title stringclasses 114
values | description stringlengths 71 138 | essay stringlengths 412 63.4k | authors stringlengths 7 67 | source_url stringlengths 52 104 | thumbnail_url stringlengths 113 249 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
History of ideas | Until the Scientific Revolution, God’s power included a licence to deceive. How did science make an honest man of Him? | Anyone who has ever read the Bible knows that God can speak. Over the course of six days, God speaks the world into existence and then speaks to both Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Later he speaks to Cain and Abel, to Noah, to Abraham and many others. What sorts of things does God say? He issues commands – ‘Let th... | Dallas G Denery II | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-scientific-revolution-made-an-honest-man-of-god | |
Stories and literature | The internet is rife with myths, scams and hoaxes. When any claim can be checked out, why does fiction still trump fact? | My grandma believes that the President of the United States is trying to remove ‘In God We Trust’ from US currency. She has forwarded me three emails about the subject, each punctuated with a two-sentence commentary: ‘I can believe this! We live in a godless time!’ Like most patient grandchildren, I ignored the first t... | Lyz Lenz | https://aeon.co//essays/should-you-fact-check-your-grandma-s-facebook-posts | |
Genetics | Epigenetics has shown that there’s no such thing as a normal human body, so how did it get hijacked by the body police? | The past decade has seen an avalanche of paradigm-shattering studies in the biological, toxicological and behavioural sciences: from findings published recently in Science and in Nature showing that sperm carry the marks of a man’s trauma and undernourishment, which leads to depression and metabolic glitches in his off... | Julie Guthman & Becky Mansfield | https://aeon.co//essays/how-epigenetics-got-hijacked-by-the-body-police | |
Economics | The Silk Road might have started as a libertarian experiment, but it was doomed to end as a fiefdom run by pirate kings | The Hidden Wiki holds the keys to a secret internet. To reach it, you need a special browser that can access ‘Tor Hidden Services’ – websites that have chosen to obscure their physical location. But even this browser isn’t enough. Like the Isla de Muerta in the film Pirates of the Caribbean, the landmarks of this hidde... | Henry Farrell | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-hidden-internet-can-t-be-a-libertarian-paradise | |
Gender | When even a simple stroll down the sidewalk is an exercise in self-loathing, why don’t more women run away to the woods? | For decades, went the story, books, candy and propane tanks had gone missing from a small community called Pine Tree on North Pond in central Maine. This was a place surrounded by wilderness; in the winter, it was a wilderness buried in snow. Its residents grew perplexed. Who among them would steal? The stories multipl... | Rhian Sasseen | https://aeon.co//essays/is-becoming-a-hermit-the-ultimate-feminist-statement | |
Philosophy of science | Nobody knows what happens inside quantum experiments. So why are some so keen to believe in parallel universes? | In July 2011, participants at a conference on the placid shore of Lake Traunsee in Austria were polled on what they thought the meeting was about. You might imagine that this question would have been settled in advance, but since the broad theme was quantum theory, perhaps a degree of uncertainty was to be expected. Th... | Philip Ball | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-many-worlds-hypothesis-just-a-fantasy | |
Information and communication | Since imperial times Chinese governments have yearned for a perfect surveillance state. Will big data now deliver it? | On 5 July 2009, residents of Xinjiang, China’s far western province, found the internet wasn’t working. It’s a regular frustration in remote areas, but it rapidly became apparent that this time it wasn’t coming back. The government had hit the kill switch on the entire province when a protest in the capital Ürümqi by y... | James Palmer | https://aeon.co//essays/will-information-open-up-china-or-close-the-ranks-for-good | |
Meaning and the good life | Since ancient times philosophy has tried to cure us of anxiety. But worry is an important part of being a moral person | At a dinner party, you find yourself seated next to a man named Sam. He’s a new acquaintance, but it turns out the two of you have several friends in common – so you’re keen to make a good impression. On that score, things seem to be going quite well. The talk is flowing and your companion gives every sign of finding y... | Charlie Kurth | https://aeon.co//essays/anxiety-isn-t-just-a-useless-emotion-it-s-also-a-moral-goad | |
Philosophy of religion | Seduced by science and rationalism, yet tied to their families and communities, Hasidic atheists opt for a double life | The moment Solomon lost his faith, he was standing on the D train, swaying back and forth with its movement as if in prayer. But it wasn’t a prayer book that the young law student was reading – he had already been to synagogue, where he had wrapped himself in the leather thongs that bound him to Orthodox Judaism, layin... | Batya Ungar-Sargon | https://aeon.co//essays/secretly-seduced-by-science-hasidic-atheists-lead-a-double-life | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Climate change has done its worst, and now just 500 million humans remain on lifeboats in the north. How do they survive? | I stare out the window from my tiny flat on the 300th floor, hermetically sealed in a soaring, climate-controlled high-rise, honeycombed with hundreds of dwellings just like mine, and survey the breathtaking vistas from my lofty perch more than half a mile above ground: the craftsman cottages with their well-tended law... | Linda Marsa | https://aeon.co//essays/welcome-to-earth-2200-ad-pop-500-million-temp-180-f | |
Ethics | Cowards have been shamed, beaten and shot, yet their failing has an important social function. Let’s hear it for cowardice | ‘One coward may lose a battle, one battle may lose a war, and one war may lose a country.’ This was Rear-Admiral and Conservative MP Tufton Beamish speaking to the House of Commons in 1930, giving voice to an idea that must be as old as war itself. Caring only for his own safety, blowing cover, attracting fire, the cow... | Chris Walsh | https://aeon.co//essays/why-it-s-brave-and-prudent-to-think-like-a-coward | |
Subcultures | From a vast subculture of gaming addicts in China, only a few go professional and get rich. Is the social cost worth it? | Five young men sit in the living room of a large, grubby apartment in downtown Shanghai, playing a computer game. The room is mostly quiet, except for the hum of the computers and the steady click and keyboard-tap of the players, who wear headphones that envelop their ears and slouch in worn office chairs. A rotund, be... | Gregory Isaacson | https://aeon.co//essays/are-pro-gamers-just-one-face-of-internet-addiction-in-china | |
