children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, in which a disagreeable orphan is transformed into a flourishing young girl, lies the protective power of secrecy. In finding a garden that has been forgotten, which is overgrown and hidden, Mary finds an echo of her own negl... | Tiffany Jenkins | https://aeon.co//essays/we-ve-forgotten-how-to-give-children-the-space-to-have-secrets | |
History | Two centuries ago, public armies replaced private ones as the dominant tool of warfare. Now, private armies are back | It is a familiar story. A superpower goes to war and faces a stronger-than-expected insurgency in distant lands, yet has insufficient forces to counter it because of political and military constraints. The superpower decides to hire contractors, some of whom are armed, to support its war effort. The armed contractors p... | Sean McFate | https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-the-return-of-mercenary-armies-mean-for-the-world | |
Cities | The utopian workplace is here, complete with roof gardens, therapists and time to nap. Can the employee ever escape? | Few companies could announce a new office in the messianic way that Google did last February. Then again, few companies have ever built this sort of office. ‘Google’s presence in Mountain View is simply so strong that it can’t be the fortress that shuts away… the neighbours. It really needs to become a neighbourhood in... | Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-utopian-workplace-just-a-ploy-to-keep-us-all-at-work | |
Biography and memoir | Hot and bothersome or exhilarating and wild: winds blow through the mind as strongly as they blow through the landscape | Every time strong southwesterlies blew across the Shetland Islands, my wooden house shook and the windows buckled. When a big gale was forecast, everything was tied down, salt-laden spray filled the air, and white horses reared up and thrashed around on the navy sea. Some storms plucked slates from roofs and embedded t... | Karen Emslie | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-wind-blows-us-on-and-off-life-s-course | |
Ageing and death | Who better to answer questions about the purpose of life than someone who has been living theirs for a long time? | Ten years ago, I reached a point in my career that felt either like a dead-end or a turning point – I wasn’t sure which. By then, I had spent 25 years as a gerontologist, professionally occupied with everything to do with ageing. I conducted research using longitudinal data sets and sophisticated statistical analyses. ... | Karl Pillemer | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-should-all-ask-our-elders-about-how-best-to-live | |
Mood and emotion | Hunger isn’t in your stomach or your blood-sugar levels. It’s in your mind – and that’s where we need to shape up | I decided to take a try at the great problem of our time: how to lose weight without any effort. So I did an experiment on myself. I was ripe for it, if truth be told. Here I am eight months later and 50 pounds lighter, so something must have worked. My approach to the problem was different from the usual perspective. ... | Michael Graziano | https://aeon.co//essays/hunger-is-psychological-and-dieting-only-makes-it-worse | |
Cosmology | Space is for sale. And if we want to get serious about our interplanetary ambitions, that could be a good thing | This is my lunar acre. There are many like it, billions, but this one is mine. At least, it could be for a modest fee: a steal at $19.95 through Cosmic Registry, $19.99 through Lunar Embassy, or ‘prices to fit any budget’ through Lunar Registry, depending on the quality of the neighbourhood. Going by the health of the ... | Grayson Clary | https://aeon.co//essays/it-s-time-to-claim-your-piece-of-the-final-frontier | |
Cognition and intelligence | A hidden sense of smell might account for the mysterious sixth sense and a universe of subtle knowledge about the world | Noam Sobel can’t stop watching you sniff your hands. In public, he sees people doing it everywhere. Here a man is leaning on one elbow, his palm covering his nose. Over there someone is playing with her upper lip, her fingers hovering just below her nostrils. Maybe you’re doing it right now. Don’t be embarrassed. We hu... | Elizabeth Preston | https://aeon.co//essays/how-our-sense-of-smell-works-as-a-mysterious-sixth-sense | |
Philosophy of religion | Prayer occurs in many faiths. It stays recognisable despite its varied forms. It must be good for something – but what? | ‘Gods change up in heaven, gods get replaced, prayers are here to stay.’ So wrote the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Anyone not sharing his conviction might consider a visit to the Blue Lotus Buddhist temple in Woodstock, Illinois. There, in a converted church, worshippers take their places between a massive new sta... | Benjamin Dueholm | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-prayer-supposed-to-accomplish | |
Biology | To figure out the origin of life might take a conceptual shift towards seeing it as a pattern of molecular energy | Mike Russell found his moment of inspiration on a warm spring evening in Glasgow in 1983, when his 11-year-old son broke a new toy. The toy in question was a chemical garden, a small plastic tank in which stalagmite-like tendrils grew out of seed crystals placed in a mineral solution. Although the tendrils appeared sol... | Tim Requarth | https://aeon.co//essays/why-life-is-not-a-thing-but-a-restless-manner-of-being | |
