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Illness and disease | The next pandemic will erupt, not from the jungle, but from the disease factories of hospitals, refugee camps and cities | The latest epidemic to terrify the Western world is Ebola, a virus that has killed hundreds in Africa in 2014 alone. No wonder there was so much worry when two infected health care workers from the United States were transported home from Liberia for treatment – why bring this plague to the US, exposing the rest of the... | Wendy Orent | https://aeon.co//essays/the-next-pandemic-will-be-nothing-like-ebola | |
Human rights and justice | My generation, once impassioned by the Western literature of rebellion, is now lulled by ‘Wealthy Socialism’ | When I first read the Chinese edition of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1988, I was a skinny 15-year-old girl who had lived all her life in a southern Chinese province surrounded by stubborn bamboo mountains. I was shocked by its opening lines, even without understanding them fully: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation des... | Xiaolu Guo | https://aeon.co//essays/why-my-generation-forgot-to-rebel-against-china-s-overlords | |
Cognition and intelligence | Movies and memoirs give us a romantic view of living with a child with Asperger’s but the reality is very different | In high school, my son Carson developed a fascination with Fred Phelps, the way a more typical teenager might obsess about the Marvel universe or The Vampire Diaries. Phelps, who died on March 19, was the bilious founder and leader of Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church, infamous for setting up godhatesfags, a website ded... | Kent Miller | https://aeon.co//essays/life-with-an-asperger-s-child-without-the-romantic-glow | |
Illness and disease | A second hurricane is battering New Orleans, this time it is an HIV catastrophe whipped up by prejudice and poverty | As far as aspirations go, MarkAlain Dery’s might seem strange: giving rapid, mouth-swab tests for human immunodeficiency virus to celebrities. ‘I’ll swab anything I can swab,’ says Dery. ‘My dream is to get L’il Wayne or some other big rapper.’ As he envisions it, the swabbing occurs in front of a large crowd of people... | Jessica Wapner | https://aeon.co//essays/how-new-orleans-became-america-s-ground-zero-for-hiv | |
Evolution | Why do laughter, smiles and tears look so similar? Perhaps because they all evolved from a single root | About four thousand years ago, somewhere in the Middle East — we don’t know where or when, exactly — a scribe drew a picture of an ox head. The picture was rather simple: just a face with two horns on top. It was used as part of an abjad, a set of characters that represent the consonants in a language. Over thousands o... | Michael Graziano | https://aeon.co//essays/the-original-meaning-of-laughter-smiles-and-tears | |
Neuroscience | Religion spawns both benevolent saints and murderous fanatics. Could dopamine levels in the brain drive that switch? | When I was 12, on family vacation in New Mexico, I watched a group of elaborately-costumed Navajo men belt out one intimidating song after the next. They executed a set of beautifully coordinated dance turns to honour the four cardinal directions, each one symbolising sacred gifts from the gods. Yet the tourist-packed ... | Patrick McNamara | https://aeon.co//essays/the-dopamine-switch-between-atheist-believer-and-fanatic | |
Illness and disease | And so I entered a new world where every tap, squeak, clang, whisper and consonant exploded and sizzled inside my head | When I woke up one morning and found I could hear nothing, my biggest sense of loss came from being unable to listen to my older brother and sister playing my favourite Diabelli duet. Down on the floor between my siblings’ feet, I tried desperately to retrieve something of the music by touching the piano body, but to l... | Josephine Dickinson | https://aeon.co//essays/a-deaf-musician-and-poet-receives-a-cochlear-implant | |
Addiction | The new science of addiction makes 12-step programmes seem like folk medicine. Is the concept of a higher power obsolete? | I hear a single voice as I walk up the steps to the meeting room. It reminds the men and women gathered in a half circle that, yes, they admitted powerlessness over alcohol, and that only a power greater than themselves could restore their sanity. Drunks-R-Us is held in a sunlit room at a liberal church in Berkeley, Ca... | Rebecca Ruiz | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-aa-is-out-of-step-with-research-on-addiction | |
Evolution | A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy | What sight could be more moving than a mother nursing her baby? What better icon could one find for love, intimacy and boundless giving? There’s a reason why the Madonna and Child became one of the world’s great religious symbols. To see this spirit of maternal generosity carried to its logical extreme, consider Diaea ... | Suzanne Sadedin | https://aeon.co//essays/why-pregnancy-is-a-biological-war-between-mother-and-baby | |
Astronomy | Where does earth end and space begin? Finding the border between the two is not as simple or scientific as you might think | Any time we embark upon a journey, be it a morning commute or a leisurely day trip, we engage in transition. We are a travelling species, which means transitions are commonplace for us, mundane even. But there are some trips that can still fire the human imagination, and none more so than the journey, experienced only ... | Greg Klerkx | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-it-so-hard-to-say-where-earth-ends-and-space-begins | |
Human rights and justice | The war on drugs was always a war against an idea. But ideas have a shelf-life, too, and this one has lost its potency | When the US President Richard Nixon announced his ‘war on drugs’ in 1971, there was no need to define the enemy. He meant, as everybody knew, the type of stuff you couldn’t buy in a drugstore. Drugs were trafficked exclusively on ‘the street’, within a subculture that was immediately identifiable (and never going to vo... | Mike Jay | https://aeon.co//essays/we-can-t-wage-war-on-drugs-we-don-t-know-what-they-are | |
Childhood and adolescence | Our first three years are usually a blur and we don’t remember much before age seven. What are we hiding from ourselves? | I’m the youngest by far of five children. My mother was 35 when she conceived me in 1951, so chagrined by this chronological indiscretion that she tried to hide the pregnancy from her sister. My mortified oldest brother didn’t want to tell his high-school friends that a new baby was on the way, but it was a small town.... | Kristin Ohlson | https://aeon.co//essays/where-do-children-s-earliest-memories-go | |
