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Education | What would happen if the aid industry started collecting data on how the people it serves actually feel about their lives? | Just like words on a page or paint on a canvas, data illustrate the world. The numbers we use to measure economic output, or school attendance, or births and deaths, are ways of telling stories about what is happening in people’s lives. They paint a picture of what societies look like. And the picture can be surprising... | Claire Melamed | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-need-data-on-what-the-poorest-actually-think | |
Gender | History is full of sorrowful knights, sobbing monks and weeping lovers – what happened to the noble art of the manly cry? | One of our most firmly entrenched ideas of masculinity is that men don’t cry. Although he might shed a discreet tear at a funeral, and it’s acceptable for him to well up when he slams his fingers in a car door, a real man is expected to quickly regain control. Sobbing openly is strictly for girls. This isn’t just a soc... | Sandra Newman | https://aeon.co//essays/whatever-happened-to-the-noble-art-of-the-manly-weep | |
Gender | British missionaries hated the sari; US feminists would ban the burqa. Why do empires care so much about women’s clothes? | In 1820, in the Indian city of Benares, an English Baptist missionary named Smith helped to save a woman from the Hindu practice of sati, the burning of widows. He described the scene: ‘As soon as the flames touched her, she jumped off the pile. Immediately the Brahmins seized her, in order to put her again into the fl... | Rafia Zakaria | https://aeon.co//essays/ban-the-burqa-scrap-the-sari-why-women-s-clothing-matters | |
Ethics | Psychologists used to manipulate and deceive their subjects with impunity. Did the end justify the means? | Nearly 50 years ago, a 35-year-old bank employee from Madrid named Jordán Peña had a fiendish idea: he would contact fellow UFO-spotters across the city, purporting to be an extraterrestrial – DEI 98, from the planet Ummo. Spinning an audaciously convoluted yarn, Peña would proceed to chronicle the turbulent history of... | Antonio Melechi | https://aeon.co//essays/is-it-ok-for-psychologists-to-deceive-their-test-subjects | |
Philosophy of mind | Some find it comforting to think of life as a story. Others find that absurd. So are you a Narrative or a non-Narrative? | ‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ And: ‘In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.’ Or a ... | Galen Strawson | https://aeon.co//essays/let-s-ditch-the-dangerous-idea-that-life-is-a-story | |
Architecture | Boring cityscapes increase sadness, addiction and disease-related stress. Is urban design a matter of public health? | In 2007, the Whole Foods supermarket chain built one of their largest stores on New York City’s storied Lower East Side, occupying an entire block of East Houston Street from the Bowery to Chrystie Street. For the well-off, the abundant availability of high-quality organic foods was a welcome addition, but for the majo... | Colin Ellard | https://aeon.co//essays/why-boring-streets-make-pedestrians-stressed-and-unhappy | |
Biology | Why shower precious resources on rescuing individual animals while habitats are destroyed and whole species disappear? | It was a frigid Tuesday in November when a tiny rufous hummingbird showed up in a front yard in St Paul. The day was unusually cold, even for Minnesota, with a high of 26 degrees Fahrenheit (-3 degrees Celsius) and snow looming – conditions way too harsh for a whisper-light animal that normally winters in Mexico. A con... | Emily Sohn | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-the-moral-worth-of-rescuing-individual-wild-animals | |
Cities | San Francisco’s homeless are harangued and despised while conservative Utah has a radically humane approach | David Hogue isn’t sure that he should tell me his name. He sits in a back office in the shelter where he has lived for the past 18 months, hands folded neatly in his lap. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to talk. He tells me about how he’s had trouble finding work. He tells me about how he’s bounced between homes for year... | Susie Cagle | https://aeon.co//essays/best-way-to-solve-homelessness-give-people-homes | |
Fairness and equality | The medical evidence is overwhelming – obesity is bad for you and it would be a major mistake to give up fighting it | Since the World Health Organization declared a global obesity epidemic in 1997, weight has played a dominant role in the conversation about health and wellness. At the intersection of physical and mental health, influenced by a heady mix of public health, sociology, economics and culture, the increase in average weight... | Caroline Weinberg | https://aeon.co//essays/can-you-be-obese-and-healthy-maybe-but-not-for-long | |
Knowledge | The truth about health or personal relationships can entail pain and regret. Is it sometimes better to stay in the dark? | In 2006 in California, Anne Wojcicki co-founded the personal genetics company 23andMe, with the mission of ‘helping people access, understand and benefit from the human genome’. For around $100 and a saliva sample, anyone can receive detailed information about their ancestry. If you live in the UK, you also get a range... | Jess Whittlestone | https://aeon.co//essays/when-are-you-better-off-not-knowing-the-truth | |
Gender | Brutal assaults by strangers are unambiguous. But what should a woman do when she is the victim of an ‘almost rape’? | ‘You know, one in five women are sexually assaulted,’ my stepfather told me. I was in middle school. The age where I listened to a lot of ‘angry-girl music’ – Tori Amos in particular. She had been raped at knifepoint when she was 21 after performing a show in Los Angeles. And that must have been how the subject came up... | Tove K Danovich | https://aeon.co//essays/is-there-such-a-thing-as-an-almost-rape | |
Cities | In Orwellian fashion, Americans have been stripped of the right to walk, challenging their humanity, freedom and health | In 2011, Raquel Nelson was convicted of vehicular homicide following the death of her four-year-old son. Nelson, it’s crucial to note, was not driving. She didn’t even own a car. She and her three children were crossing a busy four-lane road from a bus stop to their apartment building in suburban Atlanta, Georgia. She’... | Antonia Malchik | https://aeon.co//essays/step-by-step-americans-are-sacrificing-the-right-to-walk | |
Information and communication | Algorithms are producing profiles of you. What do they say? You probably don’t have the right to know | In a recent podcast series called Instaserfs, a former Uber driver named Mansour gave a chilling description of the new, computer-mediated workplace. First, the company tried to persuade him to take a predatory loan to buy a new car. Apparently a number cruncher deemed him at high risk of defaulting. Second, Uber would... | Frank Pasquale | https://aeon.co//essays/judge-jury-and-executioner-the-unaccountable-algorithm | |
