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Education | My six-year-old son was suspended as a danger to others. His crime? A disability you could find in any classroom | A few months ago, my son, who is in second grade, went on a field trip. As the class assembled in the parking lot, a new child joined in. He had metal leg braces and difficulty walking. Nobody quite knew how to talk to him and so he was left by himself at the edge of the crowd. But my son seemed drawn to him. As the li... | Michael Graziano | https://aeon.co//essays/how-a-common-disability-got-my-son-kicked-out-of-school | |
Oceans and water | Earth’s oceans are beginning to warm and turn acidic, endangering plankton and the entire marine food chain | At the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, snowdrifts piled up outside shuttered T-shirt shops, and wind and whitecaps lashed vessels tethered to empty piers in the harbour. The flood of sun-tanned tourists and research students that descends on this place in summer was still months away. T... | Peter Brannen | https://aeon.co//essays/why-plankton-is-the-canary-in-the-coal-mine-of-our-oceans | |
Public health | Disabled people in modern China are still stigmatised, marginalised and abused. What hope is there for reform? | Willy hated dirty things. Dusty cans of Coke in small shops, stained tables at noodle diners: they reminded him of the small-town poverty of Anhui, his home province, where he’d started work at 13 and earned his way to university before moving to Beijing. Willy would refuse to eat in a restaurant if he found a mark on ... | James Palmer | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-life-like-for-disabled-people-in-china | |
Art | True beauty pleases the eye and the mind – but can it help us to become better people? | The only popular thought about beauty today, the one that has the widest currency in the world, is the idea that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. It’s a kindly notion. It seeks to make peace between people who have very different tastes. People are delighted by wildly variant things and that’s how it should be, ... | John Armstrong | https://aeon.co//essays/can-beauty-help-us-to-become-better-people | |
Cities | Green living in NYC need not be simple living – think skyscraper farms, meat-production towers and revamped aqueducts | The planet is going to hell in a hand basket. Population grows exponentially, the air is toxic, and there simply aren’t enough resources to go around. The Earth could not sustain even a third of its current population were we all to consume at American levels. This fundamental gap succinctly describes the environmental... | Michael Sorkin | https://aeon.co//essays/nyc-can-this-city-state-be-completely-self-reliant | |
Ethics | We all know our culture puts a premium on good looks – does that mean that the ugly are oppressed? | The faces and forms of oppression are many, but nearly all of them flow from injustice, the treatment of people otherwise than they deserve. It’s hard to say what exactly any one person deserves, of course, but in the modern world we tend to think that desert is somehow related to what people can control. The colour of... | Jonny Thakkar | https://aeon.co//essays/if-society-prizes-beauty-are-ugly-people-oppressed | |
History of ideas | Thanks to science, most of us accept the deep past – so why are our imagined futures so shallow? | In Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987), Stephen Jay Gould tells the story of one John Playfair, who in 1788 accompanied the great British geologist James Hutton to see an ‘unconformity’ at Siccar Point in Scotland. With the help of this geological visual – an ancient erosion surface dividing two layers of rock, one gentl... | J L Schellenberg | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-we-assume-the-future-will-be-short-blame-the-bible | |
Economics | Measure a country purely against its GDP and you neglect the wellbeing of its people. Yet can that be measured? | Have we reached the end of progress? Today, this lodestar of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution is shining less brightly than at any time in the past 200 years. And our principal measure of progress – gross domestic product (GDP) – seems particularly tarnished. Growing numbers of people are asking whether ... | Diane Coyle | https://aeon.co//essays/has-gdp-reached-its-limits-as-a-useful-measure | |
Family life | We no longer expect passion to last a lifetime, but some couples do stay in love to the end. What’s their secret? | As a young boy, I was fascinated by romantic tragedies such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Amos Oz’s My Michael (1968). These novels served as cautionary tales, warning what could happen if passion withered and true love died. Take the undoing of Emma Bovary, who tries to relieve the banality of her lif... | Aaron Ben-Ze’ev | https://aeon.co//essays/how-can-romantic-love-last-a-lifetime | |
Biology | This winter has seen an irruption of snowy owls in the US. What does it mean to see Arctic birds so far from home? | Perched on a rocky point along the Maine coast, the snowy owl is languid, a predator without country or concern. The wind and the sleet don’t matter. Crashing waves don’t matter. You don’t matter either. The snowy owl doesn’t care that you’ve driven halfway across winter to see a bird on a rock. The snowy owl doesn’t e... | Bryan Pfeiffer | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-the-us-facing-an-irruption-of-snowy-owls | |
Ethics | Christian parents teach their children to believe in God, atheists teach them not to. Who is doing the right thing? | Ever since I read Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (2006), one thing has stayed with me above all the fiery polemics. It is an answer that Dawkins gave in the book to a question about priestly abuse of children: ‘I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-te... | Michael Ruse | https://aeon.co//essays/is-it-wrong-to-teach-your-children-to-believe-in-god | |
Art | Digital art and culture mustn’t get caught up in the tools of its making or it will never transport us somewhere new | Do you ever stop to imagine what your great grandchildren will consider to be the defining cultural output of the early 21st century? It is unlikely to be to what we might think. One hundred years ago, in 1913, Schoenberg caused a near riot in Vienna; Marcel Duchamp stuck a bicycle wheel on a plinth; cubism landed, lik... | Tom Uglow | https://aeon.co//essays/digital-art-is-what-you-can-do-not-how-you-did-it | |
Economics | Can sustainability really hope to beat consumerism? Yes, and all without a vow of poverty or a change in human nature | Sustainability is often described as a big idea in waiting. In the pantheon of today’s big ideas, though, it’s still relatively small fry, while the seductive appeal of consumerism has grown only more formidable over the past few decades. The governments of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and De... | Jonathon Porritt | https://aeon.co//essays/why-i-m-hopeful-that-sustainability-will-triumph | |