The ancient world | Incentives, rewards, bonuses and bonding experiences – Roman slaveowners were the first management theorists | Vedius Pollio, a rich Roman, once invited his friend the emperor Augustus to dinner. The entertainment was interrupted when a slave broke a valuable crystal cup. Trying to impress with his toughness, Vedius ordered the slave boy be thrown to the huge moray eels in his fish pond. But Augustus was not impressed. In fact,... | Jerry Toner | https://aeon.co//essays/were-roman-slaveowners-the-first-management-theorists | |
Language and linguistics | Science once communicated in a polyglot of tongues, but now English rules alone. How did this happen – and at what cost? | If you can read this sentence, you can talk with a scientist. Well, maybe not about the details of her research, but at least you would share a common language. The overwhelming majority of communication in the natural sciences today – physics, chemistry, biology, geology – takes place in English; in print and at confe... | Michael D Gordin | https://aeon.co//essays/how-did-science-come-to-speak-only-english | |
Information and communication | Junk news is like junk food – a quick bite that fails to nourish. Are slow-burning stories what we really want, and need? | In a newsroom at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, on a June day in 2000, a woman handed me a video tape. ‘Log this,’ she said. Logging tape was a mundane task that made most interns groan, but I regarded it as glamorous. It meant slogging through hours of raw video footage to create a ‘shot list’ of metadata, a time-coded transcr... | Sarah Smarsh | https://aeon.co//essays/has-24-7-junk-news-left-us-hungry-for-true-stories | |
Human rights and justice | A fixed constitution has no place in a modern democracy, so why is the founding document of the US still seen as sacred? | In 1927, the American Communist leader Jay Lovestone aroused Moscow’s ire by arguing that industry in the United States was so youthful and vigorous as to be exempt from the traditional Marxist laws of capitalist crisis and decay. ‘American exceptionalism’ – the phrase that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin used to descr... | Daniel Lazare | https://aeon.co//essays/should-the-us-constitution-be-treated-as-a-sacred-document | |
Animals and humans | The animal who speaks in a human voice is a figure of the most enduring imaginative power. What do we hope to hear? | Last year, a collaborative group of anonymous Tumblr scribes rewrote William Shakespeare’s most iconic play, Romeo and Juliet, in a familiar animal language: What light. So breaks. Such east. Very sun. Wow, Juliet.What Romeo. Such why. Very rose. Still rose…The language of the translated Romeo and Juliet is likely to b... | Stassa Edwards | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-we-fantasise-about-talking-to-animals | |
War and peace | It is easy to think that mass shooters are simply monsters but that is just a way to duck our shared responsibility | A movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado. Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. The Washington Navy Yard. The college town of Isla Vista, California. Most of us recognise these as US sites of recent mass murder, loosely defined as the intentional killing of more than four people in a single incident. Unlike the casua... | Joseph Pierre | https://aeon.co//essays/does-a-culture-of-entitlement-explain-us-mass-shootings | |
Automation and robotics | Get ready for companies that run themselves. But will the autonomous economy set us all free, or just make the rich richer? | It is January 2014 and at least 400 people are packed into a conference hall in Miami Beach. High-profile journalists stand against the walls. Powerful venture capitalists crouch in the aisles. Banking and finance gurus crane their necks from the back of the room. They’re waiting for one of the most anticipated present... | David Z Morris | https://aeon.co//essays/are-we-ready-for-companies-that-run-themselves | |
Engineering | We tend to think that technological progress is making us more resilient, but it might be making us more vulnerable | On 10 February 1853, a ship named the Charles Mallory arrived in port in Honolulu, Hawaii, having made the journey from San Francisco in only 13 days, a near-record time, particularly for a ship of its small size. The Charles Mallory was among the newest breed of ships that benefited from the latest in maritime technol... | Colin Dickey | https://aeon.co//essays/technological-progress-makes-us-more-vulnerable-to-catastrophe | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | A new wave of videogames offers lessons in powerlessness, scarcity and inevitable failure. What makes them so compelling? | White and silent, death is undoing everything. For years, the 20 or so families in the tiny riverside settlement had lived hard yet improving lives, clearing the forest around them, fishing the waters, planting crops and building houses. Birth by birth, the population grew. From time to time, trading boats came down th... | Will Wiles | https://aeon.co//essays/trading-your-gun-for-milk-welcome-to-the-hunger-games | |
Beauty and aesthetics | It makes letters colourised and numbers pulsate with cosmic time: a rare gift, or are we all on the synaesthetic spectrum? | Vladimir Nabokov once called his famed fictional creation Lolita ‘a little ghost in natural colours’. The natural colours he used to paint his ‘little ghost’ were especially vivid in part because of a neurological quirk that generated internal flashes of colour whenever letters of the alphabet appeared within his mind.... | Shruti Ravindran | https://aeon.co//essays/are-we-all-born-with-a-talent-for-synaesthesia | |
Beauty and aesthetics | My two-year-old daughter already knows that pink is for girls. And she loves it. Why does that make me see red? | Lately, I’ve been thinking about pink a lot. I have a daughter who recently turned two and is quite vocal in her opinions, especially concerning the glory of pink and the intrinsic goodness of things that happen to be pink: for instance, that strawberry ice-cream is maximally delicious, in virtue of its colour. My daug... | Elisabeth Camp | https://aeon.co//essays/should-i-let-my-two-year-old-daughter-wear-pink | |
Cosmology | Our latest message to ET could be full of LOLcats and celebs. We should try to do better, or keep quiet altogether | This summer, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will reach the highlight of a journey it began back in 2006. When the probe flies by Pluto at approximately 11.49am UTC on 14 July, it will snap a series of detailed, intelligence-worthy pictures of the former planet’s surface. Once the mission is complete, NASA will download... | Sarah Scoles | https://aeon.co//essays/what-our-messages-to-et-say-about-us | |