Knowledge | Archaeologists used to be obsessed with religion. Now they can’t be bothered with it. Is the field worse off? | In her first year teaching at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, Leann Pace taught a class called Near Eastern Archaeology. Thirty years ago, the course would probably have been called ‘Biblical Archaeology’, as it focuses on regions important in the birth of the major Western religions. One day, a student raise... | Rose Eveleth | https://aeon.co//essays/is-archaeology-better-off-without-religion | |
Gender and identity | There may be no watertight definition of ‘man’ or ‘woman’, but your gender still defines you more than anything else does | A few years ago a blog called The Philosophy Smoker hosted a discussion of women’s dress. The blog’s motto (‘In which issues concerning the profession of philosophy are bitched griped about’) and its title, which refers to a type of beer-fuelled convention reception, now smoke-free but still mandatory for job candidate... | Charlotte Witt | https://aeon.co//essays/would-you-be-the-same-person-if-you-were-a-different-gender | |
Food and drink | Can we restore the world’s culinary masterpieces by rescuing the lost ingredients and flavours that inspired them? | One summer afternoon in the city of Sumter in South Carolina, three men – a farmer, a scholar, and a landscape architect – stood in a field boiling watermelon juice. They had pressed the juice themselves from Bradford watermelons, a favoured fruit of the antebellum South. The Bradford has white seeds, deep ruby flesh, ... | Jill Neimark | https://aeon.co//essays/why-food-should-join-books-and-music-in-the-cultural-canon | |
Information and communication | The hacker ethos is wild and anarchic, indifferent to the trappings of success. Or it was, until the gentrifiers moved in | Any large and alienating infrastructure controlled by a technocratic elite is bound to provoke. In particular, it will nettle those who want to know how it works, those who like the thrill of transgressing, and those who value the principle of open access. Take the US telephone network of the 1960s: a vast array of phy... | Brett Scott | https://aeon.co//essays/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacker-ethos | |
Family life | Sperm donation is socially acceptable but donor eggs still provoke a wave of unease about blood relations and motherhood | ‘So, what finally made the difference for you – that you’re really pregnant?’ my friend Sharon asked me. She wasn’t the first. As a columnist who publicly detailed my fertility journey in The New York Times Motherlode blog – covering three years, four miscarriages, and nine rounds of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) – I ha... | Amy Klein | https://aeon.co//essays/why-are-donor-eggs-almost-taboo-among-fertility-options | |
Architecture | It might be pleasing to dream of arcologies, mega-cities, and space colonies – but no one can design the perfect human community | In 1970, Paolo Soleri set out to build a utopia in the barren desert of Arizona. The Italian architect’s sojourn in the wilderness was an unusual one. Born in 1919 and educated at Turin’s renowned Polytechnic University, where he received the highest honours in architecture, Soleri moved to Arizona in 1947 to apprentic... | Jared Keller | https://aeon.co//essays/can-we-design-the-ideal-city-or-must-it-evolve-organically | |
Biography and memoir | A remote island, an Arctic expedition, a one-way trip to Mars – what drives our urge to explore the farthest reaches? | First, there is nothing. From all appearances, the fast ferry, whipping through the water in the early morning sun, is headed out into the cold wastes of the Atlantic. But then a shimmering line appears on the horizon. As minutes and miles pass, it grows no taller but, eventually, the black profile of a row of loblolly... | Veronique Greenwood | https://aeon.co//essays/what-drives-the-urge-to-explore-the-farthest-human-reaches | |
Cognition and intelligence | We have this powerful sense that death is a transition, not an end. Why can’t we imagine a world without us? | What happens to people after they die? Do the deceased live on eternally as spirits? Are loved ones reunited in heaven? Or do personal memories, feelings, thoughts, desires, goals and preferences cease forever, along with brain functioning, at the point of death? Scholars from theology to biology have attempted to answ... | Natalie Emmons | https://aeon.co//essays/why-does-everyone-of-every-faith-and-none-feel-immortal | |
Meaning and the good life | Just like pain, boredom is an aversive and unpleasant experience that we need to have in order to truly live well | Twice a day, for a total of 19 months during the 1920s, the American vaudeville performer Edward H Gibson would get up on stage and perform a death-defying routine. The man billed as ‘The Human Pincushion’ would ask a member of the audience to pierce him with 50 or 60 pins that would be inserted up to their heads anywh... | Andreas Elpidorou | https://aeon.co//essays/life-without-boredom-would-be-a-nightmare | |
History | From Piltdown to Mormon seer stones, prehistory has always beckoned the trickster, since bad science makes for good stories | Three archaeologists walk into a recently excavated prehistoric bar in Iceland. Athwart the barstools sit various skeletons, both human and dinosaur. The first archaeologist, a self-styled secular empiricist, is fascinated by the establishment’s seating arrangements and brewing mechanisms, and begins a speculative essa... | Ted Scheinman | https://aeon.co//essays/from-piltdown-to-mormon-seer-stones-prehistory-has-always-beckoned-the-trickster | |
Bioethics | To honour donors, we should harvest organs that have the best chance of helping others – before, not after, death | A previously healthy middle-aged man has suffered a massive stroke from a ruptured artery in his brain and fallen into a persistent, then permanent, coma. Now imagine that before the stroke our hypothetical patient had expressed a wish to donate his organs after his death. If neurologists could determine that the patie... | Walter Glannon | https://aeon.co//essays/should-we-harvest-organs-from-patients-who-are-not-dead-yet | |
Fairness and equality | Other liberation movements have rejected the idea that biology is destiny. So why should gay rights depend on it? | Last month, the US Supreme Court affirmed the rights of same-sex couples to marry. The decision was a major achievement for a liberation movement that began nearly half a century ago. Throughout the struggle for marriage equality, supporters drew parallels with the oppression of African Americans, be that anti-miscegen... | Shamus Khan | https://aeon.co//essays/why-should-gay-rights-depend-on-being-born-this-way | |