Information and communication | If Narcissus were here he’d be busy on Instagram. Can we have a virtuous sense of worth without the vanity of self-love? | People often seem to talk of self-respect, self-esteem, pride and vanity as if they are interchangeable, never mind the nuances of amour-propre, conceit, self-absorption and narcissism. We might talk about the ‘me’ generation, the addiction to selfies, or the overbearing politician in any of these terms. But this ignor... | Simon Blackburn | https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-cultivate-self-worth-without-the-vanity-of-self-love | |
Death | The death of a fly is utterly insignificant – or it’s a catastrophe. How much should we worry about what we squash? | This morning a tiny fly was, true to its name and nature, flying about in the vicinity of my desk. It really was very tiny – a fruit fly, I’d guess. At one point it landed in front of me. I brushed it aside and it resumed flitting about in its patternless path. Then it landed again, and again I aimed to brush it aside.... | Stephen Cave | https://aeon.co//essays/if-death-comes-for-everything-does-it-matter-what-we-kill | |
Ethics | Why bystanders are reluctant to report a violent crime or aid a victim, and how they can be taught to step up and help | Bethesda in the state of Maryland is the kind of safe, upscale Washington DC suburb that well-educated, high-earning professionals retreat to when it’s time to raise a family. Some 80 per cent of the city’s adult residents have college degrees. Bethesda’s posh Bradley Manor-Longwood neighbourhood was recently ranked th... | Dwyer Gunn | https://aeon.co//essays/why-don-t-people-come-to-the-rescue-of-victims-of-crime | |
Cognition and intelligence | Albert Einstein was a genius, but he wasn’t the only one – why has his name come to mean something superhuman? | Before he died, Albert Einstein requested that his whole body be cremated as soon as possible after death, and his ashes scattered in an undisclosed location. He didn’t want his mortal remains to be turned into a shrine, but his request was only partially heeded. Einstein’s closest friend, the economist Otto Nathan, di... | Matthew Francis | https://aeon.co//essays/how-did-albert-einstein-become-the-poster-boy-for-genius | |
Economics | To revive the global economy and make society more equal we should all consume more not less. How is this possible? | Westerners are constantly worrying about consuming too much and living too well. This is not a new concern. For at least the past 2,000 years we have worried about having to pay a price for prosperity. What is perhaps more surprising is that we continue to worry. During the first millennia of human existence, increases... | Florian Schui | https://aeon.co//essays/can-we-consume-our-way-to-a-fairer-more-prosperous-society | |
Fairness and equality | My daughter insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl and I’m her willing conspirator in updating the classics for our times | Almost six years ago, when I became a parent, one of my very few certainties was that I would read to my daughter. I had been an only child, and now I was raising one. I wanted my daughter to learn, as I had, that stories were sources of adventure, inspiration and constant, loyal companionship. So I read to my daughter... | Michelle Nijhuis | https://aeon.co//essays/my-daughter-says-bilbo-baggins-is-a-girl-who-am-i-to-argue | |
Architecture | The urge to tidy up cities is deadening – let’s celebrate the tangled chaos and honky-tonk energy that keep them alive | Whitechapel Underground Station in the East End of London is a long, wide trench, an unexpected burst of sunlight that comes just a couple of minutes after your train leaves the City. Being mostly subterranean, the Tube does not generally foster window-gazing, but here the raised, curious eye is magnificently rewarded.... | Will Wiles | https://aeon.co//essays/cities-thrive-most-when-they-are-a-tangled-mess | |
Mental health | Anorexia remains a deadly and mysterious illness. Could radical new brain treatments offer the possibility of a cure? | ‘Just try to explain to anyone the art of fasting! Anyone who has no feeling for it cannot be made to understand it.’ Franz Kafka: ‘A Hunger Artist’ (1922) Brenda Conley was 20 years old when she stopped eating. A simple statement, yet it defies comprehension. Why would a seemingly cheerful young woman from rural Ontar... | Kenneth Miller | https://aeon.co//essays/could-deep-brain-stimulation-be-a-cure-for-anorexia | |
Knowledge | When your reasons are worse than useless, sometimes the most rational choice is a random stab in the dark | We could start with birds, or we could start with Greeks. Each option has advantages.Let’s flip a coin. Heads and it’s the Greeks, tails and it’s the birds.Tails. In the 1970s, a young American anthropologist named Michael Dove set out for Indonesia, intending to solve an ethnographic mystery. Then a graduate student ... | Michael Schulson | https://aeon.co//essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly | |
Childhood and adolescence | Everyone thinks that too much praise can turn children into entitled monsters but the science isn’t nearly that simple | When I took my son to visit my parents in South Carolina six months ago, my father yelled out ‘Good job!’ after I finished rinsing some dishes one night. It was a running joke at my expense – I had earlier exclaimed ‘Good job!’ when my son ate a handful of blueberries, and then again later that evening when he leaned f... | Carlin Flora | https://aeon.co//essays/are-kids-today-praise-junkies-or-is-that-just-a-myth | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | When my life came crashing down I took shelter on my farm, surviving with 11th-century tools like the sickle and scythe | When there is a likelihood of even small amounts of snow, sleet or ice, I move my car to the top of the hill that shelters my farm. If I need to run errands during such times, I just walk up the hill to it. The car is old, our drive is steep and close to a quarter-mile long. Depending upon how deep the snow, and how of... | Keith Ferrell | https://aeon.co//essays/how-i-learnt-to-survive-like-an-11th-century-farmer | |
Philosophy of religion | Younger Christians may be ditching doctrines of fire and brimstone – but will Christianity ever get rid of hell entirely? | In December 2013, a hoax began circulating on the internet claiming that Pope Francis had called a Third Vatican Council that, among other things, purged a literal hell from Catholic doctrine. ‘This doctrine is incompatible with the infinite love of God,’ Francis purportedly said. ‘God seeks not to condemn but only to ... | Kathryn Gin Lum | https://aeon.co//essays/why-has-the-idea-of-hell-survived-so-long | |
Architecture | Twitter has log cabins and Facebook has graffiti — what do the offices of tech giants tell us about the future of work? | Social networks have changed radically during the past 10 years, and so have their offices. Second Life, which created a virtual world online, was one of the first social networks to thrive in the years after the 1999 dotcom crash, by allowing tech workers to escape mundane reality for elaborate fantasy. Facebook, the ... | Kate Losse | https://aeon.co//essays/what-facebook-s-office-design-tells-us-about-the-future-of-work | |