Gender and identity | Some paedophiles might be hard-wired to commit their abusive acts. Should that alter their crime in the eyes of the law? | A 29-year-old man named Juan Carlos Castillo Ponce was renting a basement apartment in the New Jersey city of Elizabeth when he befriended his landlord’s daughters, who were aged three, six and 10. While he lived there between 2000 to 2008, he would take the girls out to dinner, and became a trusted friend of the famil... | Caren Chesler | https://aeon.co//essays/if-paedophilia-is-a-compulsion-is-imprisonment-the-solution | |
Stories and literature | What’s more wholesome than reading? Yet books wield a dangerous power: the best erode self, infecting readers with ideas | Reading novels is good for you. This is the current wisdom, at least. A 2013 study by the New School for Social Research in New York City attempted to prove that reading passages by Don DeLillo and Lydia Davis had an immediate impact on participants’ ability to identify the emotions of others. Another, at Emory Univers... | Tara Isabella Burton | https://aeon.co//essays/how-books-can-sap-the-soul-and-poison-readers-with-ideas | |
Philosophy of science | Great theories can spend decades waiting for verification. Failed theories do too. Is there any way to tell them apart? | No-shows are a commonplace, though often hidden, part of the process of scientific discovery. Theories predict. That’s their job. Ever since Isaac Newton and his co‑conspirators in the 17th century consummated their revolutionary programme of subjecting nature to mathematics, this has come to mean that particular solut... | Thomas Levenson | https://aeon.co//essays/when-does-science-finally-take-no-for-an-answer | |
Demography and migration | ‘Roots’ sparked an African-American quest for identity through family history. Does DNA finally provide firm grounds? | The appeal of genetic ancestry testing cannot be understood without also understanding the backdrop of the specific example of Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976). Now known to be fiction based on fact, Roots was published in the 200th year of the United States to great fanfare and with tremendous... | Alondra Nelson | https://aeon.co//essays/from-roots-to-dna-kits-the-quest-for-african-american-identity | |
Meaning and the good life | Your decision about whether to procreate is serious. That makes it philosophy’s business, alarming as that might sound | Many people want to have children. But they might wonder: is it ethical to bring a child into this broken world, where she might suffer – and partake in – various harms and injustices? Others prefer not to have children. This choice also raises ethical qualms: is it ‘selfish’ to refrain from procreating? Are non-parent... | Richard Chappell | https://aeon.co//essays/do-people-have-a-moral-duty-to-have-children-if-they-can | |
History of ideas | For most of human history, the stars told us where we were in space and time. Have we forgotten how to look up? | When all the stars were ready to be placed in the sky, First Woman said: I will write the laws that are to govern mankind for all time. These laws cannot be written on the water as that is always changing its form, nor can they be written in the sand as the wind would soon erase them, but if they are written in the st... | Gene Tracy | https://aeon.co//essays/what-have-we-lost-now-we-can-no-longer-read-the-sky | |
Political philosophy | Edmund Burke’s support for the American Revolution, and opposition to the French, have been misunderstood | Edmund Burke, one of the great statesmen and philosophers of the 18th century, is the founder of modern conservatism. Or so it is commonly held: authorities, from Corey Robin on the left to Niall Ferguson on the right, agree that conservative ideology can be traced to this original source. The view has in fact been com... | Richard Bourke | https://aeon.co//essays/conservatives-cant-claim-edmund-burke-as-one-of-their-own | |
Philosophy of science | Is cold fusion truly impossible, or is it just that no respectable scientist can risk their reputation working on it? | A few years ago, a physicist friend of mine made a joke on Facebook about the laws of physics being broken in Italy. He had two pieces of news in mind. One was a claim by a team at the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) in Gran Sasso, who said they’d discovered superluminal neutrinos. The othe... | Huw Price | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-scientists-dismiss-the-possibility-of-cold-fusion | |
Bioethics | Labelling someone crazy and difficult is a way to resist justice and change – and psychiatrists are complicit | The nightmare started with a piece of toast. As a patient at an eating-disorder treatment centre, Holly was required to finish everything on her plate or drink a high-calorie liquid supplement. Already uncomfortably full after eating everything else, she couldn’t finish the slice of toast. A nurse reminded her of the r... | Carrie Arnold | https://aeon.co//essays/we-should-listen-to-the-defiant-not-diagnose-and-medicate-them | |