Consciousness and altered states | Just when you crave one more sensual hit, the void of the float tank stops time, strips ego and unleashes the mind | ‘Experience Nothing.’ When my local float centre was under construction, this phrase kept catching my eye. Beneath the text was the image of a featureless Vitruvian man, milk-white, hovering in yoga’s śavāsana pose. Tranquil. Effortless. Floating imperceptibly upwards. Was that what it felt like? Years ago, I had read ... | M M Owen | https://aeon.co//essays/climb-in-float-off-zone-out-why-floatation-blows-my-mind | |
Death | Is the heaven tourism memoir spiritual kitsch for the superficial seeker, or an earnest attempt to wrestle with death? | In The Republic, Plato tells the story of Er, a soldier slain in battle, found amid the decaying corpses of other soldiers. After being hoisted upon a funeral pyre, Er’s body comes back to life, and he begins to tell a great tale: his soul journeyed to the other world, where he saw two openings in the earth, and judges... | Mya Frazier | https://aeon.co//essays/explaining-the-boom-in-kitschy-books-about-visiting-heaven | |
Childhood and adolescence | Our culture is rich with esteem-boosting platitudes for young dreamers, but the assurances are dishonest and dangerous | Twelve-year-old Gwenyth has dark brown eyes and a fierce desire to change people’s negative perception of sharks. She attends West Oaks French Immersion school in Ontario, where she and about a dozen other kids who test as gifted, spend three days every other month exploring topics outside their usual curriculum. Most ... | Leslie Garrett | https://aeon.co//essays/how-feeding-children-s-ambition-only-sets-them-up-to-fail | |
Evolution | Constructor theory is a new vision of physics, but it helps to answer a very old question: why is life possible at all? | Living things have puzzled and challenged us since the dawn of our species. Even in the light of our modern scientific understanding, they seem remarkable. A merlin falcon hunting its prey, a hummingbird suspended in the air beside a flower, the self-reproduction of a bacterial cell: all are instances of stunning contr... | Chiara Marletto | https://aeon.co//essays/how-constructor-theory-solves-the-riddle-of-life | |
Ethics | Are professional ethicists good people? According to our research, not especially. So what is the point of learning ethics? | None of the classic questions of philosophy are beyond a seven-year-old’s understanding. If God exists, why do bad things happen? How do you know there’s still a world on the other side of that closed door? Are we just made of material stuff that will turn into mud when we die? If you could get away with killing and ro... | Eric Schwitzgebel | https://aeon.co//essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-their-mothers | |
Childhood and adolescence | Little girls sign up to play chess in droves. So why are so few of the world’s top players women? | Here’s a story my father likes to tell. When I was five, my family spent several months living in Barbados. Since we were in a rental house, there weren’t many games or toys around, save for the beat-up travel checkers set we’d packed in our suitcase. The hours I didn’t spend in school learning to add a ‘u’ to the word... | Hana Schank | https://aeon.co//essays/why-are-only-two-of-the-world-s-top-100-chess-players-women | |
Cognition and intelligence | We could build an artificial brain that believes itself to be conscious. Does that mean we have solved the hard problem? | The brain is a machine: a device that processes information. That’s according to the last 100 years of neuroscience. And yet, somehow, it also has a subjective experience of at least some of that information. Whether we’re talking about the thoughts and memories swirling around on the inside, or awareness of the stuff ... | Michael Graziano | https://aeon.co//essays/can-we-make-consciousness-into-an-engineering-problem | |
Biology | Alien lifeforms might be living right under our noses, but how can we find them if we don’t know what we’re looking for? | In the late 1670s, the Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked through a microscope at a drop of water and found a whole world. It was tiny; it was squirmy; it was full of weird body types; and it lived, invisibly, all around us. Humans were supposed to be the centre and purpose of the world, and these microscal... | Sarah Scoles | https://aeon.co//essays/does-earth-have-a-shadow-biosphere | |
Childhood and adolescence | Adversity in childhood can create long-lasting scars, damaging our cells and our DNA, and making us sick as adults | If you saw Laura walking down the New York City street where she lives today, you’d see a well-dressed 46-year-old woman with auburn hair and green eyes, who exudes a sense of ‘I matter here.’ She looks entirely in charge of her life, but behind Laura’s confident demeanour lies a history of trauma: a bipolar mother who... | Donna Jackson Nakazawa | https://aeon.co//essays/how-bad-experiences-in-childhood-lead-to-adult-illness | |
Cosmopolitanism | Hannah Arendt knew how to be a pariah. Is that the key to being a 21st-century cosmopolitan? | Hannah Arendt died 40 years ago. Her legacy remains uncertain. Born in 1906 to a secular, assimilated German-Jewish family in what is today Hanover, she rejected the designation ‘political philosopher’, preferring instead to be called a ‘political theorist’. Theory, as she saw it, allowed her to expand from philosophy’... | James McAuley | https://aeon.co//essays/belonging-and-exile-made-hannah-arendt-a-cosmopolitan | |
Information and communication | When Chris Chafe translates data into music, listeners sway to the beat of seizing brains, economic swings and smog | We might never know when the first set of thuds, thumps and taps were strung together to make music, or when people sang the first songs, but it is incontrovertible that our lives are seeped in rhythms and beats. We tap our feet. We bob our heads. We sing in the shower. Never mind that we might not even be able to carr... | Carren Jao | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-sounds-of-data-and-nature-join-to-make-sweet-music | |
History of ideas | The ‘cosplay Caliphate’ of ISIS is a deadly fantasy, but a familiar one in the West. It feeds the same urges as Tolkien | What accounts for the persistent appeal of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (or ISIS) to recruits from Chicago, Bradford or Melbourne? This year, the question became urgent to commentators and policymakers in Europe and the United States. The group’s battlefield successes, its territorial ambitions and viral spectacle... | Benjamin Dueholm | https://aeon.co//essays/the-appeal-of-isis-isn-t-so-far-from-that-of-tolkien | |
Deep time | Was human evolution inevitable, or do we owe our existence to a once-in-a-universe stroke of luck? | In the movie Sliding Doors (1998), a woman named Helen, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, rushes to catch a train on the London Underground, but just misses it, watching helplessly from the platform as the doors slide shut. The film explores two alternative universes, comparing the missed-train universe to a parallel reality ... | Dan Falk | https://aeon.co//essays/was-the-evolution-of-our-species-inevitable-or-a-matter-of-luck | |