Economics | Costly new longevity drugs could help the wealthy live 120 years or more – but will everyone else die young? | The disparity between top earners and everyone else is staggering in nations such as the United States, where 10 per cent of people accounted for 80 per cent of income growth since 1975. The life you can pay for as one of the anointed looks nothing like the lot tossed to everyone else: living in a home you own on some ... | Linda Marsa | https://aeon.co//essays/will-new-drugs-mean-the-rich-live-to-120-and-the-poor-die-at-60 | |
Bioethics | Once you know what plankton can do, you’ll understand why fertilising the ocean with iron is not such a crazy idea | ‘Call me Victor,’ says the mustachioed scientist as he picks me up from the airport on a brisk, fall afternoon in Germany. Victor Smetacek is an esteemed marine biologist, but he’s decided to spend his golden years on an ambitious new pursuit. He has devised a plan to alter the mix of gases in Earth’s atmosphere, in or... | David Biello | https://aeon.co//essays/can-tiny-plankton-help-reverse-climate-change | |
History of ideas | Liberalism is not dead – its ideals are more important than ever – but it must change radically to survive in the future | Liberals are living in alarming times. A few years before his death in 2012, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm passed summary judgment on the future of liberal democracy. ‘None of the major problems facing humanity in the 21st century can be solved,’ he wrote in the British magazine Prospect, ‘by the principles that ... | Edmund Fawcett | https://aeon.co//essays/liberal-ideals-are-not-yet-dead-but-more-relevant-than-ever | |
Consciousness and altered states | Sleep paralysis has tormented me since childhood. But now it’s my portal to out-of-body travel and lucid dreams | Here I am, lying in bed. If you walk in now, you’ll think I’m sleeping. But I see you. Although my eyelids look shut, they are fluttering slightly. They are the only parts of me that I can move. I am fully conscious but I cannot shout out to you: my body is completely frozen. Everybody is paralysed during rapid eye mov... | Karen Emslie | https://aeon.co//essays/the-terror-and-the-bliss-of-sleep-paralysis | |
Biography and memoir | My black friends call it Murderland. My white friends call it Charm City, a town of trendy cafés. I just call it home | So I’m posted up, sharing a sandwich and a cigarette with a friend in one of the most dangerous neighbourhoods in America, and my phone buzzes. On the other end is one of my old professors asking me to tell one of my wild childhood stories at the Stoop Storytelling Series, at Center Stage in downtown Baltimore. A stoop... | D Watkins | https://aeon.co//essays/these-are-my-two-baltimores-black-and-white | |
Biology | We may think we are the first organisms to remake the planet, but life has been transforming the earth for aeons | One could easily be forgiven for thinking that life bears little connection to rocks. From high-school science curricula to Wikipedia, the institutional separation of geology and biology seems as ingrained today as when the 18th-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus first distinguished animals, vegetables, and mineral... | Robert Hazen | https://aeon.co//essays/how-life-made-the-earth-into-a-cosmic-marvel | |
History of ideas | How magical thinking haunts our everyday language, and fossilised ideas live on in even the most sophisticated science | Would you say that astrology is very scientific, sort of scientific, or not at all scientific? The question was asked in a survey in the United States, and according to Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 ‘slightly more than half of Americans said that astrology was “not at all scientific”’. The rest, almost 50 per... | Andrew Crumey | https://aeon.co//essays/magical-thinking-still-haunts-all-our-thoughts | |
Poverty and development | I went to Kenya to report on the lives of women living in poverty and I was given back the running I thought I’d lost | When you’re an American planning a trip to Africa, everyone tells you it will change your life. I certainly heard it more than once. Of course, I knew what they meant: change in the sense of the eye-opening that comes with travel. Seeing poverty. Being disconnected and out of one’s element. The intoxication of explorin... | Shannon Kelley | https://aeon.co//essays/how-kenya-helped-me-over-my-runner-s-block | |
Evolution | When it comes to sex, will humans ever be liberated from the basic biological needs that drove our evolutionary past? | Literature tells us that our desires know no reason. We read Racine’s Phaedra or Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and we see people captured by passion, acting in defiance of all sense or explanation. But science is never satisfied with ineluctable mystery, even in the realm of desire. During the past four decades, rese... | Neil McArthur | https://aeon.co//essays/will-human-sexuality-ever-be-free-from-stone-age-impulses | |
Food and drink | A carbs-rich diet has been blamed for the alarming explosion of obesity and chronic disease. What does the science show? | A decade ago, I said goodbye to wheat. I had been carrying around 15 extra pounds since high school and I was sick of it. A friend claimed that going wheat-free helped her lose weight and feel more energetic. A diet that didn’t require counting calories? Sounded good to me, so I gave it a shot. Six months later, those ... | Melinda Wenner Moyer | https://aeon.co//essays/is-there-any-real-science-behind-the-low-carb-paleo-diet | |
Logic and probability | From a big lottery win to a disaster like the Titanic, unlikely stuff happens all the time. But can we summon it at will? | Statisticians tell us that the chances of winning the lottery are incredibly small – for the UK National Lottery, for example, around one in 14 million per ticket. That’s about the same probability as seeing a flipped fair coin come up 24 heads in a row, and far less than your chances of being killed by a meteorite. An... | David Hand | https://aeon.co//essays/how-come-the-improbable-is-so-commonplace | |
Work | How the strange history of the ‘dude’ helps throw a light on why the West still feels like the real America | The best part about a dude ranch takes place behind the scenes. Having been up since dawn collecting the horses for the day’s rides, the wranglers eat breakfast. Their plates are heaping, and the portions fit for a teenage boy, which several of them are. And they put Tabasco on everything – eggs, sure; hashbrowns, of c... | Anne Helen Petersen | https://aeon.co//essays/the-strange-history-of-the-dude-and-the-american-west | |