Information and communication | The cypherpunks are winning the crypto-war against government spies. What will happen when everyone is anonymous? | Let’s see if this rings any bells. Back in the early 1990s, just as networked computing was taking off and millions of people logged on for the first time, the US government started getting worried. Although still tiny, ‘cyberspace’ was a nuisance to the law. Untraceable paedophile networks were sharing illegal images ... | Jamie Bartlett | https://aeon.co//essays/will-online-anonymity-win-the-war-of-openness-vs-privacy | |
Bioethics | An un-consenting child, an unnecessary, invasive surgery: is there any moral difference between male and female circumcision? | I try not to talk about my research at dinner parties. I’ll say ‘medical ethics’ if pressed, which will sometimes trigger an unwelcome follow-up: ‘But what about medical ethics? That’s a pretty big field.’ ‘I study lots of things,’ I’ll say – and that’s true, I do. ‘But I focus on medically unnecessary surgeries perfor... | Brian D Earp | https://aeon.co//essays/are-male-and-female-circumcision-morally-equivalent | |
Cognition and intelligence | Across time and culture, stories have been agents of personal transformation – in part because they change our brains | Back in the fall of 1999, Norman Conard, a history teacher at the Uniontown High School in Kansas, asked his students to come up with a project for National History Day. While brainstorming ideas, ninth-grader Elizabeth Cambers stumbled on an old clipping from US News and World Report. The story included the line, ‘Ire... | Elizabeth Svoboda | https://aeon.co//essays/once-upon-a-time-how-stories-change-hearts-and-brains | |
Dance and theatre | You might not be a virtuoso, but you have remarkable music abilities. You just don’t know about them yet | Twenty years ago, a pair of psychologists hooked up a shoe to a computer. They were trying to teach it to tap in time with a national anthem. However, the job was proving much tougher than anticipated. Just moving to beat-dominated music, they found, required a grasp of tonal organisation and musical structure that see... | Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis | https://aeon.co//essays/you-are-a-remarkable-musical-expert-you-just-don-t-know-it | |
Human rights and justice | The story of Native American dispossession is too easily swept aside, but new visualisations should make it unforgettable | Between 1776 and the present, the United States seized some 1.5 billion acres from North America’s native peoples, an area 25 times the size of the United Kingdom. Many Americans are only vaguely familiar with the story of how this happened. They perhaps recognise Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears, but few can recall... | Claudio Saunt | https://aeon.co//essays/how-were-1-5-billion-acres-of-land-so-rapidly-stolen | |
Family life | Women in their 30s and 40s exhibit a mix of wishful thinking and woeful ignorance when it comes to their fertility. Why? | A 42-year-old single friend tells me she is thinking of freezing her eggs. I nod with a tight, fake smile. I’m torn: on the one hand, I know how tough everything to do with fertility is because my husband and I have been trying to have a baby since we got married three and a half years ago when I was 41 and he was 45. ... | Amy Klein | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-women-know-so-little-about-their-own-fertility | |
Meaning and the good life | Science is discovering what religion has always known: forgiveness is good for us. But that doesn’t make it any easier | In the cleanest college library I’ve ever seen, women of various ages and ethnicities were seated around a long wooden table. A few were chatting, but most were nervously shuffling notebooks and pens or staring at the floor. The men – there were five, ranging in age from early 20s to mid-50s – showed up just before cla... | Amy Westervelt | https://aeon.co//essays/we-all-agree-forgiveness-is-healthy-but-why-is-it-so-hard | |
Meaning and the good life | As legions of warriors and prisoners can attest, Stoicism is not grim resolve but a way to wrest happiness from adversity | We do this to our philosophies. We redraft their contours based on projected shadows, or give them a cartoonish shape like a caricaturist emphasising all the wrong features. This is how Buddhism becomes, in the popular imagination, a doctrine of passivity and even laziness, while Existentialism becomes synonymous with ... | Lary Wallace | https://aeon.co//essays/why-stoicism-is-one-of-the-best-mind-hacks-ever-devised | |
Knowledge | Scientists seek demigod status, journals want blockbuster results, and retractions are on the rise: is science broken? | On 5 August 2014, a celebrated Japanese scientist was found dead, hanging by his neck at his workplace, his shoes politely removed and placed on the landing of the stairs. Yoshiki Sasai, 52, was a legendary stem-cell expert, widely regarded as an exceptional scientist, who worked at the RIKEN Center for Developmental B... | Jill Neimark | https://aeon.co//essays/are-the-retraction-wars-a-sign-that-science-is-broken | |
Human rights and justice | The great civil rights song turns 50 – the political made personal, and heartbreak transmuted into fiery action | In 1993, I, like so many young white people before me, discovered Sam Cooke. It was December. The dry, crisp cold of a California winter permeated the walls of my unremarkable family home. It was quiet. There were no waves at the beach. I had heard Cooke’s hits, of course, grown up with them in the canon of popular mus... | Manjula Martin | https://aeon.co//essays/sam-cooke-knew-what-makes-a-great-protest-song-work | |
Death | There are few fantasies so absurd as the idea of living on through fame. So why does immortality still beckon? | Glaucus was no coward. He had killed four men, and that was no easy matter when they were charging at him through the dust and din, waving sharp swords and screaming. In those days, it wasn’t just a matter of pulling a trigger or pressing a button. You had to push your spear hard through armour and bone, and watch as t... | Stephen Cave | https://aeon.co//essays/why-on-earth-would-we-sacrifice-our-lives-for-lasting-fame | |
Cosmopolitanism | Islands are a natural laboratory for science, they gave us evolution. But isolation is no model for a cosmopolitan age | An island was born on 14 November 1963. In a luminous memory from my childhood, my father has the newspaper spread over our yellow breakfast table in suburban Melbourne and announces this curious fact. Although far away in Iceland, the idea that an island could have a beginning captivated me. Solid rock transported by ... | Libby Robin | https://aeon.co//essays/island-mindedness-has-no-place-in-a-cosmopolitan-age | |
Knowledge | Junky, out-of-date science fuels jury errors and tragic miscarriages of justice. How can we throw it out of court? | In 1992, Juan Rivera was arrested for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in Waukegan, Illinois. On the night of the murder, Rivera was wearing an electronic ankle bracelet in connection with unrelated burglary charges, and this bracelet showed he’d been at home. Yet, based on a tip, police decided to arrest him... | Douglas Starr | https://aeon.co//essays/time-to-clean-all-the-junk-science-out-of-our-courtrooms | |