Technology and the self | As the dreams of Silicon Valley fill our world, could the dowdy historian Arnold Toynbee help prevent a nightmare? | He was an expert in world civilisations who made the cover of Time magazine in 1947, praised for writing ‘the most provocative work of historical theory… since Karl Marx’s Capital’. But in September 1921, long before he was the most famous historian in the world, a young Englishman named Arnold Toynbee boarded the Orie... | Ian Beacock | https://aeon.co//essays/arnold-toynbee-shines-a-light-on-the-humanities-role-today | |
Logic and probability | Either cause and effect are the very glue of the cosmos, or they are a naive illusion due to insufficient math. But which? | Do early childhood vaccinations cause autism, as the American model Jenny McCarthy maintains? Are human carbon emissions at the root of global warming? Come to that, if I flick this switch, will it make the light on the porch come on? Presumably I don’t need to persuade you that these would be incredibly useful things ... | Mathias Frisch | https://aeon.co//essays/could-we-explain-the-world-without-cause-and-effect | |
Sex and sexuality | Critics say that porn degrades women, dulls sexual pleasure, and ruins authentic relationships – are they right? | I don’t remember how old I was when I had my first encounter with pornography, but I must have been around 10 – the experience is entwined with the sound of the AOL dial-up tone. It was something relatively benign – a close-up photo of some genitalia – and I wasn’t much shocked. I grew up in a family not given to sugar... | Maria Konnikova | https://aeon.co//essays/does-too-much-pornography-numb-us-to-sexual-pleasure | |
Biology | An orangutan steals crops from a poor farmer in Indonesia and is shot in retribution. Who is to blame? | When Ricko Jaya first laid eyes on the orangutan, it was crouched in a jackfruit tree and stinking of rot. Even from the ground below, Jaya, a veterinarian and the coordinator of the Human and Orangutan Conflict Response Unit (HOCRU) on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, could see the animal’s festering wounds. This was... | Colleen Kimmett | https://aeon.co//essays/if-a-poor-farmer-shoots-a-raiding-orangutan-who-is-to-blame | |
Ethics | Some people are ruthless. Some lose control. Yet most violence remains unfathomable. A new theory lights up the darkness | ‘When I was 14 years old, this guy beat me down in the streets. And my stepfather took his life right in front of me. And I felt good about it, really.’ Tio, in the documentary, The Interrupters (2011) In his book Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (1999), the psychologist Roy Baumeister argues that people believe... | Tage Rai | https://aeon.co//essays/people-resort-to-violence-because-their-moral-codes-demand-it | |
Dance and theatre | Does heckling let the real comedian stand up and shine, or does it trample a punchline and mangle a routine? | Probably the closest thing you can compare it to is the fighting in ice hockey. Think about it: an activity somehow both integral and non-essential that many in the audience consider more entertaining than those parts of the performance that require actual talent. But here’s the difference between fighting in hockey an... | Lary Wallace | https://aeon.co//essays/does-heckling-improve-or-destroy-the-craft-of-comedy | |
Beauty and aesthetics | With bodies sculpted to look like comic-book heroes, today’s muscle men create an impossible template for masculinity | In 2007, Kelvin Leong posted a photograph on his Facebook page. In the picture, he stands in tiny red briefs flexing his biceps. His hands are clenched, his body bent forward to show off his taut, shiny eight-pack. Veins in his arms visibly pulsate. ‘Another variation of side chest pose complete with quad development,’... | Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore | https://aeon.co//essays/spornosexuality-how-much-does-it-pressure-young-men | |
Astronomy | When we meet aliens, it won’t be a friendly encounter nor a conquest: it will be a gold rush. Can we make sure it’s ethical? | It wasn’t the Martians’ fault their planet died. If they existed – once – Martians were likely microbes, living in a world much like our own, warmed by an atmosphere and crisscrossed by waterways. But Mars began to lose that atmosphere, perhaps because its gravity wasn’t strong enough to hold onto it after an asteroid ... | Lizzie Wade | https://aeon.co//essays/what-are-our-rights-and-duties-towards-alien-life | |
Language and linguistics | The metaphor designer isn’t trying to make something beautiful. She wants to change your view on things. Here’s how | If you could ask Dante where he got the idea of life as a road, or Rilke where he found the notion that time is a destroyer, they might have said the metaphors were hewn from their minds, or drawn from a stock of poetic imagery. Their readers might have said the imagery had origins more divine, perhaps even diabolical.... | Michael Erard | https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-build-a-metaphor-to-change-people-s-minds | |
Biography and memoir | Travel is supposed to make us feel more alive, so why is the hotel room a place of such loneliness and despair? | There was a period in my life when I spent a lot of time in hotel rooms. It was normal to skit from Shanghai to Dublin via Vilnius and Rome in a month, and then begin the loop all over again: Athens, Novosibirsk, Kuala Lumpur. I travelled alone to these cities and when I got there I was required to stand on stages, sit... | Suzanne Joinson | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-the-hotel-room-a-place-of-such-lingering-despair | |
Design and fashion | Older than bronze and as new as nanowires, textiles are technology — and they have remade our world time and again | In February 1939, Vogue ran a major feature on the fashions of the future. Inspired by the soon-to-open New York World’s Fair, the magazine asked nine industrial designers to imagine what the people of ‘a far Tomorrow’ might wear and why. (The editors deemed fashion designers too of-the-moment for such speculations.) A... | Virginia Postrel | https://aeon.co//essays/how-textiles-repeatedly-revolutionised-human-technology | |
Illness and disease | Personal identity is tied to memory, but sometimes we find peace, clarity and a true sense of completeness in the lapses | I teach a course on personal identity, and one of the authors we read is John Locke, the 17th-century English philosopher who tells us that our memory constitutes who we are. He poses the following thought experiment: if a prince and a cobbler were to exchange memories, so that the body of the cobbler carried with it t... | Marianne Janack | https://aeon.co//essays/why-remember-and-be-sad-when-you-could-happily-forget | |
