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Global history | The concept of geopolitics comes from German and Russian attempts to explain defeat and reverse loss of influence | Today everyone talks geopolitics. The idea is infectious. It appears to come from nowhere. Twenty years ago, the term was exotic, and the meaning behind it quaint. The world was different then. In 2002, America Unrivaled – a book edited by my Princeton colleague, G John Ikenberry, the foremost exponent of the idea of l... | Harold James | https://aeon.co//essays/geopolitics-is-a-losers-buzzword-with-a-contagious-idea | |
Stories and literature | Often vilified as a weapon of male supremacy, pornography in fact has much to tell us about ourselves and our culture | Across at least five decades, from Susan Brownmiller to Gail Dines, some feminists have denounced pornography for enacting and inciting violence against women, making its viewers into psychologically inert consumers or, worse, sexual aggressors. Andrea Dworkin put forth this view in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1... | Kathleen Lubey | https://aeon.co//essays/what-andrea-dworkin-missed-about-pornography | |
Ethics | Subjecting the problems of ethics to the cool quantifications of logic and probability can help us to be better people | The relationship between mathematics and morality is easy to think about but hard to understand. Suppose Jane sees five people drowning on one side of a lake and one person drowning on the other side. There are life-preservers on both sides of the lake. She can either save the five or the one, but not both; she clearly... | Elad Uzan | https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-solve-moral-problems-with-formal-logic-and-probability | |
Metaphysics | A dragon needs the clouds and the wind in order to fly. What happens when we too relinquish individualistic reasoning? | What if I told you that there’s no such thing as an individual action? That every time you eat, walk up the stairs or read a book, you are not the sole agent behind what you are doing, but are engaged in a process of co-creation – as much acted-upon as acting? To grasp what I mean here, imagine riding a horse. While I ... | Mercedes Valmisa | https://aeon.co//essays/in-classical-chinese-philosophy-all-actions-are-collective | |
The ancient world | The Roman Empire enabled an early version of globalisation that offered travellers adventure, novelty and opportunity | Deep in the south of Egypt, on the west bank of the Nile facing the historic capital Thebes, stand two 60-foot-tall statues of the pharaoh Amenhotep III (14th century BCE). By the time the Romans annexed Egypt in 30 BCE, these colossi were an ancient remnant of the grandeur of the pharaoh’s mortuary temple, doomed by t... | Fabio Fernandes | https://aeon.co//essays/the-roman-empire-was-a-cosmopolitan-network-of-adventurers | |
Stories and literature | For thousands of fans, he made philosophy thrillingly relevant. Yet there is a deep unsavoury undercurrent to his worldview | Which would you prefer: low to middling success your entire writing career, or a sudden rise to global fame, followed by an equally steep descent, then the rest of your career an anticlimax? While most writers get the former, Colin Wilson experienced the latter. Wilson was a working-class high-school dropout, who escap... | Jules Evans | https://aeon.co//essays/was-colin-wilson-a-fascist-or-was-he-fascist-adjacent | |
Earth science and climate | Darwin was the first to see that all lifeforms, from worms to corals, transform the planet. What does that mean for us? | I want to start with a proposition: if Earth had never come alive, it would be a profoundly different world. Conversely: the planet of today has, to a remarkable extent, been made what it is by the activities of lifeforms. Over the course of the planet’s long history, a history that extends back more than 4.5 billion y... | Olivia Judson | https://aeon.co//essays/the-insight-of-darwins-work-on-corals-worms-and-co-evolution | |
Metaphysics | Alethic nihilism is the theory that nothing is true. There is much to gain by taking this radical idea seriously | Truth is a topic philosophers have spent centuries considering. We have asked questions such as: what is the content of the concept of truth? That is, what is it to think of something as true? And what is truth itself? Can we come up with a true and illuminating account of what truth really is? For example, is truth th... | David Liggins | https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-advantages-of-believing-that-nothing-is-true | |
Cosmology | The Universe cannot always be understood through observation. Instead, physicists explore by devising thought experiments | Albert Einstein’s theory of gravitation, known as general relativity, is intimidating, even for highly trained theoretical physicists. In his theory, matter and energy cause space-time to curve. In most situations, this warping is so small as to be unobservable, even with powerful and sophisticated instruments. In fact... | Michael Dine | https://aeon.co//essays/how-black-hole-thought-experiments-help-explain-the-universe | |