Education | Professors worry about the ‘crisis in the humanities’. But more people than ever, especially women, are studying them | The humanities are in crisis. It’s become orthodoxy. In fact, so much attention has been paid to the ‘crisis of the humanities’ that few have stopped to ask if there actually is such a crisis. Over just the past few generations, enormous changes have transformed higher education. These changes have brought a greater pr... | Peter Mandler | https://aeon.co//essays/the-humanities-are-booming-only-the-professors-can-t-see-it | |
Values and beliefs | All world-altering revolutions are born in danger and death, brotherhood and joy. How can this one be stopped? | ‘Virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue…’Maximilien Robespierre, On the Principles of Political Morality (1794) As pundits and politicians stoked the recent shootings in Californi... | Scott Atran | https://aeon.co//essays/why-isis-has-the-potential-to-be-a-world-altering-revolution | |
Progress and modernity | Has money really changed from shells to digital apps? Underneath, money is always a token of our social relations | From ApplePay to Bitcoin or Kenya’s famous M-Pesa mobile money system, digital payment systems are proliferating at a pace never before seen. People are predicting the end of cash and coin. And many promoters and start-ups in payments pitch their service as the next stage – even the final pinnacle! – in the evolution o... | Bill Maurer | https://aeon.co//essays/how-money-evolved-from-shells-and-coins-to-apps-and-bitcoin | |
Rituals and celebrations | Every human culture has used masks for ritual disinhibition, shaming and play. Is being online the ultimate masquerade? | It is an acknowledged fact of modern life that the internet brings out the worst in people. Otherwise law-abiding citizens pilfer films and music. Eminent authors create ‘sock puppets’ to anonymously praise their own work and denigrate that of rivals. Teenagers use the internet for bullying; even more disturbingly, gro... | Sandra Newman | https://aeon.co//essays/how-masks-explain-the-psychology-behind-online-harassment | |
Language and linguistics | Orwell taught us to fear technocratic jargon that doesn’t let us say what we mean. But that is language at its best | Everyone remembers Newspeak, the straitjacketed version of English from George Orwell’s novel 1984 (1949). In that dystopia, Newspeak was a language designed by ideological technicians to make politically incorrect thoughts literally inexpressible. Fewer people know that Orwell also worried about the poverty of our ord... | Elijah Millgram | https://aeon.co//essays/orwell-was-wrong-doublethink-is-as-clear-as-language-gets | |
History of ideas | Whether to kill baby Hitler might be a political firecracker, but can counterfactuals say anything deeper about the past? | What if Adolf Hitler’s paintings had been acclaimed, rather than met with faint praise, and he had gone into art instead of politics? Have you ever wondered whether John F Kennedy would have such a shining reputation if he had survived his assassination and been elected to a second term? Or how the United States might ... | Rebecca Onion | https://aeon.co//essays/what-if-historians-started-taking-the-what-if-seriously | |
War and peace | In a national act of redemption, Rwanda aims to embrace 30,000 perpetrators of mass ethnic slaughter now returning home | The meeting hall at Gasabo Prison is a vast space, built to hold hundreds, with brick walls, a metal roof, and a view of green hills through barred windows. But on this May afternoon, the only occupants were 20 génocidaires and a handful of visitors, packed into a circle of chairs and benches. The inmates’ heads were s... | Kenneth Miller | https://aeon.co//essays/can-rwanda-s-genocide-perpetrators-find-a-path-to-forgiveness | |
Poverty and development | The age of austerity has transformed work, but what it means to be a man has not caught up | When Gary Gilbert lost his job, it was devastating. A tradesman, he had joined his employer’s company only because he thought it offered a bit more security than endlessly chasing the next gig as a freelance operator, and that he could then provide a better future for his son. The layoff came without warning. ‘I was cr... | Allison J Pugh | https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-man-in-the-age-of-austerity | |
Sex and sexuality | Female sex drive has plummeted in our stressed-out world, but can we fix an epidemic of lost desire with drugs? | In the drawer of her bedside table, Julie maintains an archive of lust. Here are the naked Polaroids she slipped in between her husband’s business papers, explicit notes once left on mirrors, Anaïs Nin, a riding crop. Come evening, Julie used to watch her husband’s movements from across the room, eager for the moment w... | Katherine Rowland | https://aeon.co//essays/can-women-s-lost-libido-be-fixed-with-mere-drugs | |
Neuroscience | How exactly did consciousness become a problem? And why, after years off the table, is it a hot research subject now? | Growing up in Australia, I loved to lie on the grass, immersed in the scent of wattles, and stare up at the sky. A sky like no other; a deeper, richer shade of blue than anywhere else I have been – and I’ve travelled on all seven continents, including Antarctica. Australians speculate that the colour of our sky results... | Margaret Wertheim | https://aeon.co//essays/how-and-why-exactly-did-consciousness-become-a-problem | |