Death | Nobody wants a protracted, dehumanised death: why is it still so easy for doctors to ignore a dying patient’s wishes? | Antibiotics, defibrillators, feeding tubes and ventilators are lifesaving tools that sometimes become weapons to prolong life against our will. None of us can escape death but some of us want to shape our final time on earth. We don’t want to live for years in a nursing home rendered unconscious by late-stage dementia;... | Jeanne Erdmann | https://aeon.co//essays/even-a-legal-plan-can-t-safeguard-the-manner-of-your-dying | |
Language and linguistics | If we want to safeguard our languages, stories and ideas against extinction, we had better study Egyptology | Consider the New Kingdom Egyptian. He can be forgiven for thinking his state sits at creation’s centre, a kernel of order anchoring the known world. If he lives during the reign of Ramses II, his Egypt has already governed Northeast Africa for the better part of 2,000 years. Trouncing Hittites at Kadesh, Ramses will co... | Grayson Clary | https://aeon.co//essays/how-egyptology-can-help-us-to-future-proof-our-culture | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Genes that leap from one species to another are more common than we thought. Does this shake up the tree of life? | Fay-Wei Li stepped out of his car and looked around. There was not much to see aside from an old wooden fence and a soggy ditch strewn with roadside detritus. Could this really be the spot? A biologist at Duke University, Li had driven seven hours from North Carolina to these exact coordinates in Florida in search of h... | Ferris Jabr | https://aeon.co//essays/genes-that-jump-species-does-this-shake-the-tree-of-life | |
History | Social progress, high-speed transport and electricity everywhere – how the Victorians invented the future | Before the beginning of the 19th century, the future was only rarely portrayed as a very different place from the present. The social order, like the natural order, was supposed to be static, with everything in its proper place: as it had been, so it would be. When Sir Isaac Newton thought about the future, he worried ... | Iwan Rhys Morus | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-victorians-invented-the-future-for-us | |
Public health | Misunderstanding risk factors has led to massive overtreatment of diseases people don’t have and probably never will | Most health-conscious people are familiar with the concept of risk factors for disease. We’re too familiar, in fact. A risk factor is like the guest that nobody invited to the party, a spoiler. Though we might feel fine now, our individual risk for (fill in the blank) tells us that our wellbeing might not last. That va... | Jeff Wheelwright | https://aeon.co//essays/what-are-the-risks-of-overtreating-the-many-to-help-the-few | |
Love and friendship | A white gown, a grand reception, a multi-tiered cake – the stuff of a traditional wedding or something else entirely? | Colleen, an associate director at a large pharmaceutical company, daydreamed about getting married on a beach. By the time she began planning her own ceremony in 2012, she’d been to her fair share of weddings, including several at the New Jersey Shore, one in Las Vegas, and one in Costa Rica that required a four-hour j... | Beth Montemurro | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-traditonal-wedding-isn-t-as-traditional-as-it-seems | |
Language and linguistics | For decades, the idea of a language instinct has dominated linguistics. It is simple, powerful and completely wrong | Imagine you’re a traveller in a strange land. A local approaches you and starts jabbering away in an unfamiliar language. He seems earnest, and is pointing off somewhere. But you can’t decipher the words, no matter how hard you try. That’s pretty much the position of a young child when she first encounters language. In... | Vyvyan Evans | https://aeon.co//essays/the-evidence-is-in-there-is-no-language-instinct | |
Future of technology | Some of our greatest cultural and technological achievements took place between 1945 and 1971. Why has progress stalled? | We live in a golden age of technological, medical, scientific and social progress. Look at our computers! Look at our phones! Twenty years ago, the internet was a creaky machine for geeks. Now we can’t imagine life without it. We are on the verge of medical breakthroughs that would have seemed like magic only half a ce... | Michael Hanlon | https://aeon.co//essays/has-progress-in-science-and-technology-come-to-a-halt | |
Cognition and intelligence | What I learned about fear, sex, desire and dread from the peculiar pleasures of diving with great white sharks | The safety briefing started just as we dropped anchor. ‘Welcome to Guadalupe Island,’ our divemaster announced, ‘the best place on the planet to see great white sharks.’ Most people don’t particularly want to see great white sharks – deterred, perhaps, by the 300 razor-sharp, serrated teeth with which the great fish ea... | Sy Montgomery | https://aeon.co//essays/diving-with-sharks-and-why-being-afraid-feels-so-good | |
Bioethics | Scientists torturing bees to save them have nightmares about the work. Must grief be part of experimental design? | It was a warm day in early spring when I had my first long conversation with the entomologist and science studies scholar Sainath Suryanarayanan. We met over a couple of hives I had recently inherited. One was thriving. Piles of dead bees filled the other. Parts of the comb were covered with mould and oozing something ... | Heather Swan | https://aeon.co//essays/bees-have-feelings-too-and-scientists-should-respect-them | |
Philosophy of religion | The Communion wafer is food and symbol, relic and rite. In an age plagued by fears of disease, can it still help us connect? | Helen didn’t know me, but she loved me. I met her at the nursing home when the Catholic lay minister asked me if I would bring her, a Protestant, communion. He led me to her, sitting in the memory-care unit. ‘Are you Helen?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Would you like to receive Holy Communion?’ Her face lit up. ‘Helen, this is the Body of... | Benjamin Dueholm | https://aeon.co//essays/has-fear-of-contagion-made-holy-communion-harder-to-swallow | |
Ethics | The new zombie still eats brains, but it can think, emote and even fall in love. Why zombies with heart are on the rise | A boy called R becomes zombified during the zombie apocalypse and for eight years he is alone, shambling around an abandoned airport, groaning at fellow zombies and searching for human flesh. Then he meets his dream girl. There’s just one problem: she is human. For R, it is love at first sight – perhaps because, just b... | Davia Sills | https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-the-zombie-say-about-who-we-are-and-what-we-fear | |
Art | Fra Angelico’s frescos inspired generations of devotion. Can religious art still work its magic on the godless? | The loveliest image I know is Fra Angelico’s ‘Entry of the Blessed into Paradise’, a scene from his painting The Last Judgment of 1431. In it, the blessed, just risen from their graves, gather together in a flowering garden to join hands with angels and dance into the light of heaven. There’s a scene in D H Lawrence’s ... | Pelagia Horgan | https://aeon.co//essays/can-secular-people-still-be-moved-by-sacred-art | |