Public health | Bullying doctors are not just unpleasant, they are dangerous. Can we change the culture of intimidation in our hospitals? | He comes to the operating room late, greets no one, and berates the nurse for not setting up the stepstools the way he likes. He tells the resident she doesn’t know the anatomy and sighs when she adjusts her grip on a surgical tool. He slaps the hand of the medical student when she reaches for the retractor to pull bac... | Ilana Yurkiewicz | https://aeon.co//essays/bullying-junior-medical-staff-is-one-way-to-harm-patients | |
Philosophy of science | When the deepest theory we have seems to undermine science itself, some kind of collapse looks inevitable | In 1909, Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden took a piece of radium and used it to fire charged particles at a sheet of gold foil. They wanted to test the then-dominant theory that atoms were simply clusters of electrons floating in little seas of positive electrical charge (the so-called ‘plum pudding’ m... | Adrian Kent | https://aeon.co//essays/what-really-happens-in-schrodinger-s-box | |
Philosophy of religion | Christian meditation may sound like an uneasy hybrid, but that awkwardness is hiding something important | How do you know when you really belong somewhere? When you’re truly welcome, beyond the politeness of good people? The simple wooden cross a few feet away from me on the carpet is offset — aesthetically and theologically — by some ambiguously spiritual pieces of crumpled coloured linen that are strewn in front of it. T... | Christopher Harding | https://aeon.co//essays/what-good-is-the-christian-part-of-christian-meditation | |
Fairness and equality | Elections are flawed and can’t be redeemed – it’s time to start choosing our representatives by lottery | It is easy to feel that what you do won’t make any difference. Recycle that can, bike or drive, buy from this company not that one, march in the streets against the factory closing or the looming war. It’s never enough: the forces are large and anonymous, and there aren’t enough of us. Or there are too many of us. Vote... | Alexander Guerrero | https://aeon.co//essays/forget-voting-it-s-time-to-start-choosing-our-leaders-by-lottery | |
Architecture | Living outside changes you. When environmental illness left me too sick to stay in my high-rise, I turned to nature to heal | In 1996, I stepped into a New York writer’s dream: a rent-stabilised two-bedroom in a pre-war doorman building overlooking the Hudson River. Built in 1931, the great behemoth of a building contained nearly 300 apartments and a respectable smattering of famous musicians and artists. To the north, a curving boulevard dot... | Jill Neimark | https://aeon.co//essays/environmental-illness-made-me-too-sick-to-live-inside | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | Philosophers and physicists say we might be living in a computer simulation, but how can we tell? And does it matter? | Our species is not going to last forever. One way or another, humanity will vanish from the Universe, but before it does, it might summon together sufficient computing power to emulate human experience, in all of its rich detail. Some philosophers and physicists have begun to wonder if we’re already there. Maybe we are... | Matthew Francis | https://aeon.co//essays/is-reality-a-computer-simulation-does-it-matter | |
Art | Optical illusions such as magic lanterns taught the Victorians what to trust. What can they teach us today? | In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and caused a small revolution of his own. He profoundly changed the way we now understand scientific knowledge, invoking the notion of a paradigm, and then claiming that we can only make sense of the world around us through the paradigm’s lens. A pa... | Iwan Rhys Morus | https://aeon.co//essays/optical-illusions-fool-the-eye-but-they-educate-the-mind | |
Childhood and adolescence | John Mack was a Harvard scientist who took extraterrestrial abduction seriously. Is he the reason I like misfits? | My younger brother and I called him ‘the old lizard’ (on account of his reptilian resemblance — and to irk our mother, his partner at the time). To his enemies, he was a crackpot, fraud, and a cheat. And to his patients, and many of his friends, he was a source of support, an open listener, a sage and protector. Dr Joh... | Alexa Clay | https://aeon.co//essays/wasn-t-i-special-enough-to-be-abducted-by-aliens | |
History | Americans love heroes. Is that why we idealise royalty even when real kings and princesses are nothing like the fairytales? | ‘Far away, where the swallows take refuge in winter, lived a King who had 11 sons and one daughter, Elise. The 11 brothers — they were all princes — used to go to school with stars on their breasts and swords at their sides. They wrote upon golden slates with diamond pencils, and could read just as well without a book ... | Maria Bustillos | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-americans-have-such-a-soft-spot-for-royals | |
Gender and identity | Transformation is sold as an instant miracle — but for transsexual people the journey is slow and painful | As a boy, growing up in a small town in the south-east of England, I found little to nourish me when I questioned my gender; there was nothing on such issues in our local library and no discussion of it at school. I used to scour the TV listings and the newspapers, desperate to find anyone with the same issues as me, a... | Juliet Jacques | https://aeon.co//essays/there-was-no-before-and-after-in-my-transsexual-journey | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Fire has come roaring back into America’s West after a century of attempted extirpation. Can our land take the wild heat? | On 19 September 1909, Aldo Leopold, then a young ranger with the US Forest Service, shot two timber wolves in Arizona’s White Mountains. He noted the episode casually in a letter home. ‘In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf,’ he would recall, any more than they left fires to burn. But t... | Stephen J Pyne | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-american-southwest-became-a-tinderbox | |
Rituals and celebrations | In a rare interview, Philip Pullman tells us his own origin story, and why the great questions are still religious ones | The most impressive thing about meeting Philip Pullman is how unimposing he is. Renowned as a master of mythologies, casting a cultural shadow that stretches from Hollywood films to intellectual debates about atheism and faith, you’d expect his Oxfordshire house to be some kind of remote, brooding mansion. Instead, I r... | Peter Jukes | https://aeon.co//essays/a-rare-interview-with-philip-pullman-the-religious-atheist | |