History of science | The aquarium was once the best way to encounter the wonders of sea life. It has become a mere travesty, tacky and cruel | The deeply religious 19th-century English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse was not the first person to experiment with fish in receptacles or tanks. Ornamental fishkeeping was an ancient practice. Bowls – first made from porcelain, then glass – had been popular for centuries, but they didn’t have plants to supply oxygen, ... | Bernd Brunner | https://aeon.co//essays/why-it-s-time-to-put-an-end-to-the-cult-of-the-aquarium | |
Illness and disease | Stem cell therapies for the scourges of old age are on the near horizon. Will they come in time for the Baby Boomers? | I watched both my parents disappear into the sinkhole of dementia before their deaths. Their once-expansive lives were gradually diminished by their growing frailty until all that remained was a tiny room in a nursing home or assisted‑living facility, a lifetime of possessions whittled down to a few photographs and kee... | Linda Marsa | https://aeon.co//essays/will-stem-cell-grafts-offer-chicken-soup-for-the-ageing-brain | |
Family life | ‘Take a photo of the spread,’ my mother says. ‘This way you can remember what to arrange when I’m dead.’ | ‘This is where Bing Crosby’s buried,’ says my mom from the front seat of my middle aunt’s car. Mother is feeling triumphant because she’s conned me into a twofer. I’d been guilt-tripped into attending Catholic mass and now we were on our way to visit her parents’ gravesites. I should have brought my own car — a Corolla... | Mary H K Choi | https://aeon.co//essays/is-dining-al-fresco-among-tombstones-an-asian-thing | |
Human rights and justice | Calling for secular reform in Pakistan’s politics earned me the enmity of the political Islamists, who tried to kill me | It was a November night in Islamabad, not too different from that evening when the assassins came for me. The two nights are inseparable in my memory. A little after midnight, I had walked out of the television studios after a current affairs live show. Each night my loquacious co-host, a good-humoured producer and his... | Raza Rumi | https://aeon.co//essays/pakistan-s-political-islamists-tried-to-kill-me | |
Information and communication | Websites and apps are designed for compulsion, even addiction. Should the net be regulated like drugs or casinos? | When I go online, I feel like one of B F Skinner’s white Carneaux pigeons. Those pigeons spent the pivotal hours of their lives in boxes, obsessively pecking small pieces of Plexiglas. In doing so, they helped Skinner, a psychology researcher at Harvard, map certain behavioural principles that apply, with eerie precisi... | Michael Schulson | https://aeon.co//essays/if-the-internet-is-addictive-why-don-t-we-regulate-it | |
Mood and emotion | An ordinary person becomes a torturer with surprising ease. The hard part comes when it’s time to be human again | Most people assume that torturing another human being is something only a minority are capable of doing. Waterboarding requires the use of physical restraints – perhaps only after a physical struggle – unless the captive willingly submits to the process. Slapping or hitting another person, imposing extremes of temperat... | Shane O’Mara | https://aeon.co//essays/an-ordinary-person-becomes-a-torturer-with-surprising-ease | |
Subcultures | The Amish are online, onscreen, and multiplying fast. In their battle with modernity, it’s tough to say who’s winning | The first time I met an Amish person I was a teenager. It was 1985, and my family had recently moved back to Ohio from a stint in the United Arab Emirates. Life overseas had given me a hunger to know about other cultures, and also the Harrison Ford movie Witness had just come out. So when my family encountered a bearde... | Kevin Williams | https://aeon.co//essays/is-it-ok-for-the-amish-to-run-etsy-stores | |
Rituals and celebrations | Live-action role-play is venturing into some weighty social topics. Can make-believe really show us possible worlds? | One Sunday evening recently, I went to a stranger’s apartment for my first ‘larp’ (live‑action role-play). I was ushered into the living room, where I found three makeshift tents, reminiscent of forts I used to make as a child. Other props – trail snacks, water bottles, hiking gear – littered the floor. It was a little... | Alexa Clay | https://aeon.co//essays/can-live-action-role-play-games-bring-about-social-change | |
Genetics | The long and peculiar history of the designer human, from Plato’s citizen breeders to Nobel sperm banks and beyond | For centuries, human hereditary improvement was a problem in social, not biological, engineering: how to persuade or coerce people into marrying to benefit the population as a whole. The obvious analogy was to agriculture and animal husbandry. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates says that only the best citizens would be allo... | Nathaniel Comfort | https://aeon.co//essays/the-dream-of-designing-humans-has-a-long-and-peculiar-history | |