Mental health | Evidence is growing that mental illness is more than dysfunction, with enormous implications for treatment | Most people thought my dad lived alone. He didn’t. He lived with God and the French actress Catherine Deneuve. They were outside of him but somehow projected their voices into his mind. Throughout my teens and 20s, the four of us would have conversations over coffee and cigarettes. Catherine was always kind to me. One ... | Justin Garson | https://aeon.co//essays/evidence-grows-that-mental-illness-is-more-than-dysfunction | |
War and peace | Disturbing and inhaling radioactive dust, in their haste Russian soldiers unburied the wrecked, undead Earth itself | Contemporary events appear in ever-shifting configurations. They seem to be entirely contingent, their amplification on the global scale dependent on how many people are paying attention. The vicissitudes of spotlighting various events are daily, if not hourly: something that was the focus of attention yesterday may be... | Michael Marder | https://aeon.co//essays/what-did-the-russians-dig-up-when-they-dug-trenches-in-chernobyl | |
Anthropology | The gifts we exchange are both generous and yet fraught with social rules and obligations. Marcel Mauss explained why | ‘To receive from kings,’ the Mahabharata tells us, ‘is at first honey, at the end, poison.’ Honey because who doesn’t want the gift of a king’s riches? Poison because how will we ever repay? We all know, because it is written by our sages and scripted in our norms, that receiving a gift carries with it certain obligati... | Gili Kliger | https://aeon.co//essays/give-and-take-how-gift-giving-forges-society-and-ourselves | |
History of ideas | Percy Shelley thought romantic love freed men and women from the strictures of monogamy, but did it free them equally? | In the notes for his poem Queen Mab (1813), Percy Shelley declares that ‘love is free’. This was the creed he would follow when it came to his own intimate relationships: he rejected monogamy, and tried to convince the women in his life to do the same. Not many people today would be shocked by this. Most living in West... | Neil McArthur | https://aeon.co//essays/how-percy-shelley-invented-free-love-in-1792 | |
Economic history | As corporations struggle to survive in a more uncertain world, they should look to the success of the Society of Jesus | Would you give your money to someone who will seek to maximise their returns rather than yours? The answer is likely ‘No!’ However, as Voltaire warned us, in the corporate world common sense is not very common. Workers, suppliers and lenders provide the corporation with their resources but these are used in the interes... | Paolo Quattrone | https://aeon.co//essays/lessons-in-corporate-governance-from-the-jesuits | |
History | When a young street vendor found her name in a guidebook to the sex workers of Paris, she couldn’t live with the shame | In late December 1791, Rose Mainville, a 17-year-old French girl, made a horrifying discovery. She found her name, address and physical description in a pornographic book advertising itself as a detailed guide to the sex workers of Paris. Ashamed, humiliated and terrified at the thought of being confronted by her famil... | Amanda E Herbert & David N Woodworth | https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-deadly-practice-of-doxxing-in-revolutionary-paris | |
Beauty and aesthetics | The ultimate value of the world can be discovered if you are sensitive to what is beautiful | We care about more than our own lives. We care about our families and friends and our local communities. We care about the political scene, and regularly check the news about the latest travesty. Every so often, something truly horrific happens; the kind of calamity that makes one despair of the world. Every so often, ... | Tom Cochrane | https://aeon.co//essays/why-aesthetic-value-should-take-priority-over-moral-value | |
Ethics | The Buddha taught not to kill, yet his followers have at times disobeyed him. Can murderers still be Buddhists? | Most Buddhists recognise that the injunction not to kill, the first of the religion’s five precepts, is central to the ethos of the different Buddhist traditions. In the past decade, however, a surprising amount of popular and scholarly discussion on the subject of killing and Buddhism – from Slavoj Žižek’s commentarie... | Martin Kovan | https://aeon.co//essays/if-killing-is-antithetical-to-buddhism-how-can-they-do-it | |
Thinkers and theories | Bruno Latour showed us how to think with the things of the world, respecting their right to exist and act on their own terms | A humble virus, the Dead Sea, oil pipelines, Wonder Woman, a voodoo doll, Escherichia coli, the concept of freedom, monsoons, ‘extinct’ languages, and tectonic plates. All are real. All are active. And, in their own way, these and myriad other nonhuman entities are actors, enrolled in the production of our world. We’re... | Stephen Muecke | https://aeon.co//essays/bruno-latour-showed-us-how-to-think-with-the-things-of-the-world | |