Art | When a tattoo marks a personal transformation, or the reclaiming of an abused body, the tattoo artist becomes a healer | ‘I was a hooker — an art hooker — for most of my career,’ says Roxx, a tattooist in San Francisco. ‘I’d listen to what people wanted and I would do their things.’ When she suggested her own ideas, many declined — only to return later to confess their regret. Today, no one tells Roxx what to do. Her clients come for a c... | Margot Mifflin | https://aeon.co//essays/meet-the-tattooist-who-is-both-an-artist-and-a-therapist | |
Public health | For centuries, a little Belgian town has treated the mentally ill. Why are its medieval methods so successful? | Half an hour on the slow train from Antwerp, surrounded by flat, sparsely populated farmlands, Geel (pronounced, roughly, ‘Hyale’) strikes the visitor as a quiet, tidy but otherwise unremarkable Belgian market town. Yet its story is unique. For more than 700 years its inhabitants have taken the mentally ill and disable... | Mike Jay | https://aeon.co//essays/geel-where-the-mentally-ill-are-welcomed-home | |
Cognition and intelligence | Quick decision-making might seem bold, but the agony of indecision is your brain’s way of making a better choice | In the autumn of 2007, the then prime minister of the UK, Gordon Brown, was riding on a wave of popularity. He had just taken the reins from Tony Blair, adroitly dealt with a series of national crises (terrorist plots, foot and mouth disease, floods) and was preparing to go to the country for a new mandate for his gove... | Stephen M Fleming | https://aeon.co//essays/forget-being-boldly-decisive-let-your-brain-take-its-time | |
Engineering | Giant instruments are giving us a sea of data. Can science find its way without any big ideas at the helm? | Whenever I visit scientists to discuss their research, there comes a moment when they say, with barely concealed pride: ‘Do you want a tour of the lab?’ It is invariably slightly touching — like Willy Wonka dying to show off his chocolate factory. I’m glad to accept, knowing what lies in store: shelves lined with bottl... | Philip Ball | https://aeon.co//essays/science-is-becoming-a-cult-of-hi-tech-instruments | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | Human ingenuity has created a world that the mind cannot master. Have we finally reached our limits? | Despite the vastness of the sky, airplanes occasionally crash into each other. To avoid these catastrophes, the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) was developed. TCAS alerts pilots to potential hazards, and tells them how to respond by using a series of complicated rules. In fact, this set of rules — d... | Samuel Arbesman | https://aeon.co//essays/is-technology-making-the-world-indecipherable | |
Addiction | When I stopped smoking weed, my appetite shrivelled and my head throbbed – but it was the dreams that really shook me | It would be an understatement to say that America has an ambivalent relationship with marijuana. The United States is in the world’s top five per-capita consumer of the drug, yet it treats possession more harshly than most of its international peers. The federal government maintains that marijuana has no accepted medic... | Malcolm Harris | https://aeon.co//essays/is-marijuana-withdrawal-a-real-thing | |
Architecture | Theories and demographics are all very well, but to know New York City’s inner life you need to walk and talk | When I was nine, my father found a new form of entertainment for me. Whenever our schedules were free, we took the subway from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to the end of the line and walked around, exploring the neighbourhood. We saw swampy marshes in Canarsie, Brooklyn, public housing projects in Astoria, Queens, and b... | William Helmreich | https://aeon.co//essays/how-i-learned-to-love-new-york-city-stride-by-stride | |
Biology | We assume that microbes evolved to attack humans when actually we are just civilian casualties in a much older war | The classic novel by H G Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898) – a tale of England besieged by Martian conquerors – ends not with a rousing and heroic victory but an accidental one. The aliens subjugate humanity with heat rays and black smoke but, at the height of their victory, they die. Their machines come to a standst... | Ed Yong | https://aeon.co//essays/when-bacteria-kill-us-it-s-more-accident-than-assassination | |
Death | Like the deadly pufferfish, wild mushrooms are for culinary daredevils. Care to play Russian roulette with your dinner? | I decided to move out of London earlier this year and spent much of the summer in the Lake District where my boyfriend works as a mountain guide. When the sun shone, we swam in the river where it ran still and deep, and on quiet days — to stave off fears about work, unanswered emails, unpaid invoices, my imminent pover... | Cal Flyn | https://aeon.co//essays/mushroom-foraging-is-deadly-why-am-i-doing-it | |
Childhood and adolescence | He skated over knowledge, it’s true, but Colin Wilson exhilarated a generation with the bold possibilities of life | Like Aldous Huxley and C S Lewis with John F Kennedy, the English writer Colin Wilson had the misfortune of dying on the same day as a vastly (and justly) more famous man: Nelson Mandela. When Wilson’s first book, The Outsider, came out in 1956 — coinciding with the arrival of a noisy cohort of anti-establishment write... | Ken MacLeod | https://aeon.co//essays/exhilarating-if-flawed-colin-wilson-helped-open-my-mind | |
Information and communication | With a flood of dark memes and viral horror stories, the internet is mapping the contours of modern fear | Not long ago, in a room very like this one (the setting of most of these stories is both familiar and vague), I was looking for the origin of a video game. Polybius was a coin-operated arcade shoot-’em-up released in 1981 to a few suburban locations in Portland, Oregon. The player experience was abstract and psychedeli... | Will Wiles | https://aeon.co//essays/creepypasta-is-how-the-internet-learns-our-fears | |
Stories and literature | Even in our digital age, live storytelling has a spellbinding effect more potent than any DVD box set | My first job was as a lawyer. I was not a very happy or inspired lawyer. One night I was driving home listening to a radio report, and there is something very intimate about radio: a voice comes out of a machine and into the listener’s ear. With rain pounding the windscreen and only the dashboard lights and the stereo ... | Richard Hamilton | https://aeon.co//essays/a-story-told-aloud-in-person-has-a-power-like-no-other | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | The question is not whether we can upload our brains onto a computer, but what will become of us when we do | In the late 1700s, machinists started making music boxes: intricate little mechanisms that could play harmonies and melodies by themselves. Some incorporated bells, drums, organs, even violins, all coordinated by a rotating cylinder. The more ambitious examples were Lilliputian orchestras, such as the Panharmonicon, in... | Michael Graziano | https://aeon.co//essays/the-virtual-afterlife-will-transform-humanity | |