Ethics | Disgust is often used as a tool of persuasion. But are gut feelings ever a reliable guide in questions of right and wrong? | Every spring a pro-life group – one whose campaigning methods are so shockingly offensive that I won’t publish their name here – sets up shop on my university’s campus quad. The group’s shtick involves displaying billboard-sized images of aborted foetuses juxtaposed with gory photos of atrocities such as mass graves an... | Carol Hay | https://aeon.co//essays/does-disgust-have-any-place-in-moral-reasoning | |
Automation and robotics | CGI has become wearingly dull and cliched. Can its deep weirdness be recovered and filmgoers’ minds stretched again? | James Cameron’s underwater adventure The Abyss (1989) is widely considered the first film to have successfully made extensive use of computer-generated imagery, or CGI, to show audiences something they could never witness otherwise. The film’s visual trump card shows a deep-sea explorer, played by Mary Elizabeth Mastra... | Jonathan Romney | https://aeon.co//essays/can-the-creative-weirdness-of-cgi-be-recovered-from-cliche | |
Ethics | We tend to think that our memories determine our identity, but it’s moral character that really makes us who we are | One morning after her accident, a woman I’ll call Kate awoke in a daze. She looked at the man next to her in bed. He resembled her husband, with the same coppery beard and freckles dusted across his shoulders. But this man was definitely not her husband. Panicked, she packed a small bag and headed to her psychiatrist’s... | Nina Strohminger | https://aeon.co//essays/moral-character-is-the-foundation-of-a-sense-of-personal-identity | |
Consciousness and altered states | Today’s bitter craft beers are dominated by hoppy preservatives. How did they taste back when brewers were shamans? | Brian Hunt and I sat under a redwood tree in his rutted, gravel driveway in a rural part of Sonoma County, California. We were somewhere around Santa Rosa, but I couldn’t say where, and nor could my dashboard Garmin. Among the towering trees and rolling vineyard hills, cell signals fizzled and GPS was useless. I was lo... | William Bostwick | https://aeon.co//essays/why-are-today-s-craft-beers-so-bitter | |
Gender | Is the growing market for male escorts a sign of female sexual liberation or just a re-run of the same old stereotypes? | In the middle of every month, when the moon is full, and straight after payday, Louise meets Tom in a smart hotel in north Sydney to indulge in what she calls ‘my little ritual’. She lays out a bottle of her favourite Champagne, a box of chocolates and a punnet of fresh strawberries, and dresses thoughtfully for their ... | Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore | https://aeon.co//essays/when-it-comes-to-buying-sex-are-women-any-different-from-men | |
Future of technology | The most exciting discovery in physics could come about thanks to telecoms satellites. Is a single theory of reality in sight? | Watching a rocket as it slowly starts to heave itself out of Earth’s deep gravity well and then streaks up into the blue, you suddenly grasp on a visceral level the energies involved in space exploration. One minute that huge cylinder is sitting quietly on its launching pad; the next, its engines fire up with a brillia... | Sidney Perkowitz | https://aeon.co//essays/when-commercial-satellites-unite-quantum-physics-and-relativity | |
Philosophy of religion | In the 1940s, Japan’s search for a national philosophy became a battle for existence. Did Zen ideas create the kamikaze? | Dusk, that most beautiful moment With no pattern. Millions of images appear and disappear. Beloved people. How unbearable to die in the sky. Hours after writing these lines, the 24-year-old Tadao Hayashi fuelled a battered Mitsubishi A6M Zero and flew it towards an American aircraft carrier – and into nothingness. It ... | Christopher Harding | https://aeon.co//essays/the-zen-ideas-that-propelled-japan-s-young-kamikaze-pilots | |
Sleep and dreams | People once woke up halfway through the night to think, write or make love. What have we lost by sleeping straight through? | It is 4.18am. In the fireplace, where logs burned, there are now orange lumps that will soon be ash. Orion the Hunter is above the hill. Taurus, a sparkling V, is directly overhead, pointing to the Seven Sisters. Sirius, one of Orion’s heel dogs, is pumping red-blue-violet, like a galactic disco ball. As the night move... | Karen Emslie | https://aeon.co//essays/why-broken-sleep-is-a-golden-time-for-creativity | |
Childhood and adolescence | We prize originality, yet humans are natural-born copycats and only good imitators survive. Is it time to celebrate the rip-off? | Imitation might be a form of flattery, but it is also a good way to end up in legal trouble. More than 6,000 lawsuits over patent infringements were filed in the United States last year. Samsung and Apple, locked in what’s been called the bloodiest corporate war in history, have jointly spent more than $1 billion in th... | Kat McGowan | https://aeon.co//essays/forget-the-lone-genius-it-s-copycats-who-drive-progress | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | How a massive breeding contest turned a rarely eaten backyard bird into the technological marvel that feeds the world | Among African Americans across the South, the pastor had first dibs on the bird that typically graced the table after church. ‘He ate the biggest, brownest, and best parts of the chicken at every Sunday meal,’ complained Maya Angelou of the pious glutton Reverend Howard Thomas in her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Si... | Andrew Lawler | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-backyard-bird-became-a-wonder-of-science-and-commerce | |
Beauty and aesthetics | How does it feel when writer’s block finally gives way, and what is it that brings back the grace of creation? | It was going to New York City last week that finally did it, almost as if the point of going had been for me to be in Central Park on that fine crystal afternoon, to sit on a bench by the lake watching that cinema trick of a painting dissolving into motion. Something happened in that spot. I was touched in the core of ... | Sven Birkerts | https://aeon.co//essays/how-it-feels-when-writer-s-block-dissolves-into-inspiration | |
Art | Paul Simon’s album ‘Graceland’ is a joyous political statement. Does it strike the same chord in the sombre Rothko Chapel? | On a recent trip to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, I witnessed a peculiar spectacle. A man who had been sitting cross-legged in front of a painting stood up and began shouting. The sound was a kind of incantation, which shattered the chapel’s silence. Attendants quickly hustled him outside and amid the noise I sa... | Nathan Dunne | https://aeon.co//essays/what-music-can-you-hear-in-rothko-s-art | |