Bioethics | The rules on doping in sport are incoherent – should we change them to allow the right kind of performance enhancement? | Nothing is more reviled in sport now than doping. The US cyclist Lance Armstrong is not just bad – in the eyes of the media he is practically a monster: ‘singularly evil’, and ‘worse than shameless’. His body, once a modern miracle for beating cancer and winning the Tour de France seven times, is now ‘worthless’ and hi... | Julian Savulescu | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-should-legalise-most-doping-in-sport | |
Earth science and climate | We are running out of land for traditional agriculture. Time to figure out what saltwater plants can do for us | Ever since ancient times, the sowing of salt has been synonymous with severe and deadly retribution. The Roman general Scipio Africanus the Younger was said to have ended the Third Punic War in 146BC by razing Carthage, enslaving its population and spreading salt on its fields. In the biblical book of Judges (9:45), th... | Mark Anderson | https://aeon.co//essays/are-halophytes-the-crop-of-the-future | |
Anthropology | Every culture looks for creative inspiration to other cultures, but is there a point when this is just outright theft? | I committed my first act of cultural appropriation when I was three years old. I was given a keffiyeh, the checkered scarf that is a symbol of Palestinian nationalism. My grandmother had more important things to worry about than Middle Eastern politics, and keffiyehs were readily available in the markets in Dubai where... | Nabeelah Jaffer | https://aeon.co//essays/the-line-between-creativity-and-stealing-from-another-culture | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | Thanks to new technology, sex toys are becoming tools for connection – but will sexbots reverse that trend? | There is only one true sexbot that you can go out and buy today. Her name is Roxxxy, and she is a ‘robot companion’ intended to look human, or something very close. She’s 5’7” and slender. She’s got a wide range of hair and eye colours. And depending on the model you choose, she can ‘hear’ you, ‘talk’ to you, and ‘feel... | Leah Reich | https://aeon.co//essays/how-will-sexbots-change-the-way-we-relate-to-one-another | |
Ethics | Are you surrounded by fools? Are you the only reasonable person around? Then maybe you’re the one with the jerkitude | Picture the world through the eyes of the jerk. The line of people in the post office is a mass of unimportant fools; it’s a felt injustice that you must wait while they bumble with their requests. The flight attendant is not a potentially interesting person with her own cares and struggles but instead the most availab... | Eric Schwitzgebel | https://aeon.co//essays/so-you-re-surrounded-by-idiots-guess-who-the-real-jerk-is | |
Language and linguistics | A push for English to be the official language of the US has both a dark history and a regressive vision for the future | ‘English-only’ advocacy in the United States dates at least as far back as 1919, when President Theodore Roosevelt declared: ‘We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as... | Eric C Miller | https://aeon.co//essays/why-would-the-us-make-english-an-official-language | |
Art | In their blind variations of senseless combinations, artists and Bitcoin miners both reach for a kind of grace | The first time I went to visit a pair of former artillery sheds on the outskirts of Marfa, Texas, the sun was high in the sky and I knew very little about what I was about to see. The second time, the sun was setting and I knew a bit more, and everything was completely different. The contents of the sheds are officiall... | Ned Beauman | https://aeon.co//essays/artists-and-bitcoin-miners-alike-find-grace-through-brute-force | |
Public health | The great allies of infectious diseases are no longer poverty, nor dirt, but the global anti-vaccination movement | Polio should have been eradicated long ago, at least in the developed world. After all, we’ve had a good, efficient vaccine for 60 years. So why is polio still here? And what is it doing in my country? Israel is the original start-up nation, powered by high-tech and science, with some of the most sophisticated medical ... | Keren Landsman | https://aeon.co//essays/how-anti-vaxxers-fuel-the-spread-of-polio | |
Addiction | The fear of missing out haunts our social networks and our real lives alike. But there is a way to break free | Here’s a test you might enjoy: rate these scenarios on a number scale, ranging from 1 for mild discomfort to 7 for outrageous distress. Scenario 1: you’re flicking through news websites, as you do every morning. Today, however, you’re behind schedule and have only 15 minutes to read articles, instead of your usual 30. ... | Jacob Burak | https://aeon.co//essays/can-we-break-free-from-the-fear-of-missing-out | |
Food and drink | Wine is an elixir, a miracle-worker and shapeshifter – no wonder even the most secular of us hold it sacred still | I should start by saying that I’m not a wine critic. I can be counted on to keep a few bottles on hand, but I don’t have a cellar or a special refrigerator, or different glasses for whites and reds. I know the sensory sequence of wine tasting – I don’t slug the stuff back like a shot of tequila. I make my wine into a s... | Ross Andersen | https://aeon.co//essays/even-in-a-secular-age-wine-remains-a-sacred-elixir | |
Gender and identity | For centuries a woman’s tears have been the sign of her humanity. So what happens when they dry up altogether? | I realised that I could no longer cry one Wednesday afternoon as I tore around a department store, desperately trying to find Christmas presents at a time when it felt as if my life was falling apart. I didn’t have time to stop and cry, so I just carried on shopping with tears streaming down my face. Except they weren’... | Clare Bayley | https://aeon.co//essays/the-woman-who-cannot-cry-is-she-an-unfeeling-stone | |
Mental health | PTSD has come to signify the moral, social and political suffering of war. But not all suffering is a mental illness | At the beginning of the First World War, my grandfather, Gwilym Jones, was a medical orderly and stretcher-bearer at Ypres in Belgium, where some of the fiercest fighting took place. I imagine him, knee-deep in waterlogged trenches, struggling to lift a wounded man or staggering through shell holes, trying not to trip ... | Lynne Jones | https://aeon.co//essays/the-more-we-label-every-trauma-with-ptsd-the-less-it-means | |
Cosmology | We can point to our home on a globe and find Earth in a model of the solar system but where are we in the Milky Way? | Every few months, the artist Jon Lomberg kneels next to a croton plant, removes the cheap earring that pierces a speckle on one of its leaves, and fastens a new yellow stud into the same hole. This, he says, pointing to the stud, represents the Sun. He is standing 30ft from the middle of the 100-ft-wide Galaxy Garden i... | Sarah Scoles | https://aeon.co//essays/do-you-know-where-you-are-in-the-milky-way | |