Mood and emotion | Self-help books might have a reputation for nonsense but the best of them are more effective than medication or therapy | Most people enter the self-help realm while planning a personal improvement project, a kind of steam-cleaning of the soul. I fell into it by mistake. Maybe the allusion to a familiar poem was what made me pull M Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled (1978) off my parents’ shelf as a young teen. In any case, I was hooked... | Elizabeth Svoboda | https://aeon.co//essays/can-self-help-books-be-better-than-medication-or-therapy | |
Language and linguistics | No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language | English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spellin... | John McWhorter | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages | |
Music | We use neat stories to explain everything from sports matches to symphonies. Is it time to leave the nursery of the mind? | It’s a movie classic. The lovers are out for a walk when a villain dashes out of his house and starts fighting the man. The woman takes refuge in the house; having seen off his rival, the villain re-enters and chases after her. Yet the hero returns, pulling open the door so that the heroine can escape. The villain chas... | Philip Ball | https://aeon.co//essays/why-story-is-used-to-explain-symphonies-and-sport-matches-alike | |
Bioethics | Parents already put their children under intense pressure to compete in the world. Will gene editing make it worse? | When the international project to sequence the human genome started in 1990, nearly everybody agreed: to use genetics to control the shape of future generations would be to engage in eugenics, something so self-evidently bad that nobody needed to say why. Nearly everybody agreed that the knowledge gleaned from the proj... | Erik Parens | https://aeon.co//essays/can-parents-be-trusted-with-gene-editing-technology | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Local and organic is a romantic myth – the future of sustainable agriculture is all about smart technology and scaling up | The tomato is one of our lovelier foods; juicy icon of the good life. There’s almost nothing better than buying fresh tomatoes on a Saturday morning, bringing them home to your kitchen, washing them carefully, slicing them, admiring their shiny interiors with the miraculous seeds inside, adding a few drops of green, vi... | Louise O Fresco | https://aeon.co//essays/is-sustainability-sold-at-supermarkets-or-farmers-markets | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Once oases supported human evolution. Now, our addiction to fountains, pools and palms threatens our survival | Seen from the air, the single verdant parcel of land with its straight borders and sharp edges resembles a green postage stamp pasted on a great expanse of manila envelope. Inside the boundary, a screen of trees hides a palatial estate, acres of emerald turf, a paved circular driveway, and an extensive array of tumblin... | Rebecca Lawton | https://aeon.co//essays/palm-trees-amid-the-sand-the-origins-of-the-oasis-fantasy | |
History | Contagion, poison and trigger. The idea that books are dangerous has a long history, and holds a kernel of truth | At universities around the world, students are claiming that reading books can unsettle them to the point of becoming depressed, traumatised or even suicidal. Some contend that Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), in which a suicide has taken place, could trigger suicidal thoughts among those disposed to self-ha... | Frank Furedi | https://aeon.co//essays/contagion-poison-trigger-books-have-always-been-dangerous | |
History | The Arab Spring was two centuries in the making. But is the Egyptian revolution any closer to ending the state’s tyranny? | This is an historical perspective on the Arab Spring – particularly in Egypt, but generalisable to some extent to other Arab countries – from a historian by education and practice. A peculiar personal experience drew me from being another Egyptian protesting in Tahrir Square in Cairo to the state historian of the Egypt... | Khaled Fahmy | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-egyptian-revolution-began-and-where-it-might-end | |
History | From bison-hunting tribes on the Great Plains to RV retirees in Arizona, wanderlust runs through all America’s nomads | On visiting the United States, the Tibetan dignitary T T Karma Chophel met with a group of supporters in Utah. He was there to discuss democracy, but his gaze kept travelling out across the high desert to the snowy mountains on the horizon. He thought of yaks and yak-herders, making their endless migrations across a si... | Richard Grant | https://aeon.co//essays/wanderlust-runs-in-american-veins-from-comanche-to-retiree | |
Genetics | In gene editing, the genetic code now has a workable text editor. Will this mean Ctrl+X for disease and Ctrl+V for talent? | Imagine if living things were as easy to modify as computer software. In such a world, farm animals or plants could be engineered to produce leaner meat or juicier fruit, or to withstand extremes of climate. Medical research would be transformed: we could generate mutant animals to model human disease, or engineer plan... | John Parrington | https://aeon.co//essays/we-now-have-a-good-text-editor-for-your-genetic-code | |