Animals and humans | When the land is all filled up, it’s time to get creative with it, as small countries like Switzerland already know | From time to time, a hiker through the Swiss Alps might witness a startling sight. First, the sound of a helicopter reverberates off the valley walls. Then the chopper appears, a long cable hanging from its belly. When the burden at the end of the cable heaves into view, it is not a rescued mountaineer, en route to the... | Veronique Greenwood | https://aeon.co//essays/swiss-flying-cows-is-this-the-future | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | In economics, climate science and public health, computer models help us decide how to act. But can we trust them? | Here’s a simple recipe for doing science. Find a plausible theory for how some bits of the world behave, make predictions, test them experimentally. If the results fit the predictions, then the theory might describe what’s really going on. If not, you need to think again. Scientific work is vastly diverse and full of f... | Jon Turney | https://aeon.co//essays/all-scientific-models-are-wrong-but-some-at-least-are-useful | |
Consciousness and altered states | ‘He’s got a lot of energy’ they told us at the shelter. How Cooper’s antics drove me to deal with my own skittish brain | The cyclist takes me by surprise, and the thoughts that had been swarming inside my skull — That lesson this morning was a disaster. How am I going to salvage the leftovers of that disgusting dinner? — suddenly scatter. But Cooper saw him first, and I have no chance of heading off his reaction: twirling on his hind leg... | Anthony Sorge | https://aeon.co//essays/how-my-crazy-dog-helped-me-learn-to-meditate-at-last | |
Ethics | Our morality may be a product of natural selection, but that doesn’t mean it’s set in stone | For centuries now, conservative thinkers have argued that significant social reform is impossible, because human nature is inherently limited. The argument goes something like this: sure, it would be great to change the world, but it will never work, because people are too flawed, lacking the ability to see beyond thei... | Allen Buchanan & Russell Powell | https://aeon.co//essays/morality-evolved-but-it-isnt-fixed | |
Biology | Sabercats were magnificent, powerful predators – what does their extinction tell us about the future of life on Earth? | There are mammoths along Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. They stand out against the constant crush of urban traffic, a reminder of the city’s recent past. One hapless behemoth stretches her trunk toward the sky, her reflection shimmering on a gently bubbling asphalt pool. Her herd mate looks on impassively, while an... | Riley Black | https://aeon.co//essays/the-magnificent-sabercat-and-the-future-of-life-on-earth | |
Death | As we mourn the poet, do we not mourn the loss of what he had in his keeping: a way of living that served us for aeons? | I was in the last days of a family vacation in a house on a lake in northern Vermont when I got the news that Seamus Heaney had died. It was 30 August, not in the ‘dead of winter’, as when W B Yeats, his predecessor as greatest living Irish poet, had died, also at age 74. In his great poem on that loss, W H Auden had w... | Sven Birkerts | https://aeon.co//essays/as-we-mourn-the-poet-we-mourn-a-way-of-being-in-the-world | |
Childhood and adolescence | Why is the smell and taste of some foods so evocative of the past? I spent a day eating childhood favourites to find out | For the Frenchman Marcel Proust, the elixir of memory might have been a petite madeleine, but that wouldn’t work on British-bred me. What I needed was a can of Heinz cream of mushroom soup and a packet of Sainsbury’s cheese and onion crisps. As I gathered these and other long-neglected childhood foodstuffs from the sup... | Julian Baggini | https://aeon.co//essays/childhood-foods-may-evoke-lush-memories-but-are-they-true | |
Biology | For decades, the selfish gene metaphor let us view evolution with new clarity. Is it now blinding us? | A couple of years ago, at a massive conference of neuroscientists — 35,000 attendees, scores of sessions going at any given time — I wandered into a talk that I thought would be about consciousness but proved (wrong room) to be about grasshoppers and locusts. At the front of the room, a bug-obsessed neuroscientist name... | David Dobbs | https://aeon.co//essays/the-selfish-gene-is-a-great-meme-too-bad-it-s-so-wrong | |
Religion | The ancient God of Judaism and Islam was no distant immortal, but a god of domestic life, infertility and fratricide | In the past few years I have spent a lot of time in the West Bank city of Hebron, where communal relations between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims could hardly be any worse; and I have often wondered why we expect the adherents of the Abrahamic faiths to get along, when their revered ancestors, described in the Bo... | Edward Platt | https://aeon.co//essays/the-god-of-the-old-testament-was-no-distant-immortal | |
Addiction | Back on the islands of my childhood, I’m clinging to sobriety, searching for a rare bird that’s also on the brink | I spent the summer staying up all night. When everyone else was asleep, I was out in the gloaming with the livestock and the wildfowl, searching for a rare, endangered bird. I returned each morning to the tiny rented half-a-house above the harbour town where I went to school. Here, they call me ‘the corncrake wife’. Fo... | Amy Liptrot | https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-lonely-midnight-trail-of-orkney-s-corncrakes | |
Rituals and celebrations | Native American peoples are still here and still caring for their land. Can their conquerors say the same? | A few years ago, I was invited to attend a traditional Haida memorial ceremony. It was for a prominent community member in Old Masset on Haida Gwaii, off British Columbia. Before the potlatch, a friend casually mentioned a highly unusual event. When the man had died a few months earlier, a school of killer whales came ... | Peter Whiteley | https://aeon.co//essays/the-love-of-land-still-burns-bright-for-native-americans | |
Economics | The more we hate it, the more it agrees with us. How advertising turned anti-consumerism into a secret weapon | In 1796, the English physician Edward Jenner injected an eight-year-old boy in Gloucestershire with cowpox. Reasoning that absorbing a small amount of the virus would protect the child from a full-strength attack of smallpox in the future, Jenner’s bold experiment founded the practice of vaccination. Two hundred years ... | Adam Corner | https://aeon.co//essays/is-anti-consumerism-the-secret-weapon-of-advertising | |