Biography and memoir | My husband got the death threat, but I went into hiding. Are some brains wired for courage and others for fear? | One Friday evening in March, my husband walked into the house and said: ‘There was a death threat. A defendant in one of my cases.’ My husband is in law enforcement. He helps put bad people in jail for a really long time. He’s been doing it for 20 years. One might think he would have had a death threat before, but he h... | Caren Chesler | https://aeon.co//essays/why-are-some-people-brave-and-others-such-cowards | |
Biology | Weird quantum effects are so delicate it seems they could only happen in a lab. How on Earth can life depend on them? | The point of the most famous thought-experiment in quantum physics is that the quantum world is different from our familiar one. Imagine, suggested the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, that we seal a cat inside a box. The cat’s fate is linked to the quantum world through a poison that will be released only if a si... | Johnjoe McFadden | https://aeon.co//essays/quantum-weirdness-is-everywhere-in-the-living-world | |
Bioethics | Rafting the Grand Canyon seemed the perfect wilderness escape until we found we’d brought a deadly virus with us | With a couple weeks of rowing in front of me, I turned the bow of the whitewater raft to the left and pulled hard at the oars, backing away from the monster waves between me and the sandstone cliffs on the Colorado River’s left bank. A wave broke over the boat. Another one caught me in the face. My boat partner, Ben, h... | Jordan Fisher Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/the-virus-that-hitched-a-ride-into-the-grand-canyon | |
Cosmopolitanism | You don’t have to be a monster or a madman to dehumanise others. You just have to be an ordinary human being | In March 1945, Leatherneck Magazine, an official organ of the United States Marine Corps, published a brief, ostensibly humorous article describing a parasite named Louseous Japanicas. It included an illustration of a grotesque creature with stereotypically Japanese features. The accompanying text tells us that: To the... | David Livingstone Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-it-so-easy-to-dehumanise-a-victim-of-violence | |
Fairness and equality | If you have a mouthful of teeth shaped by a childhood in poverty, don’t go knocking on the door of American privilege | I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer homes. I grew up next to Tiffany ‘Pennsatucky’ Doggett, the hostile former drug addict from the prison TV drama Orange Is the New Black. I know her by her teeth. Pennsatucky – a scrappy slip of a woman menacing, beating and proselytising to fellow inmates – stole the s... | Sarah Smarsh | https://aeon.co//essays/there-is-no-shame-worse-than-poor-teeth-in-a-rich-world | |
Architecture | Sacred structures needn’t be religious. Great buildings have a curious power to command reverence in any cultural setting | In 570, the year of the prophet Muhammad’s birth, Abraha, the Ethiopian viceroy in Yemen, sent an army north into the Arabian Peninsula. Some years before, Abraha had built a magnificent church in Sanaa, hoping it would surpass the Ka’aba as a place of pilgrimage for Arabs. But when the Arabs showed no sign of changing... | David Shariatmadari | https://aeon.co//essays/what-makes-the-very-sticks-and-stones-of-a-building-sacred | |
Biology | Animals and viruses practise deception, fast and slow, in ways that help us understand human predators and scammers | It’s the friend who betrays you, the lover living a secret life, the job applicant with the fabricated résumé, or the sham sales pitch too good to resist. From the time humans learnt to co‑operate, we also learnt to deceive each other. For deception to be effective, individuals must hide their true intentions. But dece... | Daniel N Jones | https://aeon.co//essays/animal-deceivers-can-warn-us-against-the-human-variety | |
Metaphysics | The legendary comics author Alan Moore has written a million-word novel, tribute to every eternal speck in his universe | Alan Moore is waiting when I get off the train in Northampton, a majestically bearded figure in a hoodie, scanning the crowd that pushes through the turnstiles with a look of fearsome intent. When I wave, the glare becomes a beaming smile. ‘How are you, mate?’ he booms. ‘Splendid, splendid. I thought we’d go for a bit ... | Tim Martin | https://aeon.co//essays/alan-moore-i-am-in-charge-of-this-universe | |
Ethics | No longer the hardest word, a public apology is now the defence strategy of the rich and powerful. Can it still do good? | Consider this story of corporate contrition. From 1932 to 1968, the Japanese chemical manufacturer Chisso Corporation discharged mercury into Minamata Bay on the west coast of Japan, causing a lethal and disfiguring condition known as ‘Minamata Disease’. Chisso’s own scientists knew that they were to blame, yet the com... | Nick Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-public-apology-became-a-tool-of-power-and-privilege | |
Bioethics | Human industry is now noisy enough to drown out whale songs. What would happen in the ocean if we went quiet? | At 5:30am I awoke to the sound of the diesel chug-chugging of a lone lobster boat carving into the glassy Atlantic. An audience of shrieking gulls hushed in the engine’s wake as it rumbled through the narrow strait that separates the United States from Canada. After the boat pushed out into the open ocean, the gulls re... | Peter Brannen | https://aeon.co//essays/what-would-happen-in-the-ocean-if-humanity-went-quiet | |
Addiction | Cutting brings relief because emotion and pain criss-cross in the brain. Can we untangle the circuits and stop self-harm? | Here’s what I remember about the first time I cut myself: I was mad. As a writer, I wish I could come up with something more literary, such as: ‘The cuts provided a route through my skin for the emotions to escape.’ Or maybe: ‘I used it to translate emotional pain into physical pain.’ Or even, perhaps: ‘I engraved my s... | Carrie Arnold | https://aeon.co//essays/how-self-harm-provokes-the-brain-into-feeling-better | |
Cities | Human sprawl is usually a threat to wildlife, but birds buck the trend. Can we help biodiversity take wing in our suburbs? | My backyard is a peaceful respite from the nearby city of Seattle. Eighty-year-old firs and cedars provide an emerald backdrop for the wildlife with which I share a single hectare of forest. Western tanagers sing from the canopy. Wrens, sparrows, towhees and juncos breed in the lower shrubs, while native red squirrels ... | John M Marzluff | https://aeon.co//essays/how-urbanisation-can-be-a-friend-to-the-biodiversity-of-birds | |
Mood and emotion | Does relentless enthusiasm really help the world, or should generation TED learn to take a more sceptical view? | I say ‘very’ rather than ‘super’. I think mountains are awesome but simply having the right money for my waiter is not. I don’t think I’m amazing: I don’t even believe I should think that. In sunny Silicon Valley, this moderate British scepticism makes me feel churlish and cynical. It certainly has no place at Googlepl... | Julian Baggini | https://aeon.co//essays/is-being-super-awesome-really-helping-anybody | |