Gender | Caitlyn Jenner identifies as a woman, Rachel Dolezal as black. Why should one be legitimate and the other condemned? | Alice, the heroine of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871), has many extraordinary encounters, but the one that’s always stuck with me is her meeting with Humpty Dumpty, an egg-shaped being, balanced on a wall. He is annoyed when Alice calls him an egg, he tells her she should stop growing, and they end by ... | Katharine Quarmby | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-it-legitimate-to-change-genders-but-not-ethnicity | |
Biology | Science is not a ‘body of knowledge’ – it’s a dynamic, ongoing reconfiguration of knowledge and must be free to change | Coming from a scientist, this sounds smug, but here it is: science is one of humanity’s most noble and successful endeavours, and our best way to learn how the world works. We know more than ever about our own bodies, the biosphere, the planet and even the cosmos. We take pictures of Pluto, unravel quantum mechanics, s... | David P Barash | https://aeon.co//essays/science-needs-the-freedom-to-constantly-change-its-mind | |
Demography and migration | I mourn my beloved uncle’s death in Ethiopia as I mourn my exile. I cannot bury him, but can I bury my loss? | For many recent immigrants, the telephone line remains the most vital link to home. The phone offers a respite from isolation, but is also the harbinger of ominous news. After a while, the phone call from ‘back home’ is typically either about a death in the family or a request for money. Every immigrant dreads both cal... | Mohammed Ademo | https://aeon.co//essays/when-that-terrible-call-arrives-how-to-grieve-so-far-from-home | |
Public health | A critical mass of medical knowledge could soon end the death threat of cancer, but politics stands in the way | Six years ago, I (Vincent) was diagnosed with life-threatening prostate cancer that would have killed most men. I survived because I was able to call on colleagues to deliver aggressive surgery outside the standard of care (hormone therapy) for my type of disease. Without a doubt, the operation saved my life. What happ... | Vincent DeVita & Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn | https://aeon.co//essays/why-are-people-still-dying-of-cancer | |
Gender and identity | Love in the West is consumerist – we choose a partner to give us what we think we need. But Russians do things differently | In 1996 I left Russia for the first time to spend a school year in the United States. It was a prestigious scholarship; I was 16 and my parents were very excited about the possibility of my somehow slipping into Yale or Harvard afterwards. I, however, could think of only one thing: getting an American boyfriend. In my ... | Polina Aronson | https://aeon.co//essays/russia-against-the-western-way-of-love | |
Death | Writing my father’s epitaph, I realised love of food trumped love of grandchildren – should his headstone reflect that? | When my father died last November, I was surprised to learn he’d asked to be cremated, and even more so that the plan was to bury his ashes under a tree. He had liked to talk about ‘leaving your mark’, and though he didn’t mean to leave it literally on a grave, for me it seemed necessary. Although neither burial nor st... | Todd Pitock | https://aeon.co//essays/does-an-epitaph-really-matter-when-the-dead-can-t-read-it | |
Cognition and intelligence | Like IQ or EQ, there should be FQ: a freedom quotient to show how much free will we have – and how to get more | The cat is crouched low to the ground, whiskers brushing grass. It inches forward in minute movements, eyes drilling towards two sparrows just ahead. It tenses, set to spring. The birds prance like sparring boxers, unaware. But then the cat’s muscles relax. The moment wasn’t quite right – something in the angle or the ... | Stephen Cave | https://aeon.co//essays/free-will-is-back-and-maybe-this-time-we-can-measure-it | |
History of technology | For centuries, the powerful would never hold anything useful for themselves. How did devices become universal luxuries? | Behold Shalmaneser III. The neo-Assyrian ruler lords it over everyone else on the Black Obelisk made in 825 BCE in his honour, now in the British Museum. Two servants or slaves attend him, each holding items for his convenience, with a parasol extended over him. Shalmaneser is not comparably encumbered. He surveys adva... | Joyce E Chaplin | https://aeon.co//essays/where-did-our-passion-for-the-handheld-device-originate | |
Biology | How a 500-year experiment to revive dormant microbes could reveal the secrets to cheating time | Suppose you wanted to preserve a room completely unchanged. Picture an Egyptian tomb, or perhaps a storage vault for fragile artefacts. Suppose that your maintenance budget is effectively zero. How should you arrange things? Is it better to seal up your chamber against every possible disturbance? Or perhaps you make a ... | Alex Riley | https://aeon.co//essays/how-microbes-live-for-centuries-by-shutting-down | |