Ethics | Konrad Morgen prosecuted his fellow Nazis, but not for the Final Solution. How should history judge him? | Georg Konrad Morgen was the first man to prosecute commandants of the Nazi concentration camps, but he wasn’t an officer of war-crimes tribunals. He was himself a German SS officer, and he prosecuted his fellow SS officers in SS courts during the Second World War. Morgen charged them not with crimes against humanity bu... | Herlinde Pauer-Studer & J David Velleman | https://aeon.co//essays/the-nazi-judge-who-sought-justice-in-the-system | |
Human rights and justice | Our myths are full of young heroes yet our media calls them tragic victims. What is the truth about child soldiers? | The idea of child soldiers is itself young. International law organisations didn’t take up the issue until the close of the 20th century and, even then, they did so in a cautious and patchwork manner. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child asks governments to take ‘all feasible measures’ to keep ... | Malcolm Harris | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-child-soldier-anything-more-than-a-tragic-victim | |
Cities | Bed bugs crawl under our covers, suck our blood and disappear, leaving us on a razor’s edge between reality and delusion | The other day, I pulled up a map of my Brooklyn neighbourhood on the Bedbug Registry, an online database of self-reported bed-bug infestations, and a familiar dread clenched my gut. It was a feeling I thought was long gone. But the infestations were marked by red dots that spread across the streets like a rash of throb... | Brooke Borel | https://aeon.co//essays/how-bed-bugs-infest-our-homes-and-our-minds | |
Consciousness and altered states | New research puts us on the cusp of brain-to-brain communication. Could the next step spell the end of individual minds? | You already know that we can run machines with our brainwaves. That’s been old news for almost a decade, ever since the first monkey fed himself using a robot arm and the power of positive thinking. Nowadays, even reports of human neuroprostheses barely raise an eyebrow. Brain-computer interfaces have become commonplac... | Peter Watts | https://aeon.co//essays/do-we-really-want-to-fuse-our-brains-together | |
History | War isn’t like it used to be. Victory is more elusive, and a strong military doesn’t count as much | On 28 December 2014, the US commander of international forces in Afghanistan presided over a secret ceremony in Kabul. Standing before a group of NATO soldiers, General John Campbell hailed what he described as great gains in a war effort by then underway for 13 years. ‘You’ve made Afghanistan stronger and our countrie... | Mark Kukis | https://aeon.co//essays/why-americans-believe-the-us-can-win-wars | |
History | For centuries, Americans saw the Catholic Church as a dangerous foreign enemy. Not any more. What changed? | For nearly 350 years, anti-Catholic bias was a reliable and powerful presence in the political and religious culture of the United States. Today, when the Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, for example, insists that Muslim immigrants ‘want to use our freedoms to undermine… freedom’, it can be easy to forget that for most... | Maura Jane Farrelly | https://aeon.co//essays/why-it-has-become-ok-to-be-american-and-catholic | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Evolution works through tiny corridors of space and time, churning genes and transforming species before our very eyes | Peruse my bookshelves and you’ll find a suspiciously large number of the titles are devoted to wildlife and plants. There’s the western North America bird book; the natural history of neotropical mammals; Field Guide to Grasses of California; animal skulls, feathers, and wildlife tracking books. Leafing through them, t... | Victoria Schlesinger | https://aeon.co//essays/evolution-is-a-grand-process-that-works-even-on-a-tiny-scale | |
Demography and migration | Generational thinking is seductive and confirms preconceived prejudices, but it’s a bogus way to understand the world | Science fiction uses generations as guinea pigs in thought experiments: writers will change one important feature of human life, but leave the rest intact, in order to hypothesise how a single, world-rearranging shift might play out. In S M Stirling’s Emberverse series (2004-), a mysterious event alters the laws of phy... | Rebecca Onion | https://aeon.co//essays/generational-labels-are-lazy-useless-and-just-plain-wrong | |
Anthropology | If you descend from slaves in Senegal, your shame is an open secret and your life limited by stigma and disrespect | It started a few years ago, with a conversation I had with my then-boyfriend, a Senegalese agronomist, first about peanuts and then about slavery. He lived in the Sine-Saloum region of Senegal, a four-hour drive from where I lived in the capital, Dakar. I was writing about the history of peanut agriculture, Sine-Saloum... | Jori Lewis | https://aeon.co//essays/how-descendants-of-african-slaves-are-stigmatised-for-life | |
Sports and games | For centuries, altitude sickness thwarted our attempts to reach sacred heights. What mysterious force repelled us? | Altitude sickness is democratic. It strikes the young just as easily as the old. The super-fit can be laid low at 2,500 metres while an inveterate smoker can have no problems at all. In 1991, Roman Giutashvili, a 54-year-old Georgian with one lung, reached the summit of Everest. Immunity, like God’s grace, is dispensed... | Robert Twigger | https://aeon.co//essays/how-altitude-sickness-can-help-to-keep-us-grounded | |
Astronomy | Cosmology has been on a long, hot streak, racking up one imaginative and scientific triumph after another. Is it over? | One crisp day last March, Harvard professor John Kovac walked out of his office and into a taxicab that whisked him across town, to a building on the edge of the MIT campus. People were paying attention to Kovac’s comings and goings that week. He was the subject of a fast-spreading rumour. Kovac is an experimental cosm... | Ross Andersen | https://aeon.co//essays/will-we-ever-understand-the-beginning-of-the-universe | |
Ethics | Seen through game theory, cancer and police corruption are pretty much the same thing. And for one of them, there’s a cure | Naturalists have long regarded ants and bees as a sort of living parable on the benefits of universal virtue. ‘Karl Marx was right, socialism works,’ said the great ant specialist Edward O Wilson; ‘it’s just that he had the wrong species.’ Certainly, the eusocial insects (from the Greek eu meaning ‘good’ or ‘real’) are... | Suzanne Sadedin | https://aeon.co//essays/game-theory-s-cure-for-corruption-make-us-all-cops | |