Beauty and aesthetics | Scientists prize elegant theories, but a taste for simplicity is a treacherous guide. And it doesn’t even look good | Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity is a century old next year and, as far as the test of time is concerned, it seems to have done rather well. For many, indeed, it doesn’t merely hold up: it is the archetype for what a scientific theory should look like. Einstein’s achievement was to explain gravity as a ge... | Philip Ball | https://aeon.co//essays/beauty-is-truth-there-s-a-false-equation | |
Childhood and adolescence | Between the ages of 8 and 12 many kids fall in love with a sports team, but what makes that love last a lifetime? | When I arrived at Q’s bar on Wilshire Boulevard in Brentwood, I walked past a row of beer taps and pool tables and up a flight of stairs that led to a large cordoned-off room draped in navy blue stars. I had on a grey sweatshirt and, as I shuffled in, I could feel the eyes of the room glance curiously in my direction. ... | Flinder Boyd | https://aeon.co//essays/how-sports-fans-stay-in-love-all-through-the-highs-and-lows | |
Cities | Crowds aren’t really crazed – they are made of highly co-operative individuals driven to shared interests and goals | There’s nothing like a riot to bring out the amateur psychologist in all of us. Consider what happened in August 2011, after police killed Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old man from the London suburb of Tottenham. Thousands took to the streets of London and other English towns in the UK’s worst outbreak of civil unrest in a g... | Michael Bond | https://aeon.co//essays/the-surprising-psychology-of-the-compassionate-crowd | |
Pleasure and pain | Nobody wants to go back in time, but did we lose our sense of sympathy when we lost the shared experience of pain? | In 1812, the English novelist Frances Burney described her mounting terror as she prepared to undergo a mastectomy without any anaesthetic. Having two hours to wait until the dreaded event (her ‘execution’, as she put it), she wandered into the room where the operation was going to take place and ‘recoiled’. In an effo... | Joanna Bourke | https://aeon.co//essays/how-doctors-turned-away-from-their-patients-stories-of-pain | |
Animals and humans | Humans are fascinated by our fellow animals – is that just an evolutionary hangover or something more profound? | I like zoos. Really I do. I applaud today’s zoological parks for their increasing emphasis on naturalistic exhibits, their breeding programmes for endangered species, and their efforts to educate the public about wildlife conservation. But the truth is, I mainly like zoos for the same reason that other people do: becau... | David P Barash | https://aeon.co//essays/why-did-humans-evolve-to-be-so-fascinated-with-other-animals | |
Fairness and equality | Democracies are notoriously short-sighted. With one simple device, we could give unborn citizens a say in our present | Given the ferocity with which he opposed it, the Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke is not often accused of radicalism. Yet here he is, writing in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): Society is indeed a contract… a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living... | Thomas Wells | https://aeon.co//essays/we-need-to-listen-to-our-future-citizens-here-s-how-to-tune-in | |
Illness and disease | HIV is preventable, yet it’s still with us. Is it time for all, gay and straight, to stop framing sex as a lethal weapon? | My friend Dave died twice. He died the way we fall asleep and fall in love, lose our money or lose our way: slowly and then all at once. He died of HIV of the body. And he died of HIV of the mind. A Jersey kid who loved trains and got a job as a subway conductor, Dave was infected with HIV at age 20 in the early 1980s,... | Jill Neimark | https://aeon.co//essays/hiv-is-preventable-so-why-can-t-we-get-infection-rates-down | |
Biology | The oceans of Jupiter’s ice worlds might be swimming with life – so why do we keep sending robots to Mars? | The robots come to Mars out of a sky tinged peach from whirlwind-lofted dust. They cut through the thin, cold air in supersonic aeroshells and parachutes, making planetfall in bouncing airbag cocoons and bursts of braking retrorockets, bristling with cameras and spectrometers, antennas and manipulator arms. Some stay w... | Lee Billings | https://aeon.co//essays/forget-mars-s-deserts-let-s-look-for-life-in-europa-s-ocean | |
Logic and probability | Buddhist philosophy is full of contradictions. Now modern logic is learning why that might be a good thing | Western philosophers have not, on the whole, regarded Buddhist thought with much enthusiasm. As a colleague once said to me: ‘It’s all just mysticism.’ This attitude is due, in part, to ignorance. But it is also due to incomprehension. When Western philosophers look East, they find things they do not understand – not l... | Graham Priest | https://aeon.co//essays/the-logic-of-buddhist-philosophy-goes-beyond-simple-truth | |
Art | Ai Weiwei is back in production with his Fake studio and his team of assistants. What does art mean now to the dissident? | When I sit down with Ai Weiwei, the first thing he does is aim his iPhone at me. We are in Ai’s cathedral-like home-cum-studio, in the dusty village of Caochangdi, on Beijing’s outskirts. Winter sunlight streams through vast windows into an expansive room, sparsely decorated with a large potted ginkgo tree and a headle... | Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore | https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-art-mean-now-to-the-mercurial-ai-weiwei | |
Chemistry | Human fat cells can be used to regenerate damaged hearts and ageing joints. So should we start piling on the pounds? | ‘Why don’t you use fat?’ I stared at Keith, not quite sure whether he was serious or just kidding. Did he really think we could use fat to regenerate the heart? I had joined Keith March’s research laboratory at Indiana University as a postdoctoral fellow in the summer of 2001. At the time, his group was trying to impro... | Jalees Rehman | https://aeon.co//essays/engineering-human-fat-to-heal-hearts-and-joints | |
Biology | Why does life resist disorder? Because ever since the first replicating molecules, another kind of stability has beckoned | Biology is wondrously strange – so familiar, yet so strikingly different to physics and chemistry. We know where we are with inanimate matter. Ever since Isaac Newton, it has answered to a basically mechanical view of nature, blindly following its laws without regard for purposes. But could there be, as Immanuel Kant p... | Addy Pross | https://aeon.co//essays/paradoxes-of-stability-how-life-began-and-why-it-can-t-rest | |