Bioethics | The Milgram experiments showed that anybody could be capable of torture when obeying an authority. Are they still valid? | The year was 1960, and Dr Stanley Milgram had a theory about Germans. Only 27 years old, Milgram was a rising star in social psychology. He had just finished his doctorate work at Harvard on the phenomenon of conformity and begun a prestigious professorship at Yale. For his first experiment as a full-fledged academic, ... | Malcolm Harris | https://aeon.co//essays/is-it-time-to-stop-doing-any-more-milgram-experiments | |
Food and drink | It takes time to plan a meal, to say nothing of cooking and eating it. What if we could opt out of food altogether? | There are plenty of superpowers that would make a nice addition to my current lifestyle. I would be delighted to wake up one morning with the ability to fly, to become invisible, or even to turn matter into gold, provided my Midas touch came with a reliable on-off switch. But the superpower that I really want – the one... | Nicola Twilley | https://aeon.co//essays/how-many-of-us-would-opt-out-of-food-if-given-the-chance | |
Childhood and adolescence | Storms of doubt and change I expected as the parent of an adolescent, I just thought they would be hers, not mine | Every few weeks my daughter and I stand back-to-back in the kitchen, socks off, our bare feet cooling on the tiled floor, and we measure up. I can feel her body elongate itself against mine, squaring pre-teen shoulders on my sloping ones, our bottoms taut with tension. We look like a totem pole – bodies melded together... | Marina Benjamin | https://aeon.co//essays/my-adolescent-daughter-and-the-mirroring-of-myself | |
Information and communication | Public debate is afflicted by short-term thinking – how did history abdicate its role of inspiring the longer view? | It has long been fashionable to say that the globe is shrinking. In the wake of the telegraph, the steamship and the railway, thinkers from the late 19th century onwards often wrote of space and time being annihilated by new technologies. In our current age of jet travel and the internet, we often hear that the world i... | David Armitage & Jo Guldi | https://aeon.co//essays/the-role-of-history-in-a-society-afflicted-by-short-termism | |
Neuroscience | New brain implants can restore autonomy to damaged minds, but can they settle the question of whether free will exists? | About 20 years ago, a student in one of my courses began missing classes. After several weeks, she appeared in my office and said that she had a history of major depression, had experienced a relapse and had been committed to the psychiatric ward of the local hospital. She had lost her motivation to do things, she said... | Walter Glannon | https://aeon.co//essays/how-new-brain-implants-can-restore-and-enhance-free-will | |
Cosmology | Elon Musk argues that we must put a million people on Mars if we are to ensure that humanity has a future | ‘Fuck Earth!’ Elon Musk said to me, laughing. ‘Who cares about Earth?’ We were sitting in his cubicle, in the front corner of a large open-plan office at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles. It was a sunny afternoon, a Thursday, one of three designated weekdays Musk spends at SpaceX. Musk was laughing because he was jok... | Ross Andersen | https://aeon.co//essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-planet-civilisation | |
Biology | The DNA helix gave 20th-century biology its symbol. But the more we learn, the more life circles back to an older image | Here is a remarkable fact about identical twins: they have the same DNA, and therefore the same ‘genetic fingerprint’, yet their actual fingerprints (such as they might leave behind on a murder weapon) are different, and can be told apart in standard police observations. Fingerprints are, of course, produced by the pat... | Jamie Davies | https://aeon.co//essays/the-feedback-loop-is-a-better-symbol-of-life-than-the-helix | |
Death | It’s a modern dream that we can plan a good and peaceful death but what can we really do to meet the end of all we are? | For as far back as I can remember, I have been preoccupied with what it will be like to die. As a girl, I would often zone out on my bed, or at my desk in school, imagining that I was on the verge of death, and trying on a range of possible reactions: terror, confusion, grief. What I really hoped for in those moments o... | Mary Talbot | https://aeon.co//essays/in-a-secular-age-what-does-it-mean-to-die-a-good-death | |
Information and communication | To end inequality, we must realise that it isn’t about the rich, it’s about the poor. And we know almost nothing about them | Close observers of the development scene will have noticed an interesting shift over the past few years. Where once institutions such as the World Bank and charities like Oxfam described their goal as simply ‘ending poverty’, today they tend to frame things in terms of poverty and inequality. Well, that makes sense: do... | Claire Melamed | https://aeon.co//essays/to-end-inequality-we-must-understand-how-poverty-works | |
Cognition and intelligence | We are told that we are an irrational tangle of biases, to be nudged any which way. Does this claim stand to reason? | Humanity’s achievements and its self-perception are today at curious odds. We can put autonomous robots on Mars and genetically engineer malarial mosquitoes to be sterile, yet the news from popular psychology, neuroscience, economics and other fields is that we are not as rational as we like to assume. We are prey to a... | Steven Poole | https://aeon.co//essays/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-nudge-us | |
Anthropology | From fire-walking to the ice-bucket challenge, ritual pain and suffering forge intense social bonds | On the Day of Ashura, Shia Muslims around the world gather to mourn the Imam, Husayn ibn Ali, and his defeat in the battle of Karbala (in present-day Iraq) in 680 CE. They slash their heads and backs using swords or iron chains with blades until the streets are covered in blood. Every Good Friday, Catholics in the Phil... | Dimitris Xygalatas | https://aeon.co//essays/how-extreme-rituals-forge-intense-social-bonds | |
Bioethics | Some of the world’s most powerful conservationists are giving up on wilderness. They are making a big mistake | Several years ago, I asked a biologist friend what she thought of a recently fashionable notion in environmentalist circles: that pristine nature was an illusion, and our beloved wilderness an outdated construct that didn’t actually exist. She’d just finished her shift at the local boardwalk, a volunteer-tended path th... | Brandon Keim | https://aeon.co//essays/giving-up-on-wilderness-means-a-barren-future-for-the-earth | |