Evolution | The Vatican still refuses to endorse evolutionary theory – setting a billion believers at odds with modern science | There was a moment in the recent history of the Roman Catholic Church when an influential Jesuit tried to forge a deep synthesis between religion and modern science. But he was muzzled by the Vatican, and Catholics have been paying for it ever since. Sunday 10 April was the 60th anniversary of the death of Pierre Teilh... | John Farrell | https://aeon.co//essays/why-does-the-vatican-accept-the-big-bang-but-not-evolution | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | Persecuted little guy, or powerful revolutionary – what sort of wunderkind was Aaron Swartz? | Who was Aaron Swartz? I never met him, though I’ve had dealings with friends of his over the years. The outline of his biography is a matter of public record: teenaged computer whizz gets rich, becomes a political activist and ends up in his 20s facing decades in jail for murky charges related to the misappropriation o... | Ed Lake | https://aeon.co//essays/aaron-swartz-was-on-a-crusade-that-is-clear-but-for-what | |
Earth science and climate | We can melt ice sheets and cook landscapes. When humans made fire, they made themselves and their planet too | At night, viewed from space, the cluster of lights looks like a supernova erupting in North Dakota. The lights are as distinctive a feature of night-time North America as the glaring swathe of the northeast megalopolis. Less dense than those of Chicago, as expansive as those of Greater Atlanta, more coherent than the s... | Stephen J Pyne | https://aeon.co//essays/how-humans-made-fire-and-fire-made-us-human | |
Stories and literature | Messy plots, audience participation and uncertain endings: how digital storytelling revives the ancient art of gossip | In 1999, Adnan Syed, a teenager from Baltimore, was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. Appraised of the details of the case, you might view Syed as a skilled sociopath adept at concealing his guilt, or as the victim of a flawed judicial process. Or you might remain uncertain. Perhaps you have rehearsed... | Katherine May | https://aeon.co//essays/how-digital-storytelling-revives-the-ancient-art-of-gossip | |
Deep time | In the race for geology’s highest accolade – a ‘golden spike’ – do advocates of the Anthropocene sell their ideas short? | The geological epoch we currently inhabit – the ‘wholly recent’ period since the last ice age – was first mooted in 1833 by the English geologist Charles Lyell to encompass the time during which Earth had been ‘tenanted by man’. French paleontologist Paul Gervais dubbed it the Holocene in 1867, a name which was formali... | James Westcott | https://aeon.co//essays/is-rushing-to-declare-the-anthropocene-also-human-error | |
Ethics | Lying, cheating and arrogance might be morally repugnant, but a little dose of nastiness can be a creative thing | Malevolent personalities come in flavours, says Del Paulhus, the University of British Columbia psychologist who coined the term ‘dark triad’ to describe a trifecta of human evil: the Machiavellian plotter strategising the downfall of others, smiling all the while; the impulsive psychopath, pouncing to steal a friends’... | Kristin Ohlson | https://aeon.co//essays/why-it-s-enlightening-to-get-in-touch-with-your-dark-side | |
Education | The worst public schools do one thing very well – they teach poor black kids how to stay in the American underclass | My 13-year-old nephew Butta was getting into trouble weekly. Arguing with teachers, ignoring administrators, and walking out of class. To the point where my sister had a time-block in her schedule every month dedicated to parent-teacher conferences – but they didn’t work. Butta is as harmless as he is plump – that joll... | D Watkins | https://aeon.co//essays/how-school-grooms-african-americans-for-the-underclass | |
Ethics | How we lost touch with animals, life and death, and learned to find butchery repulsive while eating more meat than ever | The skin did not come off like a sweater, as I’d been told it would. I’d looked at how to do it in the classic Joy of Cooking, figuring the directions for squirrel couldn’t be much different from rabbit: hook it through the heels, yank the skin down to its paws. I didn’t have a hook, but even the falconer, Chris Davis,... | Amanda Giracca | https://aeon.co//essays/what-happens-when-carnivores-lose-their-taste-for-butchery | |
Environmental history | Steel mills, coal mines and blast furnaces have killed and poisoned thousands of Americans – so why mourn their passing? | Two memorials pay homage to the miners killed in a coal dust explosion on 5 April 2010 at the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia. One is a towering black granite monument etched with the silhouettes of the 29 miners, from Cory Davis, who was aged 20, to Benny Willingham, 61. The monument’s inscription rea... | Deborah Rudacille | https://aeon.co//essays/how-toxic-is-smokestack-nostalgia | |
Biology | The idea that we are edging up to a mass extinction is not just wrong – it’s a recipe for panic and paralysis | The way the public hears about conservation issues is nearly always in the mode of ‘[Beloved Animal] Threatened With Extinction’. That makes for electrifying headlines, but it misdirects concern. The loss of whole species is not the leading problem in conservation. The leading problem is the decline in wild animal popu... | Stewart Brand | https://aeon.co//essays/we-are-not-edging-up-to-a-mass-extinction | |
Demography and migration | Women with money and education tend to get and stay married in America. Why aren’t working-class women the same? | We’re both happily married law professors who followed the same trajectory. We graduated from college, became established in our professions, got married, and had children. Our children and most of our friends have followed the same pattern. Our family experiences might be typical of the college-educated professionals ... | Naomi Cahn & June Carbone | https://aeon.co//essays/wealth-makes-men-faithful-while-poverty-makes-women-choosy | |
Cognition and intelligence | Throughout evolutionary history, we never saw anything like a montage. So why do we hardly notice the cuts in movies? | Suppose you were sitting at home, relaxing on a sofa with your dog, when suddenly your visual image of the dog gave way to that of a steaming bowl of noodles. You might find that odd, no? Now suppose that not just the dog changed, but the sofa too. Suppose everything in your visual field changed instantaneously in fron... | Jeffrey M Zacks | https://aeon.co//essays/why-don-t-our-brains-explode-when-we-watch-movies | |
Personality | The martyr is not an alienated and depressed loner but an individual driven by idealism, altruism and the need to belong | The YouTube video is grainy and little more than 90 seconds long. A group of men sit under olive trees on a hill, in a scene that would resemble a cheery picnic were it not for the rifles resting at their feet. Digital pixelation dances across their faces in an effort to keep their identities hidden, though one fair-sk... | Luba Ostashevsky | https://aeon.co//essays/self-sacrifice-is-the-ultimate-irrationality-what-motivates-it | |