Demography and migration | Libertarians are united by opposition to government, but when it comes to planning a new society they are deeply divided | For a country where the national flag flies from front porches and convenience stores and where children recite the Pledge of Allegiance each morning at school, we’re remarkably resistant to the notion of being governed. In the fall of 2013, the Pew Research Center found that only three in ten Americans trust the feder... | Livia Gershon | https://aeon.co//essays/what-happens-when-libertarians-try-to-build-a-new-society | |
Sex and sexuality | Gritty, emotional, smelly and dirty: new evidence supports Freud’s long-debunked theory that sex fuels our dreams | When I was a hormone-addled adolescent in the late 1960s and early ’70s, I would often look up at a poster of Sigmund Freud on my brother’s bedroom wall. The title on the portrait – something like ‘Freud: explorer of the unconscious and discoverer of the meaning of dreams’ – depicted a hero of intellectual freedom and ... | Patrick McNamara | https://aeon.co//essays/was-freud-right-about-dreams-all-along | |
Human rights and justice | You know that censorship has won its war on truth-telling when journalists happily police themselves | I majored in journalism in California and interned at four daily newspapers in the US. I had watched Shattered Glass (2003), the chronicle of The New Republic journalist Stephen Glass’s elaborate fabrications in the 1990s, in two college classes: each viewing was followed up with an ethics discussion. One instructor wa... | Leslie Anne Jones | https://aeon.co//essays/how-i-caved-to-censorship-in-china-and-why-i-am-not-alone | |
Astronomy | The lunar phases influence all sorts of creatures from corals to eagle owls. Does the Moon tug on human behaviour too? | The eagle owls began to call at dusk, right around the time the full Moon started to rise in the east. Watching and listening were the ecologist Vincenzo Penteriani and his crew. They would be up all night, trying to learn more about the behaviour of these owls, Europe’s largest, with wings that could spread across a k... | Cameron Walker | https://aeon.co//essays/do-the-phases-of-the-moon-affect-human-behaviour | |
Cosmopolitanism | World government is back, in geopolitics and in the academy, but what does the future hold for it? | Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), recently tried a new tack in his campaign to free Britain from the ‘shackles’ of European Union membership. The EU, he said, should not be viewed as a mutually beneficial economic and political union of 28 countries, but ‘as a prototype for those... | Luis Cabrera | https://aeon.co//essays/could-a-world-government-actually-work | |
Biography and memoir | Vertigo knocked me out of whack. Now, when people talk of finding equilibrium, I want to hit them with my walking stick | In my dreams, I walk like a normal person. I even run and skip. Sometimes I jump rope. I went through a whole series of diving dreams – making the perfect approach on the diving board, then the heavy step that vaults you into the air twisting and turning and performing a perfect forward dive with a double twist. I ente... | Rachel Dickinson | https://aeon.co//essays/thrown-for-a-loop-a-memoir-of-vertigo | |
Childhood and adolescence | Living with your parents, single and with no clear career. Is this a failure to grow up or a whole new stage of life? | I will readily admit, it took me a long time to grow up. I graduated from Michigan State University in 1980 at the age of 23 with a freshly printed bachelor’s degree in psychology and no idea what I really wanted to do. I’d learned to play guitar in college and, intent on avoiding the drudgery of a crummy low-paying jo... | Jeffrey Jensen Arnett | https://aeon.co//essays/still-living-with-your-parents-don-t-you-want-to-grow-up | |
Human rights and justice | We know solitary confinement annihilates the minds of its victims — but what does it do to the rest of us? | I first met Five Omar Mualimm-ak at a forum on solitary confinement in New York City. He wore track shoes with his tailored suit. ‘As long as the Prison Industrial Complex keeps running, so will I,’ he explained. After hearing him speak about the connections between racism, poverty, mass incarceration and police violen... | Lisa Guenther | https://aeon.co//essays/why-solitary-confinement-degrades-us-all | |
Demography and migration | My connection to place is fluid and complex. In a nomadic world, do we still need a home? | There was a time – I was still young, in my mid-20s – when I thought I was going to be a perennial traveller, a woman without a country or permanent address, a vagabond. Not that I was ever the backpacker type. I liked lace blouses and high heels too much. In my fantasy image of myself, I floated from place to place in... | Ruth Behar | https://aeon.co//essays/where-is-home-for-the-child-of-nomads | |
Consciousness and altered states | How did enlightenment thinkers distinguish between ‘drugs’ and ‘medicines’? And how should we? | My sister is a witch. Or, more precisely, a Wiccan astrologer and tarot reader. Growing up as a kid who worshipped Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, I found it hard to square her worldview with my own. But that didn’t stop me from feeling a thrill when I visited her shabbily ornate, mist-clad Victorian house in San Franc... | Benjamin Breen | https://aeon.co//essays/how-yesterday-s-drugs-become-tomorrow-s-medicines | |
War and peace | When soldiers kill in war, the secret shame and guilt they bring back home can destroy them | November 2004, against a shattered wall in south Fallujah in Iraq, with video rolling, I conduct a battlefield interview with US Marine Corporal William Wold. He has just shot six men dead inside a room adjoining a mosque and is juiced with a mix of adrenaline and relief. He describes the 30-second sequence with a prof... | Kevin Sites | https://aeon.co//essays/how-do-soldiers-live-with-their-feelings-of-guilt | |
Biology | To breed condors in captivity, we must pull on the strings of nature. But does that matter if we save a species? | The condors wouldn’t leave Les Reid alone. In the late 1990s, a pack of them regularly showed up at his house in Pine Mountain Club, California, a small community northwest of Los Angeles. They clambered around on his roof, making a racket. They perched, one by one, on his large patio umbrella, seeming to enjoy the slo... | Lizzie Wade | https://aeon.co//essays/condors-bred-in-captivity-need-our-tough-love | |
Logic and probability | Some philosophers think maths exists in a mysterious other realm. They’re wrong. Look around: you can see it | What is mathematics about? We know what biology is about; it’s about living things. Or more exactly, the living aspects of living things – the motion of a cat thrown out of a window is a matter for physics, but its physiology is a topic for biology. Oceanography is about oceans; sociology is about human behaviour in th... | James Franklin | https://aeon.co//essays/aristotle-was-right-about-mathematics-after-all | |