Consciousness and altered states | Scientific research says it’s safer to drive high than straight, right? Wrong. Here are the phantom studies to (un)prove it | People get stoned in cars. People get fried at home before driving off on epic quests for gas‑station goodies. Because marijuana smells and frequently induces paranoia, users – especially young ones with potentially prying parents – often like to smoke in seclusion. Where I grew up, that meant escaping the post-industr... | Lee Vinsel | https://aeon.co//essays/science-shows-it-s-safer-to-drive-high-than-straight-right | |
Childhood and adolescence | I am an atheist, and suspicious of sugar-coated evasions. So how can I explain death to my son without fudging the truth? | I have a good arsenal of strategies to dip into when my five-year-old son tells me: ‘Dad, I don’t want to have a bath’ or ‘Dad, I don’t want to go to school’. In fact, it feels like the past few years have been a schooling in communications and sales strategy, for a particularly difficult customer. But when he told me ... | Cormac James | https://aeon.co//essays/how-do-i-explain-death-honestly-to-my-five-year-old-son | |
Illness and disease | Most of our organs can be treated as repairable machines. Why can’t we treat mental illness by simply fixing the brain? | Our understanding and treatment of mental disorders is primitive. Why is that? The burden on our society is huge. A quarter of women will have an episode of depression at some stage in their lives (it’s about half that for men). Most will never reach a doctor or be diagnosed. About 40 per cent of those who do won’t res... | Joe Herbert | https://aeon.co//essays/why-can-t-we-treat-mental-illness-by-fixing-the-brain | |
Art | Michelangelo and Raphael; Leibniz and Newton; Constable and Turner. Does every creative genius need a bitter rival? | On 25 May 1832, John Constable was busy adding the final touches to his masterpiece, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge. One of England’s greatest 19th-century landscape artists, he had been working on the painting for more than 10 years and was finally set to reveal it to the world the next day, at the opening of the Roya... | Jacob Burak | https://aeon.co//essays/does-every-creative-genius-need-a-bitter-rival | |
Gender | Female thrill-killers are rare in crime fiction. Why is it hard to imagine a woman who murders for pleasure not revenge? | As a crime writer, I think a lot about violence – and I get quizzed about it at literary events and festivals in a way that my male colleagues don’t. One question that comes up often is: have you considered creating a female thrill-killer? That is, a female perpetrator who kills for pleasure rather than in revenge or s... | Melanie McGrath | https://aeon.co//essays/why-are-so-few-crime-novels-about-female-thrill-killers | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Devastated by years of drought, California farmers hire dowsers to locate their water, exposing the power of belief | The highway to Oroville, a small town in California’s Central Valley, runs into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. As the road and the temperature climb, the neon lights of the valley’s box stores give way to orchards. Before the weather changed, this was a good place for fruit. Along the highway, hand-painted posters... | Lois Parshley | https://aeon.co//essays/why-dowsing-for-water-is-a-test-of-faith-and-of-science | |
Consciousness and altered states | New evidence suggests that we can learn while we sleep, but do we really want to put our hours of rest to work? | Whenever I travel abroad, I like to arrive with a few phrases in the local tongue. Fluency is another matter. The son of a language teacher, I learned French as a boy. I picked up Spanish during a ramble through Mexico in my 20s. Since then, I’ve been busy. Despite a lifelong yearning for Italian, I reached middle age ... | Kenneth Miller | https://aeon.co//essays/if-we-can-learn-while-asleep-when-will-we-ever-switch-off | |
Stories and literature | Digital books stagnate in closed, dull systems, while printed books are shareable, lovely and enduring. What comes next? | From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. You could call my four years of devout screen‑reading an experiment. I felt a duty – not to anyone or anything specifically, but more vaguely to the idea of ‘books’. I wanted to understand how their boundaries were changing and being affected... | Craig Mod | https://aeon.co//essays/stagnant-and-dull-can-digital-books-ever-replace-print | |
History | Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor had a radical vision for the world: decolonisation without national independence | In October 1945, the United Nations began its official existence when the five permanent members of the new Security Council and a majority of other signatories ratified the Charter. That same month, Aimé Césaire, from colonial Martinique, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, from colonial Senegal, were elected as deputies to a ... | Gary Wilder | https://aeon.co//essays/how-cesaire-and-senghor-saw-the-decolonised-world | |
Film and visual culture | The golden age of TV drama raises some big questions about work and the meaning of life | ‘This is supposed to be about my job, not the meaning of life,’ says Peggy to Don toward the end of the US TV series Mad Men. Don has been gathering ideas for a speech to the McCann Erickson advertising agency that he says has to be visionary, like the Gettysburg Address. Peggy tries to bring him down to earth. Remembe... | Bruce Robbins | https://aeon.co//essays/how-tv-makes-us-think-about-our-jobs | |