Death | My Facebook page may be part of my identity, but can it give me a virtual afterlife? | In the dying years of the 1600s, the English philosopher John Locke did something remarkable: in just a few short pages, he took away our souls. For centuries, the idea of the soul had provided an elegant solution to a pressing problem: how could humans, with their fragile, compostable bodies, survive death? The early ... | Patrick Stokes | https://aeon.co//essays/what-will-happen-to-my-online-identity-when-i-die | |
Automation and robotics | Do insects feel pain? Are they conscious? A science kit for at-home cyborg cockroaches provokes the hard questions | Between the ages of six and eight or so, when I was old enough to run around outside but too young to have cooler things to do, I spent quite a bit of time with insects. Not that I was especially into entomology or even science. Bugs were just something fun and animate to play with: I kept caterpillars, feeding them fr... | Brandon Keim | https://aeon.co//essays/do-cyborg-cockroaches-dream-of-electric-trash | |
Economics | Like the world fairs of old, Silicon Valley runs on booms, busts, and showboating impresarios. That’s a good thing | A few times a month, I walk from my apartment in the rapidly gentrifying Lower Queen Anne part of Seattle towards one of the cafés in the booming South Lake Union neighbourhood. A good deal of the real estate along my route is controlled by Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen, and much of the demand is driven by Amazon’s... | Venkatesh Rao | https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-the-circus-of-silicon-valley-say-about-innovation | |
Cosmology | Like evangelists, astronauts travel far and return with glad tidings. But however high they ascend, they’re only human | When I was seven years old, my Baptist grandparents took me to meet an astronaut. It was, as they say, a religious experience. ‘He’s been on the Moon!’ my Nana told me, as if I might find this hard to believe. Though she and my grandfather had endured two World Wars and five grandchildren, they had never met a space tr... | Fraser MacDonald | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-we-set-such-store-by-missives-from-on-high | |
Bioethics | Biotechnology and other life sciences promise to transform our health, identity, even our brains. Should we be worried? | Everywhere we turn it seems that biomedical science and biotechnology are making Promethean claims to explain, manipulate and transform our lives. Evolutionary theory offers to explain human origins. Genomics aims to define the similarities and differences between us. Genetic and stem-cell therapies promise to cure or ... | Hilary Rose & Steven Rose | https://aeon.co//essays/biotechnology-and-the-lost-art-of-neutrality | |
Death | The idea of life after death lives on in near-death experiences and messages from beyond the grave. What’s the evidence? | She was nothing like the sweet old lady in Poltergeist, a film that gave me, an overly imaginative child growing up in the 1980s, my most memorable brush with the spirit world. In fact, Caroline seemed so down-to-earth that I wondered if she truly believed this stuff. Maybe she just enjoyed pulling people’s legs and ca... | Jesse Bering | https://aeon.co//essays/my-paranormal-adventure-in-pursuit-of-life-after-death | |
Cosmology | Is our Universe fine-tuned for the existence of life – or does it just look that way from where we’re sitting? | Some things occur just by chance. Mark Twain was born on the day that Halley’s comet appeared in 1835 and died on the day it reappeared in 1910. There is a temptation to linger on a story like that, to wonder if there might be a deeper order behind a life so poetically bracketed. For most of us, the temptation doesn’t ... | Tim Maudlin | https://aeon.co//essays/why-does-our-universe-appear-specially-made-for-us | |
Childhood and adolescence | No wonder adolescents jump off cliffs and fall in crazy love – they are constantly stifled by school and society alike | It is every parent’s nightmare. The sea wall at Plymouth Hoe is 65ft high and a line of boys, aged from 11 to 15, are leaping off the wall into the aptly named Dead Man’s Cove, each of them egged on by their friends. This is ‘tombstoning’ — the idea is to enter the water feet-first, as upright and rigid as a tombstone.... | Guy Claxton | https://aeon.co//essays/adolescents-take-crazy-risks-that-make-perfect-sense | |
Anthropology | The evolution of human culture can be explained, not by the size of our brains, but by the quality of our relationships | Most of the people reading this article do not possess the skill to start a fire from scratch. And yet, many anthropologists think that the mastery of fire literally transformed our ancestors into human beings. They say it gave us cooking, protection and heat, and also reshaped our very anatomy. In Catching Fire (2009)... | Stephen T Asma | https://aeon.co//essays/how-families-and-feelings-built-human-culture | |
Cognition and intelligence | What goes on in our minds when we see someone naked? The more we see of a person’s body the stupider they seem | In 2010, the editors at Vogue Paris made a design decision that could soon lead to a wide-sweeping change in French law. A spread in the December issue starred a model named Thylane Blondeau. In one picture, she was sprawled on a tiger-skin rug, her dress exposing one shoulder, as a jewel-encrusted leg props up a high-... | Matthew Hutson | https://aeon.co//essays/what-goes-on-in-our-minds-when-we-see-someone-naked | |
Animals and humans | Is there any reason to think dolphins and humans have a special relationship? Sure, but it might not be a friendly one | One evening in the summer of 2004, I was in a bar on the Bahamian island of Bimini when a smiling young woman came up to me. I was on the island as part of my training with the Dolphin Communication Project, a small US research organisation that studies a resident population of Atlantic spotted dolphins just offshore. ... | Justin Gregg | https://aeon.co//essays/do-dolphins-really-share-a-special-bond-with-humans | |
Cognition and intelligence | Our age reveres the specialist but humans are natural polymaths, at our best when we turn our minds to many things | I travelled with Bedouin in the Western Desert of Egypt. When we got a puncture, they used tape and an old inner tube to suck air from three tyres to inflate a fourth. It was the cook who suggested the idea; maybe he was used to making food designed for a few go further. Far from expressing shame at having no pump, the... | Robert Twigger | https://aeon.co//essays/we-live-in-a-one-track-world-but-anyone-can-become-a-polymath | |
Knowledge | What are the odds that Jesus rose or Moses parted the waves? Even with the best witnesses, vanishingly small | Do you believe in miracles? You shouldn’t – not in the strict sense of ‘miracles’, anyway. If you’re just using the word as a kind of hyperbole, that’s fine: believe away. People sometimes refer to the ‘miracle of birth’, but they don’t mean that a supernatural agent was involved. They just mean that birth is wonderful... | Lawrence Shapiro | https://aeon.co//essays/don-t-believe-in-miracles-until-you-ve-done-the-math | |