Politics and government | To understand Crimea, we need an evolutionary theory of national honour. It’s irrational and deadly – but it works | When Russia annexed Crimea in March, American policymakers were taken by surprise. They shouldn’t have been, argued the political theorist John J Mearsheimer in a New York Times op-ed. After all: ‘Mr Putin’s behaviour is motivated by the same geopolitical considerations that influence all great powers, including the Un... | Peter Turchin | https://aeon.co//essays/why-national-honour-trumps-rational-strategy | |
Illness and disease | Bipolar disorder can rage through life like a hurricane. So why does the US healthcare system leave us to cope alone? | I used to have a twangy guitar riff as the ringtone for Hank, a holdover from the days when we were lovers and he delighted me with music and a soft, southern-inflected singing voice. We didn’t talk often since I’d distanced myself from him after he returned to the kind of heavy drinking that had landed him in rehab sh... | Kristin Ohlson | https://aeon.co//essays/bipolar-disorder-tore-my-friend-s-life-to-shreds | |
Astronomy | An eternal electric day is creeping across the globe, but our brains and bodies cannot cope in a world without darkness | Sound dominated my senses as we left the village of San Pedro de Atacama and walked into the desert night. The crunch of shoes on gravel underlay our voices, which were hushed to avoid waking any households or street dogs. Our small group of astronomy writers was escaping from light and, without any flashlights or stre... | Rebecca Boyle | https://aeon.co//essays/we-can-t-thrive-in-a-world-without-darkness | |
Automation and robotics | When is it ethical to hand our decisions over to machines? And when is external automation a step too far? | For the French philosopher Paul Virilio, technological development is inextricable from the idea of the accident. As he put it, each accident is ‘an inverted miracle… When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you... | Tom Chatfield | https://aeon.co//essays/can-we-design-machines-to-make-ethical-decisions | |
Consciousness and altered states | Researchers are giving psychedelics to cancer patients to help alleviate their despair — and it’s working | On a bone-chilling morning in February last year, Nick Fernandez bundled up and took the subway from his Manhattan apartment to the Bluestone Center for Clinical Research, which is located in an art deco-style building on the Lower East Side. A 27-year-old graduate student in psychology with dark, wavy hair and delicat... | Linda Marsa | https://aeon.co//essays/how-psychedelics-are-helping-cancer-patients-fend-off-despair | |
Economics | For years, economists have laboured on the riddle of happiness. If they studied misery, they might get somewhere | There has, over the past couple of decades, been a remarkable boom in economic research into happiness. Strangely enough, it might have originated in remarks made in the early 1970s by Jigme Singye Wangchuck at the time of his coronation as absolute monarch of Bhutan, one of the poorest countries on Earth. Questioned a... | John Quiggin | https://aeon.co//essays/misery-has-far-more-to-teach-us-than-happiness-does | |
Biography and memoir | Finding my dad was an act of self-discovery: it took furtive phone calls, conjured siblings – and the power to transcend death | I spoke with my father only once that I remember. I was 18, and it was the fall of 1990. I knew his name, I knew that he’d once lived in Houston, and beyond that, I knew almost nothing. I called information, and the operator rattled off my father’s number. My hand shook as I wrote it down. I dialled it over and over, h... | Julie Rehmeyer | https://aeon.co//essays/my-father-died-without-knowing-me-but-at-least-i-know-him | |
Beauty and aesthetics | The pleasure we take in beauty must have been shaped by evolution — but what adaptive advantage did it give us? | In every culture on Earth, people decorate their possessions and themselves, and enjoy visual art. They stare in awe at vast landscapes and the starry sky, and they sing and dance, and make instrumental music. Why? The answer seems obvious: it gives them pleasure. But why should it? What benefit does the capacity for a... | Mohan Matthen | https://aeon.co//essays/how-did-evolution-shape-the-human-appreciation-of-beauty | |
Neurodiversity | I was 17 when concussion put me on the bench for good. Only now do we understand how sports injuries affect the mind | It’s a late summer day in 1998 during pre-season training for the women’s soccer team at Seattle University. I’m 17 years old, a freshman fullback on the up-and-coming National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) team. After a lackluster start, I’m working to prove myself. I’ve let nerves shake my confidenc... | Rebecca Ruiz | https://aeon.co//essays/just-one-concussion-blew-the-whistle-on-the-game-i-loved | |
Art | If you express your creativity while other people go hungry, you’re probably not making the world a better place | With less than a week to finish my screenplay for the last round of a big screenwriting competition, I stepped on a train with two members of a growing activism movement called Effective Altruism. Holly Morgan was the managing director for The Life You Can Save, an organisation that encourages privileged Westerners to ... | Rhys Southan | https://aeon.co//essays/art-is-a-waste-of-time-or-so-effective-altruism-claims | |
Public health | A diagnosis of mental illness is more common than ever – did psychiatrists create the problem, or just recognise it? | When a psychiatrist meets people at a party and reveals what he or she does for a living, two responses are typical. People either say, ‘I’d better be careful what I say around you,’ and then clam up, or they say, ‘I could talk to you for hours,’ and then launch into a litany of complaints and diagnostic questions, usu... | Joseph Pierre | https://aeon.co//essays/do-psychiatrists-really-think-that-everyone-is-crazy | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | As kids, we make secret worlds – in trees, in our imaginations, even online – but can we go back to them when we’re grown? | When I was 14, I spent a huge amount of time on the internet, but not the internet we know today. It was 1994, so while the world wide web existed, it wasn’t generally accessible. Prodigy and CompuServe were popular, and AOL was on the rise, but I didn’t have access to the web, and no one I knew had access to the web. ... | Robin Sloan | https://aeon.co//essays/before-minecraft-or-snapchat-there-was-micromuse | |
Mood and emotion | Sadness makes us seem nobler, more elegant, more adult. Which is pretty weird, when you think about it | I was listening to Paul Simon’s Hearts and Bones album recently, for the first time in many years – the first time, really, since I was a young teenager. I bought it when it came out in 1983 and listened to it over and over. But hearing it again, and particularly listening to the title track, I was struck by a question... | Adam Roberts | https://aeon.co//essays/why-does-sadness-inspire-great-art-when-happiness-cannot | |