Environmental history | It took a lot of fossil fuels to forge our industrial world. Now they’re almost gone. Could we do it again without them? | Imagine that the world as we know it ends tomorrow. There’s a global catastrophe: a pandemic virus, an asteroid strike, or perhaps a nuclear holocaust. The vast majority of the human race perishes. Our civilisation collapses. The post-apocalyptic survivors find themselves in a devastated world of decaying, deserted cit... | Lewis Dartnell | https://aeon.co//essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels | |
Biography and memoir | Jacob Bridge is a popular lieutenant in the US Marines who woke up one day with an urgent need to leave the military. Why? | First Lieutenant Jacob Bridge is stationed in Hawaii as a logistics officer. He started Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2007, received his commission in 2011, and was assigned to the Fleet Marine Force in Honolulu in 2013, after graduating in the top 10 per cent at The Basic Sc... | Lyle Jeremy Rubin | https://aeon.co//essays/an-interview-with-a-conscientious-objector | |
Astronomy | In the dark corners of our galaxy, there are billions of rogue planets roaming around, starless – can they support life? | It’s 10,000 years in the future. You are a space explorer, preparing to land on the surface of a newly discovered world that might support life. This planet is dark, so dark that you can’t identify any of its surface features. All you can see is an ominous black circle blocking the stars. You enter its atmosphere and d... | Sean Raymond | https://aeon.co//essays/could-we-make-our-home-on-a-rogue-planet-without-a-sun | |
History of technology | From Stonehenge to Silicon Valley: how technology nurtured New Age ideas in a world supposedly stripped of its magic | Close your eyes, and envision a glowing crystal suspended in infinite space. Now breathe in slowly, counting backwards from 10. Energy pulses along the interstices of the crystal. Exhale, and imagine a second crystal, precisely like the first – then a dozen, a hundred, 100,000 crystals multiplying into an infinite void... | Benjamin Breen | https://aeon.co//essays/will-new-age-ideas-help-us-in-the-high-tech-future | |
Food and drink | In memory of Charles Bowden, hard-nosed reporter and avid sensualist, who loved every sight, feel and sip of being alive | Last August, when I heard that he’d died – peacefully in his sleep aged 69, and not gunned down by cartel assassins, as so many had predicted – I bought six yellow peppers and a bottle of cheap hearty red wine. He disapproved of white wine, finding it pale and insipid. In his writing and his life, he was a champion of ... | Richard Grant | https://aeon.co//essays/in-memory-of-charles-bowden-a-writer-and-a-sensualist | |
Astronomy | It is only a matter of time before our Universe goes black, cold and dies. Must this be the end of the road for life? | We are doomed. Our best efforts to reproduce, to conserve, protect and survive will, in the end, come to nought. We could sort out climate change, dispose of our nuclear arsenals, ban research into killer AIs, and still the end would come, as surely as night follows day. The problem is physics itself. Our home – our pl... | Michael Hanlon | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-we-do-to-save-the-universe-from-certain-death | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | The Anthropocene idea has been embraced by Earth scientists and English professors alike. But how useful is it? | Officially, for the past 11,700 years we have been living in the Holocene epoch. From the Greek for ‘totally new’, the Holocene is an eyeblink in geological time. In its nearly 12,000 years, plate tectonics has driven the continents a little more than half a mile: a reasonably fit person could cover the scale of planet... | Jedediah Purdy | https://aeon.co//essays/should-we-be-suspicious-of-the-anthropocene-idea | |
Automation and robotics | Robots came to Europe before the dawn of the mechanical age. To a medieval world, they were indistinguishable from magic | In 807 the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, sent Charlemagne a gift the like of which had never been seen in the Christian empire: a brass water clock. It chimed the hours by dropping small metal balls into a bowl. Instead of a numbered dial, the clock displayed the time with 12 mechanical horsemen that popp... | E R Truitt | https://aeon.co//essays/medieval-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic | |
Ethics | Will the next generation of telepathy machines make us closer, or are there unforeseen dangers in the melding of minds? | Every modern generation has had its own idiosyncratic obsession with telepathy, the hope that one human being might be able to read another person’s thoughts. In the late 19th century, when spiritualism was in vogue, mind-reading was a parlour game for the fashionable, and the philosopher William James considered telep... | Kat McGowan | https://aeon.co//essays/do-we-need-a-telepathy-machine-when-we-already-have-empathy | |
Illness and disease | Dementia undermines all of our philosophical assumptions about the coherence of the self. But that might be a good thing | ‘On my good days, I can almost pass for a normal person. On my bad days, I feel like I cannot find myself… I don’t know who I am and what I am going to lose next.’ So says Alice Howland, as played by Julianne Moore, in the film Still Alice (2014). A professor of linguistics in her mid-50s, Howland is trying to explain ... | Charles Leadbeater | https://aeon.co//essays/if-your-memory-fails-are-you-still-the-same-person | |
Ethics | In 2115, when our descendants look back at our society, what will they condemn as our greatest moral failing? | In 100 years it will not be acceptable to use genderised words such as ‘he’ or ‘she’, which are loaded with centuries of prejudice and reduce a spectrum of greys to black and white. We will use the pronoun ‘heesh’ to refer to all persons equally, regardless of their chosen gender. This will of course apply not only to ... | Stephen Cave & Stefan Klein | https://aeon.co//essays/what-will-our-descendants-judge-as-our-greatest-sin | |
Childhood and adolescence | The stigma of depression is lifting on social media, so if suicide is signalled in your newsfeed, should you intervene? | She sat before me, feet in combat boots tapping an irregular rhythm on our muted yellow clinic floor. She was twirling a strand of long black hair and chewing some gum as she ticked off her symptoms in a bored voice with just a hint of well-hidden angst. There were the heartache symptoms such as sadness, hopelessness a... | Megan Moreno | https://aeon.co//essays/if-suicide-is-signalled-on-social-media-should-you-intervene | |
Automation and robotics | As technological choices become ever more complex, design fiction, not science, hints at the future we actually want | Picture yourself in a supermarket aisle in 2050. These new ‘magic meatballs’, brightly coloured for the kids, seem worth a try. Better have some of the meat powder too, one of the more established products from the mass-manufacturers of cultured meat – you can make that creamy meat-based fondue that always satisfies. Y... | Jon Turney | https://aeon.co//essays/technology-starts-with-imagination-not-analysis | |