The environment | Unplugging from the electrical grid was relatively easy. What we didn’t realise was that we needed the human grid, too | Once upon a time — 20 years ago, that is — seven friends bought a cheap piece of land in western Colorado, 80 acres between the redrock deserts of the Colorado Plateau and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Like most people who do such things, they were young, idealistic, and generally overjoyed by their ability to ... | Michelle Nijhuis | https://aeon.co//essays/i-was-a-thrifty-yankee-with-a-big-crush-on-the-american-west | |
Family life | The laundry will never be done. Rather than pedalling faster and faster the answer is to surrender to the eternal tide | I can hear weeds growing outside. I can hear my pores clogging. I can hear dust settling on the furniture. I can hear an ant finding its way under the back door. I can hear my arteries hardening. You try to prevent these things from happening, but there is no escape. Paint peels from the baseboards; the refrigerator hu... | Heather Havrilesky | https://aeon.co//essays/nothing-embodies-powerlessness-quite-like-dirty-laundry | |
History | Each tree and farm, street and courthouse of my home county rests on shallow-buried stories of slavery and Civil War | I was too young to bartend and too short to pass hors d’oeuvres. Dressed in black slacks and a white oxford shirt, I set tables, cleared trays, and washed dishes. I was 14, just old enough for a work permit, and it was my first night catering. The wash station was far from the tent and the main house, tucked where none... | Casey Cep | https://aeon.co//essays/shallow-buried-stories-of-slavery-still-haunt-my-home-county | |
History | It came from an Egyptian tomb… Well no, actually, it didn’t. But once a myth lurches into life, there’s no stopping it | On 24 March 1923, an ominous warning circulated in the British press. ‘According to a rare book I possess,’ wrote Marie Corelli, an elderly romantic novelist with supernatural leanings, ‘the most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb.’ She went on to quote the book’s description of ‘divers secret... | Jo Marchant | https://aeon.co//essays/why-does-the-mummy-s-curse-refuse-to-die | |
Political philosophy | Right and Left are fading away. The real question in politics will be: do you look to the earth or aspire to the skies? | The ideological dichotomy of ‘Right-’ and ‘Left-wing’ has had a good run. The ‘wing’ metaphor itself dates from the seating arrangements in the postrevolutionary French National Assembly, where supporters of King Louis XVI gathered to sit on the president’s right side and revolutionaries sat on his left. The scheme als... | Steve Fuller | https://aeon.co//essays/left-and-right-are-over-the-future-is-up-and-down | |
Childhood and adolescence | My grandfather was a legend – a holy vagabond whose life spanned India’s 20th century. Why did I let him elude me? | A curious thing happened when my grandfather died, the sort of thing that seems more and more curious as the years pass, investing itself with significance. At the time I was living in New York, and since this was the middle of the last decade, I was always only a phone call away from my family in India. What we weren’... | Samanth Subramanian | https://aeon.co//essays/my-grandfather-s-vagabond-past | |
Biology | Animals have friends, enemies, allies and life-long companions. Human relationships aren’t so unique after all | Back in my baboon-watching days in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, all eyes — at least, mine and the savannah baboons’ — were on monkey matrilines. These tight networks of monkey mothers, grandmothers, daughters, aunts, and nieces formed the core of my study groups. The young males transferred out of these groups at pub... | Barbara J King | https://aeon.co//essays/friends-allies-and-lovers-animal-family-is-complicated | |
Consciousness and altered states | Travel the world, but work on New York time. This is what I learned about circadian rhythms by unravelling my own | Few things inspire the sort of gut-wrenching guilt I feel every time I wake up at three o’clock in the afternoon. The shame rolls down my body like a wave as soon as I see the time ticking by on my phone, like realising I had one too many glasses of wine the night before. I have wasted my time and proven myself lazy in... | Cara Parks | https://aeon.co//essays/travel-the-world-work-on-new-york-time-what-could-go-wrong | |
Meaning and the good life | Our forward-charging culture sees regret as a sign of weakness and failure. But how else can we learn from our past? | I regret everything. Decades-old decisions, things I said, things I didn’t say, opportunities I missed, opportunities I took, recent purchases, non-purchases, returns. I turn all of these things over in my mind and examine them for clues — to what, I’m not sure. All I know is that very little of what I do or fail to do... | Carina Chocano | https://aeon.co//essays/why-regret-is-essential-to-the-good-life | |
Architecture | The ancients had pyramids to tame the sky’s mystery. We have Star Axis, a masterpiece forty years in the making | On a hot afternoon in late June, I pulled to the side of a two-lane desert highway in eastern New Mexico, next to a specific mile marker. An hour earlier, a woman had told me to wait for her there at three o’clock, ‘sharp’. I edged as far off the shoulder as I could, to avoid being seen by passing traffic, and parked f... | Ross Andersen | https://aeon.co//essays/the-one-place-where-it-s-possible-to-truly-see-the-night-sky | |
Childhood and adolescence | These American teens look up to their strong mothers and believe in equal rights. So why won’t they use the F-word? | My teenaged children and I were hanging out in our kitchen, just as we’d done thousands of times before, when one of them said something that made me retort: ‘Well, I consider myself a feminist.’ My 14-year-old daughter looked at me in surprise: ‘You do?’ My 16-year-old son seemed equally startled. I was startled in re... | Pamela Erens | https://aeon.co//essays/how-feminism-fell-into-disrepair-among-american-teenagers | |
Consciousness and altered states | Forget prophecy and wisdom. Using the I Ching is a weirdly useful way to open your mind to life’s unexpected twists | I stepped into the dark of the ramshackle hillside temple. It was a hot day, and the climb had been steep. There were no other tourists around. The only people I passed on my way up the mountainside steps were two pious old ladies, pausing to catch their breath as they struggled through the afternoon heat. Inside it wa... | Will Buckingham | https://aeon.co//essays/forget-prophecy-the-i-ching-is-an-uncertainty-machine | |