Ethics | What happens to life sentences if our lifespan is radically extended? A philosopher talks about future punishment | Even in my most religious moments, I have never been able to take the idea of hell seriously. Prevailing Christian theology asks us to believe that an all-powerful, all-knowing being would do what no human parent could ever do: create tens of billions of flawed and fragile creatures, pluck out a few favourites to showe... | Ross Andersen | https://aeon.co//essays/how-will-radical-life-extension-transform-punishment | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | The invasion has already begun: the only question is when, not if, humanoid robots will work, play and war beside us | What does the word ‘robot’ bring to mind for you? There’s a good chance it’s some character from science fiction. C3PO from Star Wars, maybe, or, if you’re more pessimistically minded, the killing machine from the Terminator movies. The concept of high-tech machines shaped like humans has been with us for the better pa... | Michael Belfiore | https://aeon.co//essays/meet-darpa-s-new-generation-of-humanoid-robots | |
Biology | Is it time to kill off the idea of the ‘Selfish Gene’? We asked four experts to respond to our most controversial essay | I can vividly remember reading The Selfish Gene in my local library as a teenager: it was both a page-turner and something of a conversion experience. Richard Dawkins’s explanation of the unsparing reality of evolution blew like a cold, refreshing wind through everything I thought I knew about human nature, and is one ... | David Dobbs, John Dupré, Karen James and others | https://aeon.co//essays/dead-or-alive-an-expert-roundtable-on-the-selfish-gene | |
Cognition and intelligence | Why do we listen to our favourite music over and over again? Because repeated sounds work magic in our brains | What is music? There’s no end to the parade of philosophers who have wondered about this, but most of us feel confident saying: ‘I know it when I hear it.’ Still, judgments of musicality are notoriously malleable. That new club tune, obnoxious at first, might become toe-tappingly likeable after a few hearings. Put the ... | Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis | https://aeon.co//essays/why-repetition-can-turn-almost-anything-into-music | |
Information and communication | The internet promised to feed our minds with knowledge. What have we learned? That our minds need more than that | On my morning bus into town, every teenager and every grown-up sits there staring into their little infinity machine: a pocket-sized window onto more words than any of us could ever read, more music than we could ever listen to, more pictures of people getting naked than we could ever get off to. Until a few years ago,... | Dougald Hine | https://aeon.co//essays/how-can-we-be-bored-when-we-have-google | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Animals aren’t tools for thinking. Animals are some of the basic building blocks of thought itself | I don’t recall reading poetry as a child. My father had some Betjeman and a tattered paperback of A P Wavell’s Other Men’s Flowers on the bookshelves under the stairs and, while I remember looking at the covers, I don’t think I opened them. Then, at the age of 13, our English teacher handed out two books, The Selected ... | Mark Haddon | https://aeon.co//essays/animals-have-things-to-say-they-re-just-not-saying-them-to-us | |
Rituals and celebrations | The problem with our society is not that it values material things too much but that it doesn’t value them enough | On my desk stands a miniature of an Easter Island moai, carved for me by a Rapa Nui craftsman. It’s precious to me, hewn from the same stone his ancestors used for the world-famous monoliths, textured with the tiny air-bubbles of millennia-old lava, and carrying memories of the friends I made on my voyage there. On ano... | Nick Thorpe | https://aeon.co//essays/we-should-love-material-things-more-than-we-do-now-not-less | |
Human rights and justice | The suicide statistics, squalor and recidivism haven’t ended solitary confinement. Maybe the brain studies will | Heavy-set, with a soft-jowled face, King has a distinctly ursine air about him. We first meet at a Wendy’s in downtown Brooklyn, his teddy-bearishness rounded out by a plushy layer of cocoa-coloured velour tracksuit with a matching hoodie, T-shirt, and beanie hat. He is a garrulous, flirty raconteur. He leans in close ... | Shruti Ravindran | https://aeon.co//essays/this-is-what-solitary-confinement-does-to-the-brain | |
Consciousness and altered states | On Mars I learned that boredom has two sides – it can either rot the mind or rocket it to new places | What follows is an account of an instance where I, a person of relatively sound mind and body, could not believe the evidence before my own eyes. It might not have been a hallucination that I experienced, but it was surely a great jolt of consciousness. The scene: I’m in my closet-sized cabin, inside a white dome built... | Kate Greene | https://aeon.co//essays/what-four-months-on-mars-taught-me-about-boredom | |
Earth science and climate | One tree at a time, forests are edging out the world’s mountain meadows. Can we save these islands of diversity? | On a summer afternoon, the scene near the top of Washington’s Sauk Mountain appears utterly serene. Open meadows sweep downward, overrun with wildflowers and humming with snowberry checkerspot and silvery blue butterflies. In the distance, the Sauk River curves around the base of the Cascade Range. Spindly columbines, ... | Roberta Kwok | https://aeon.co//essays/one-invading-tree-at-a-time-mountain-meadows-disappear | |
Language and linguistics | In a world that converses only in English, we’ll talk only of banal things: that’s why I want my children to be bilingual | My greatest fear growing up in the wilds of the French countryside, south of the Loire Valley, was that my English mother would speak to me in her native tongue and do so loudly. I could just about forgive her wilting straw hats and translucent dresses – when the phalanx of local mothers at the school gates wore wipeab... | Ben Faccini | https://aeon.co//essays/a-monoglot-world-speaking-mongrel-english | |
Cognition and intelligence | Pain and suffering are not just incidental elements of the sporting life: they are at the centre of every game | The history of sport is full of suffering. In 1973, the boxer Muhammad Ali fought with a broken jaw for at least four rounds during his first historic bout with Ken Norton. In 1993, the American footballer Emmitt Smith played the entire second half of an NFL game with a first-degree separated shoulder, his arm hanging ... | Michael Thomsen | https://aeon.co//essays/sport-without-pain-is-no-fun-suffering-is-intrinsic-to-play |
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