Gender | Readers of romance fiction enjoy tales of alpha males and forced seduction. Could they still be considered feminists? | Vivienne Charles has a problem: the heroine of Lilah Pace’s erotic romance Asking for It (2015) can experience sexual satisfaction only if she imagines herself being raped, which causes her endless shame. Enter the rugged, mysterious Jonah Marks, who ‘looks as though someone took the macho ideal of a masculine form and... | Batya Ungar-Sargon | https://aeon.co//essays/can-you-enjoy-romance-fiction-and-be-a-feminist | |
Information and communication | When no ancient chat or post is beyond the grasp of Google, what matters more: the right to forget, or to be remembered? | An eBay commercial from 2004 opens with a ginger-haired little boy losing his toy sail boat to the tides of the Atlantic at Cape Cod in 1972. Viewers follow the boat out to sea where it faces harsh winds and a terrible storm that sends the boat to the ocean floor, presumably forever. The ad cuts to years later when the... | Alana Massey | https://aeon.co//essays/do-i-really-want-the-net-to-forget-my-teenage-self | |
Cosmopolitanism | With its revolutionary heat and rational cool, French thought once dazzled the world. Where did it all go wrong? | There are many things we have come to regard as quintessentially French: Coco Chanel’s little black dress, the love of fine wines and gastronomy, the paintings of Auguste Renoir, the smell of burnt rubber in the Paris Métro. Equally distinctive is the French mode and style of thinking, which the Irish political philoso... | Sudhir Hazareesingh | https://aeon.co//essays/french-thought-once-dazzled-the-world-what-went-wrong | |
Economics | Long in retreat in the US, the welfare state found a haven in an unlikely place – the military, where it thrived for decades | Over the past four decades in the United States, as the country has slashed its welfare state and employers gutted traditional job benefits, growing numbers of people, especially from the working class, grasped for a new safety net – the military. Everyone recognises that the US armed forces have become a global coloss... | Jennifer Mittelstadt | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-us-military-became-a-welfare-state | |
Deep time | Light travels at around 300,000 km per second. Why not faster? Why not slower? A new theory inches us closer to an answer | If you visit the Paris Observatory on the left bank of the Seine, you’ll see a plaque on its wall announcing that the speed of light was first measured there in 1676. The odd thing is, this result came about unintentionally. Ole Rømer, a Dane who was working as an assistant to the Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico C... | Sidney Perkowitz | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-the-speed-of-light-the-speed-of-light | |
Economics | Why is the welfare state under attack when happiness economics shows it is the system most conducive to human wellbeing? | Most of us are Stoics. We think that happiness is something that individuals find for themselves: the key is to work hard for a good life, and to face adversity with defiance. This ‘rugged individualism’ might fit the American ethos, but it is at odds with a growing body of empirical research that shows that some kinds... | Benjamin Radcliff | https://aeon.co//essays/which-political-system-does-happiness-economics-support | |
Mental health | Hallucinated voices can be helpful life guides, muses of creativity, and powerful agents for healing the fractured self | Rosie’s marriage did not last long. But many months after she returned to her parents’ cottage on a south Indian tea estate, her husband’s voice rattled around her head like a vengeful earworm, berating her for her dark skin and overall worthlessness. One day, another voice spoke up. It was gravelly and hoarse, like a ... | Shruti Ravindran | https://aeon.co//essays/should-hallucinatory-voices-be-ignored-or-befriended | |
Palaeontology | Paleogenetics is helping to solve the great mystery of prehistory: how did humans spread out over the earth? | Most of human history is prehistory. Of the 200,000 or more years that humans have spent on Earth, only a tiny fraction have been recorded in writing. Even in our own little sliver of geologic time, the 12,000 years of the Holocene, whose warm weather and relatively stable climate incubated the birth of agriculture, ci... | Jacob Mikanowski | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-paleogenetics-tell-us-about-our-earliest-ancestors | |
Information and communication | Human genomics is just the start: the Earth has 50 billion tons of DNA. What happens when we have the entire biocode? | In case you weren’t paying attention, a lot has been happening in the science of genomics over the past few years. It is, for example, now possible to read one human genome and correct all known errors. Perhaps this sounds terrifying, but genomic science has a track-record in making science fiction reality. ‘Everything... | Dawn Field | https://aeon.co//essays/what-might-we-do-with-the-genomics-of-the-entire-planet |
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