Sex and sexuality | Mistresses are big business in China, where no official is a real man without his own ernai. What’s in it for the girls? | Shanshan’s $550 shoes came from her lover, but the soles of her feet, as hard as leather, came from her childhood. ‘We used to play barefoot in the village,’ she told me. ‘All the girls in the karaoke bar had feet like this.’ At 26, Shanshan has come a long way from rural Sichuan, one of China’s poorer southern provinc... | James Palmer | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-young-rural-women-in-china-become-mistresses | |
Consciousness and altered states | Consciousness is the greatest mystery in science. Don’t believe the hype: the Hard Problem is here to stay | Over there is a bird, in silhouette, standing on a chimney top on the house opposite. It is evening; the sun set about an hour ago and now the sky is an angry, pink-grey, the blatting rain of an hour ago threatening to return. The bird, a crow, is proud (I anthropomorphise). He looks cocksure. If it’s not a he then I’m... | Michael Hanlon | https://aeon.co//essays/will-we-ever-get-our-heads-round-consciousness | |
Oceans and water | The Thames has seen the riches of empire flow for centuries. But now the river is threatened by a super-port development | The point where the tidal waters of the North Sea flow into the mouth of England’s longest river marks the outer reaches of the Thames Estuary: the gateway for international trade, industry and travel into London for millennia. Goods and people from all over the world have arrived in Britain via this well-used sea rout... | Rachel Lichtenstein | https://aeon.co//essays/the-riches-of-the-thames-estuary-are-under-threat | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | It costs nothing to click, respond and retweet. But what price do we pay in our relationships and our peace of mind? | How many other things are you doing right now while you’re reading this piece? Are you also checking your email, glancing at your Twitter feed, and updating your Facebook page? What five years ago David Foster Wallace labelled ‘Total Noise’ — ‘the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s tota... | Tom Chatfield | https://aeon.co//essays/does-each-click-of-attention-cost-a-bit-of-ourselves | |
Death | There are not enough whole-body donations to science. Why don’t people want their death to help the living? | I was in seventh grade in 1993 when Marie C Wilson and Gloria Steinem launched the Ms Foundation’s Take Our Daughters to Work Day, intending to show us young women that a big, wide world existed beyond our gender and our bodies. For me, it did just that, although it also seeded a lifetime obsession with bodies in a dif... | Brooke Borel | https://aeon.co//essays/the-only-after-life-i-believe-is-donating-my-body-to-science | |
Life stages | Millennials are as hard-working as anyone else – so why does pop culture pretend that all we do is party? | Young people like me give the bulk of our waking lives to work, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at popular culture. Movies and television shows tend to cast us in the mold of Hannah Horvath, the central character on HBO’s TV series Girls (2012-). Horvath didn’t need to say ‘I may be the voice of my generation’ to m... | James Somers | https://aeon.co//essays/you-want-to-know-how-millenials-live-don-t-watch-girls | |
Design and fashion | Because I’m getting older, my days as a model are numbered – and I’m not sure what to do next | I’ve spent the past few days avoiding sunlight. I had acid put on my face to get rid of never-ending acne scars, and my dermatologist gave me strict instructions to stay indoors. She said that if I were to go in the sun, or even get close to a window, the acid would reactivate to burn my skin again. I was basically tol... | Melissa Stetten | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-model | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Hope for the world’s devastated oceans rests on a change in the hearts of the fishermen that know them best | It’s Sunday morning a few weeks before Christmas and the ice is flowing at North T‑Pier. The small crew of the South Bay holds a dockside chute as it unloads pound after pound of ice into the trawler’s hold. Captain Rob Seitz leans out of a door and shouts instructions to his teenage son Jentry. The boat leaves at midn... | Megan Molteni | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-ocean-s-devastated-fisheries-could-come-back-to-life | |
Political philosophy | In the future, most people will live in a total surveillance state – and some of us might even like it | Suppose you’re walking home one night, alone, and you decide to take a shortcut through a dark alley. You make it halfway through, when suddenly you hear some drunks stumbling behind you. Some of them are shouting curses. They look large and powerful, and there are several of them. Nonetheless, you feel safe, because y... | Stuart Armstrong | https://aeon.co//essays/the-strange-benefits-of-living-in-a-total-surveillance-state | |
Mental health | My OCD had been creating vivid, painful rituals for years. So could Buddhist ritual give me a means to fight back? | Our society likes to portray obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as a cute quirk, a goofy, if irritating, eccentricity. It is not. For the person undergoing OCD experience, it is a form of mental terrorism. This terrorism takes the form of what psychologists call ‘intrusive thoughts’ — unwanted, painful thoughts or ima... | Matt Bieber | https://aeon.co//essays/how-buddhist-ritual-helped-me-ride-out-the-storm-of-ocd | |
Ethics | When it can’t use troops, the UN’s last peacekeeping tool is its moral voice. What is that worth in the real world? | ‘We will integrate human rights into the life cycle of all staff.’ This phrase, with its strange mix of bureaucratic and moral ambitions, might sound like a piece of Orwellian doublespeak. In fact it is a sincere statement from a policy paper circulated among senior United Nations staff this summer on the need to renew... | Richard Gowan | https://aeon.co//essays/does-the-un-still-have-a-moral-role-to-play-in-the-world | |
Ethics | Atheists and homosexuals were called perverts once. Why do we still see perversion where no harm is done? | Perverts weren’t always the libidinous bogeymen we imagine when we think of the term today. Sexual mores have certainly shifted dramatically over the course of history and across societies, but the very word ‘pervert’ once literally meant something else entirely to what it does now. For example, the peculiar discovery ... | Jesse Bering | https://aeon.co//essays/perhaps-its-time-to-get-rid-of-the-word-pervert-altogether | |