Philosophy of religion | Punitive Big Brother; cosmic petty-thief-catcher; vigilant landlord. Why is God so interested in bad behaviour? | Of all humanity’s eccentricities, religion could very well be the most baffling. Even though no one has produced a fleck of evidence for the existence of the gods, people will engage in repetitive, often taxing behaviours, under the impression that some ethereal being out there knows and cares. And regardless of whethe... | Benjamin Grant Purzycki | https://aeon.co//essays/why-god-knows-more-about-misbehaviour-than-anything-else | |
Biography and memoir | Even secular people need time out to meditate, reflect, and give thanks. Is prayer the answer? | I don’t believe in God, but I need some kind of a prayer to repeat when things go haywire. I need a prayer because, as a writer with several unruly dependents under my roof, each day is a rollercoaster, a crapshoot, an exercise in uncertainty. Will the morning go well? That depends on my eight-year-old’s ability to mak... | Heather Havrilesky | https://aeon.co//essays/can-secular-people-benefit-from-prayer | |
Evolution | It seemed Darwin had banished biological essences – yet evolution would fail without nature’s library of Platonic forms | When it slithers through the grass, the legless glass lizard is indistinguishable from a snake. But harass it and it will perform a very un-snakelike feat. It will leave its tail behind – still wriggling – and slide away. That isn’t the only surprise the glass lizard has in store. A careful look also reveals inflexible... | Andreas Wagner | https://aeon.co//essays/without-a-library-of-platonic-forms-evolution-couldn-t-work | |
Knowledge | Why do some people believe conspiracy theories? It’s not just who or what they know. It’s a matter of intellectual character | Meet Oliver. Like many of his friends, Oliver thinks he is an expert on 9/11. He spends much of his spare time looking at conspiracist websites and his research has convinced him that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of 11 September 2001 were an inside job. The aircraft impacts and resulting fires ... | Quassim Cassam | https://aeon.co//essays/the-intellectual-character-of-conspiracy-theorists | |
Information and communication | For all the smart tech, we still feel pressed for time. Are digital services the problem, or are we humans to blame? | More than 40 years ago, as a young woman in Melbourne, Australia, I had a pen friend in Papua New Guinea. She lived in a coastal village, an hour’s slow boat trip from the city of Lae. I went to visit her. The abundant tropical fruit, vegetables such as taro and sweet potato, and fish fresh from the sea made up for the... | Judy Wajcman | https://aeon.co//essays/digital-technology-is-not-to-blame-for-our-hyperfast-lives | |
Chemistry | The genius and hubris of plastic has been absorbed by every living thing. Is it a curse or evolution’s next step? | I knew it was late to be calling him. But that night, with the first warm breezes rustling the curtains, I could sense the coming spring and realised he would turn 73 soon. For more than a decade, my father and I had talked about returning to the place where he made plastics before I was born. The plant had exerted an ... | Rebecca Altman | https://aeon.co//essays/plastics-run-in-my-family-but-their-inheritance-is-in-us-all | |
Food and drink | Rude in Tokyo, rude not to in New York – tipping mystifies tourists, economists and anthropologists. Should we stop? | Post-prandial bliss is especially sweet when enjoyed in the shade of a sunlit restaurant terrace in Vernazza, a picturesque village in Liguria, on Italy’s northwestern coast. But all good things must come to an end and, to signal that lunch was over, I had to perform one final parting ritual: leaving a tip. Or perhaps ... | Julian Baggini | https://aeon.co//essays/is-tipping-a-thoughtful-gift-or-a-demeaning-hand-out | |
Personality | You’re at the casino and you win big – a lucky fluke, divine intervention or inner smarts? The answer’s against the odds | In 1992, Archie Karas, then a waiter, headed out to Las Vegas. By 1995, he had turned $50 into $40 million, in what has become known as the biggest winning streak in gambling history. Most of us would call it an instance of great luck, or we might say of Archie himself: ‘What a lucky guy!’ The cold-hearted statistician... | Carlin Flora | https://aeon.co//essays/does-lady-luck-exist-or-do-you-make-your-own-luck | |
Dance and theatre | Theatre provides stimulus for psychotic, schizophrenic and depressed patients, but can it improve their mental health? | Vitor Pordeus makes a good Hamlet. Bearded, handsome, angry at the world, he stands at the centre of his group of actors. Like a force of nature that fights to be heard against the wind blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean, he rails against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to a backdrop of palm trees and hot-d... | Beth McLoughlin | https://aeon.co//essays/can-performing-shakespeare-help-to-cure-mental-illness | |
Biology | In Japan, beetles are pets, grasshoppers a delicacy and fireflies are adored. Is the creepy-crawly a Western invention? | I am standing in the cottage in the south of France where the entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre was born in 1823. Cooking utensils and a rosary hang on the wall. Through the window, the whitewashed village just beyond glows in the morning light. Or so it seems. We are actually in the basement of a sleek building in downtow... | Andrea Appleton | https://aeon.co//essays/japanese-culture-conquered-the-human-fear-of-creepy-crawlies | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | Our laptops are sleek and polished. Our operating systems are fluid and intuitive. Computing is easy and that’s a problem | My family’s first computer was the Commodore VIC-20. Billed by its pitchman, Star Trek’s William Shatner, as the ‘wonder computer of the 1980s’, I have many fond memories of this antiquated machine. I used to play games on it, with cassette tapes that served as primitive storage devices. One of the cassettes we bought ... | Samuel Arbesman | https://aeon.co//essays/computers-are-so-easy-that-we-ve-forgotten-how-to-create | |
Teaching and learning | A child’s brain can master anything from language to music. Can neuroscience extend that genius across the lifespan? | Five years ago, in a new city and in search of a new hobby, I decided to try playing a musical instrument for the first time. I had never learned to read music; in my grade school, the optional orchestra class was offered at the same time as the optional robotics class, and I chose the latter. Understanding nothing abo... | Rebecca Boyle | https://aeon.co//essays/can-neuroscience-give-my-brain-the-plasticity-of-a-child-s |
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