Illness and disease | In the battle against disease, the difference between a raging epidemic and a passing fever comes down to a single number | When Ronald Ross tipped over the water tank outside his bungalow in Bangalore, it began a lifelong battle against mosquitoes. It was 1883 and Ross, only two years out of medical school, was the British Army’s new garrison surgeon. Overall, he was happy with the posting – he considered the city, with its sun, gardens an... | Adam Kucharski | https://aeon.co//essays/how-mathematics-can-make-epidemics-history | |
Genetics | Cricketing dynasties seem to imply that talent is genetic. Yet the evidence from other sports queers the pitch | In their final Test match against Australia last winter, the England cricket team fielded two players — Stuart Broad and Jonny Bairstow — whose fathers also happened to play cricket for England. Non-aficionados might find this striking, but cricket fans scarcely turned a hair. After all, the previous year’s side featur... | David Papineau | https://aeon.co//essays/do-cricket-dynasties-prove-that-sporting-success-is-genetic | |
Art | Can today’s travel deliver on the promise of the Grand Tour – or is the idea of edifying travel utterly bankrupt? | I stood atop Mount Vesuvius with a small band of American classicists, reading a letter (it was not addressed to us but then that has never stopped classicists). This particular epistola was from Pliny the Younger to Tacitus and it recounted the great volcanic eruption during the reign of Titus that had incinerated, bu... | Ted Scheinman | https://aeon.co//essays/is-today-s-global-travel-any-better-than-the-grand-tour | |
Human rights and justice | Can humanitarian agencies still fly the flag of high principle, or are they just relics of an imperial model of charity? | I became an aid worker in the 1990s, just as the break-up of Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda cast a long shadow over the humanitarian sector. Those highly visible political failures were a major influence on my decision. I was possessed of a distressingly youthful belief that we could do better in the core humani... | Paul Currion | https://aeon.co//essays/humanitarianism-is-broken-but-it-can-be-fixed | |
Human reproduction | Most American boys are circumcised as a matter of course. Now, many of them feel violated. Should the practice be banned? | My first encounter with an ‘intactivist’ was in my freshman speech class. Our assignment was to sway our classmates on a contentious issue, and she opened her speech by asking if any man in the class still had his foreskin. I raised my hand. This being late 1990s America, only one other student joined me. ‘You’re lucky... | Rhys Southan | https://aeon.co//essays/if-you-were-circumcised-are-you-a-victim | |
Family life | Advice columns from decades past provide a chilling glimpse into the horrors of marriage counselling before feminism | In April this year, the Meredith Corporation announced that it would reduce Ladies’ Home Journal to a shadow of its former self. The venerable monthly publication, which has catered to middle-class, educated women since its founding in 1883, will now exist only as a website and a quarterly, news-stand-only edition. Thi... | Rebecca Onion | https://aeon.co//essays/the-warped-world-of-marriage-advice-before-feminism | |
Cognition and intelligence | Humans are wired for bad news, angry faces and sad memories. Is this negativity bias useful or something to overcome? | I have good news and bad news. Which would you like first? If it’s bad news, you’re in good company – that’s what most people pick. But why? Negative events affect us more than positive ones. We remember them more vividly and they play a larger role in shaping our lives. Farewells, accidents, bad parenting, financial l... | Jacob Burak | https://aeon.co//essays/humans-are-wired-for-negativity-for-good-or-ill | |
Information and communication | Predictive policing could help prevent crime. But do we want a future where computer oracles and spies track us from birth? | When a troubled young man named Adam Lanza stormed into Sandy Hook Elementary School and slaughtered 20 first-graders and six teachers in a small Connecticut suburb in December of 2012, a shroud of sorrow and confusion engulfed the United States and countries all over the world. Why were all these children murdered, an... | Henrick Karoliszyn | https://aeon.co//essays/do-we-really-want-to-use-predictive-policing-to-stop-crime | |
Neuroscience | When the storyline of one’s life hits a dead end, a redemption narrative offers an alluring, if dubious, transformation | People change, don’t they? That’s what everyone says. I once met a man who changed more than you could imagine. His name is John Pridmore. To see him was to know him, or so you’d think. Shaven head, goatee beard, heavy jewellery, black T-shirt, torso that looked more fat than muscle but no less intimidating for that. I... | Will Storr | https://aeon.co//essays/the-villainous-self-and-the-uses-of-redemption | |
Ethics | Do individuals have a right for their medical records to remain private after death, or can public interest prevail? | As I sat amid stacks of boxes in a stranger’s living room in Fairfield, California, back in 2008, I saw that my search was over. I had succeeded in a quest to track down the personal and professional papers of Douglas McGlashan Kelley, a psychiatrist who had examined the top Nazi prisoners held for the first war crimes... | Jack El-Hai | https://aeon.co//essays/do-we-have-a-right-to-medical-privacy-after-we-are-dead | |
Human rights and justice | The US gun lobby claims that guns save lives and keep us safe from criminals – what do social scientists say? | The first gun massacre in Blacksburg, Virginia, probably occurred on 8 July, 1755, when a group of native Americans entered Draper’s Meadow and killed four settlers – probably, because there are no rules as to how many killings make a massacre, and because the number of victims is disputed. Some historians have placed ... | Venkat Srinivasan | https://aeon.co//essays/the-us-gun-lobby-says-that-guns-save-lives-do-they | |
Biotechnology | From teen-targeting vampires to Lady Báthory’s bloodbaths, we love stories of stolen youth. What if it were possible? | Saul Villeda, who leads a stem-cell research lab at the University of California, San Francisco, is not concerned about a black market for baby blood. ‘You sound like my mother,’ he told an anxious reporter for the New York public radio station WNYC’s science programme Radiolab in an interview last year. ‘She’s worried... | Jess Zimmerman | https://aeon.co//essays/are-myths-about-the-rejuvenating-power-of-young-blood-true | |
Biology | A genome is not a blueprint for building a human being, so is there any way to judge whether DNA is junk or not? | Humans are astounding creatures, our unique and highly complex traits encoded by our genome – a vast sequence of DNA ‘letters’ (called nucleotides) directing the building and maintenance of the body and brain. Yet science has served up the confounding paradox that the bulk of our genome appears to be dead wood, biologi... | Itai Yanai & Martin Lercher | https://aeon.co//essays/our-genome-is-not-a-blueprint-for-making-humans-at-all |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.