Information and communication | We surf the net, stream our films and save stuff in the cloud. Can we get all the nature we need from the digital world? | There are fish in my phone. Some are pure orange with white fins; others have black mottled markings along their orange backs. They glide, twist and turn above a bed of flat pale sand fringed by rocks and the bright green leaves of something that looks like watercress. Sometimes they swim out of view, leaving me to gaz... | Sue Thomas | https://aeon.co//essays/can-we-get-all-the-nature-we-need-from-the-digital-world | |
History of ideas | Philosophy should be conversation, not dogma – face-to-face talk about our place in the cosmos and how we should live | In 1913 the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein fled the interruptions and distractions of Cambridge to live as a hermit in Norway. No one knew him there, and he could focus on his work on logic in isolation. It worked. He lodged for a while with the postmaster in Skjolden, a remote village 200 miles north of the city of B... | Nigel Warburton | https://aeon.co//essays/without-conversation-philosophy-is-just-dogma | |
Meaning and the good life | Shamanic powers of insight and the power to bring order out of chaos. Is the detective a priestly figure for our times? | There are many criteria by which to judge a society. Dostoyevsky recommended examining its prisons. Gandhi said to look at how it treats its weakest members. If you want to discover a society’s attitude towards authority, or to gauge the power of its official belief system, I suggest that you could do worse than look a... | Jason Webster | https://aeon.co//essays/unholy-modernity-and-the-shamanic-powers-of-the-detective | |
Evolution | Many evolutionists believe that humans have a drive for waging war. But they are wrong and the idea is dangerous | There is something peculiarly — even paradoxically — appealing about taking a dim view of human nature, a view that has become unquestioned dogma among many evolutionary biologists. It is a tendency that began some time ago. When the Australian-born anthropologist Raymond Dart discovered the first australopithecine fos... | David P Barash | https://aeon.co//essays/do-human-beings-have-an-instinct-for-waging-war | |
Childhood and adolescence | Children today are cossetted and pressured in equal measure. Without the freedom to play they will never grow up | When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gatherer education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long. W... | Peter Gray | https://aeon.co//essays/children-today-are-suffering-a-severe-deficit-of-play | |
Biology | The Arctic Seed Vault puts apocalyptic talk of climate change in perspective – but not how you might think | Since 2007, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has maintained a repository of the world’s agricultural heritage. A series of tunnels bored into the side of a mountain, this vault is climate-controlled, secure against tectonic activity or sea-level rise, and designed to hold up to 4.5 million different seed varieties for ce... | Colin Dickey | https://aeon.co//essays/must-the-seed-vault-in-norway-conjure-a-doomsday-scenario | |
Meaning and the good life | Happiness is not the same as a sense of meaning. How do we go about finding a meaningful life, not just a happy one? | Parents often say: ‘I just want my children to be happy.’ It is unusual to hear: ‘I just want my children’s lives to be meaningful,’ yet that’s what most of us seem to want for ourselves. We fear meaninglessness. We fret about the ‘nihilism’ of this or that aspect of our culture. When we lose a sense of meaning, we get... | Roy F Baumeister | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-better-a-happy-life-or-a-meaningful-one | |
Consciousness and altered states | Prohibition lingers on, but with pocket-sized vaporizers, marijuana users can get high wherever they please | It was my first time smoking weed in a public place. I was alone. Vulnerable. Not my finest moment. Inside the lavatory of a movie theatre in Austin, behind the locked door of a stall, I knelt in front of the toilet, stuck my head into its basin, and exhaled with care. I stood up, listened for footsteps. Quiet. I looke... | Jeff Winkler | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-it-like-to-get-high-on-the-sly-in-public | |
Demography and migration | Young Pakistanis have more opportunity than ever to change the country. But what will they do with their freedom? | We are sitting in a room the size of a football pitch in an upmarket area of Karachi: men and women in our mid-20s, most smoking cigarettes. On a coffee table in front of us sits a two-litre bottle of imported Famous Grouse whisky and an equally outsize bottle of Absolut vodka. Occasionally, a servant — a young man the... | Samira Shackle | https://aeon.co//essays/young-free-and-pakistani-a-new-generations-voice | |
Death | Death has become too sanitised. It needs raucous laughter and a little bit of living to make it real again | Several days after leaving Winchester and walking the South Downs Way through southern England, filming ourselves and the landscape, and endlessly talking, we reached the perilous cliffs of Beachy Head. From these vertically pitched, chalk-white heights, desperate souls have flung themselves to a brutal end, and countl... | Clare Davies | https://aeon.co//essays/a-death-cafe-helps-us-to-eat-cake-at-the-end-of-life-s-road | |
Astronomy | Scientists used to scan the skies for messages from alien civilisations. Now they go looking for their ruins | ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ says Ozymandias’s ruined statue in the desert of Shelley’s imagination. Shelley’s sonnet is often interpreted as a sober warning that human works are fleeting, but when I read it as a young boy it kindled a sense of adventure; it suggested a wonderfully mysterious past beneat... | Paul Gilster | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-night-sky-a-necropolis-of-alien-civilizations | |
Astronomy | Roger Angel is one of the world’s most brilliant and audacious engineers. Could he design the next energy revolution? | The universe is broken into two halves, black and blue. Above, the starry void and the radiant glare of the sun. Below, the Earth is turning, spinning the Americas out of view and into darkness. As the American southwest rotates into twilight, its deserts momentarily blaze with the brilliance of low-angle sunbeams glan... | Lee Billings | https://aeon.co//essays/when-this-man-talks-about-energy-the-world-needs-to-listen | |
Consciousness and altered states | I strapped TDCS electrodes to my head to see if I could make myself smarter by stimulating my brain. Here’s what happened | I’m lying on my bed, on my back, with a bandage wrapped around my head. If I had a thermometer sticking out of my mouth, I’d look like an emoji for a sick person. There’s nothing wrong with me, at least nothing the bandage can fix, but there are two electrodes under it — one above my right eyebrow, the other higher up,... | Mary H K Choi | https://aeon.co//essays/would-dabbling-in-cranial-stimulation-make-me-smarter |
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