Beauty and aesthetics | Good art, laced with irony, ambiguity and suspense, is not obviously political. That’s what makes it politically interesting | When we look back at the early 2020s and ask which work of fiction held up the mirror to society with greatest clarity, my bet would be on Michaela Coel’s television series I May Destroy You (2020). Narrating a young woman’s rise to fame as a cultural commentator, and her struggle with the consequences of rape, the ser... | Vid Simoniti | https://aeon.co//essays/if-all-we-do-is-argue-about-politics-maybe-the-arts-can-help | |
Comparative philosophy | It’s shocking that histories of medieval philosophy celebrate only Christian thinkers, ignoring Islamic and Jewish thought | In 1989, Cambridge University Press announced the publication of a new, three-volume book series: The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts. The first volume – edited by Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump, and dedicated to logic and the philosophy of language – contained 15 medieval texts, of which 15... | Yitzhak Y Melamed | https://aeon.co//essays/neither-philosophy-nor-religion-can-contain-maimonides | |
Palaeontology | As Brontosaurus tells us, in science as in fiction, the stories we tell to understand the world are always being revised | What’s in a name? That depends. For dinosaur fans, one hint comes from the passionate fight over what to call that plant-eating giant of the Jurassic age – ‘Brontosaurus’ or ‘Apatosaurus’. Were these beasts reptiles or birds? Two species or one? Something as straightforward as the name of an extinct species may feel li... | Nathaniel Goldberg & Chris Gavaler | https://aeon.co//essays/from-the-jurassic-to-star-wars-the-drama-of-revision-goes-on | |
History of science | James Lovelock was a visionary whose greatest ideas were made possible by his unshakeable independence | As the planet lurches towards a climate emergency and its life support systems falter, the need for visionary thinkers with fresh insights and big ideas has never been more pressing. No wonder, then, that the world mourned the death earlier this year of James (‘Jim’) Lovelock, whose Gaia theory provided a new framework... | Roger Highfield | https://aeon.co//essays/james-lovelock-the-death-of-scientific-independence | |
Religion | The mystery of why Judas forsook Jesus goes to the heart of Christianity. A newly translated gospel offers a new view | Why did Judas do it? The betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth by Judas Iscariot, one of his 12 disciples, has become the paradigmatic act of treachery in Western culture. Modern historians are sceptical of many and even most details of Jesus’ life and death found in the gospels of the New Testament, but nearly all agree that ... | David Brakke | https://aeon.co//essays/what-the-gospel-of-judas-says-about-the-betrayal-of-jesus | |
Oceans and water | A warming planet and acid oceans will radically transform marine ecosystems. How will our beloved reefs survive? | It was Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote: ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger.’ The aphorism offers good guidance during triathlon training and, often, through the tough times in your private life. Does it also apply to the ecosystems of Earth? We think it could. While plant and animal life would be better off without... | Klaus M Stiefel & James D Reimer | https://aeon.co//essays/how-will-our-beloved-reefs-survive-in-the-oceans-of-the-future | |
Space exploration | Our future in space relies on settling the Moon and using it as a base to probe the deepest questions in the cosmos | From Blue Origin and SpaceX, to the new James Webb Space Telescope, to space agencies worldwide, we’ve set our sights on distant worlds. The search is on for an Earth-like exoplanet in a solar system light-years away. Closer to home, we’ll soon be excavating the icy moons of Jupiter for life in watery realms. There’s a... | Joseph Silk | https://aeon.co//essays/only-lunar-telescopes-can-answer-the-mysteries-of-the-universe | |
Politics and government | Authoritarian leaders who play the religious card are not mere hypocrites. There’s something far more troubling going on | Viktor Orbán reportedly does not attend church. Benjamin Netanyahu eats at non-kosher restaurants. New York libertine Donald Trump lacks all manner of evident religious virtue. Yet it is a fact that today’s crop of aspiring authoritarians invoke religious themes and symbols, despite not being strict adherents to their ... | Suzanne Schneider | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-right-wing-is-trying-to-turn-religion-into-identity | |
Deep time | As Neolithic people transformed prehistoric forests, they stumbled into an ecological trap. Domestication goes both ways | Steady blows from flint axes echo through the forest. Each strike cuts deeper into the layers of a tree trunk, rhythmically interrupting the chattering of birds and the hum of swarming insects. Someone is calling, but their voice is drowned out by cracking in the underwood – another tree is falling. We are watching the... | Mette Løvschal | https://aeon.co//essays/how-one-modest-shrub-entrapped-humans-in-its-service | |
Stories and literature | Parenting advice from D H Lawrence: don’t smother your children with love. They are more sagacious than you think | As parents, we are assailed by injunctions to protect our children, to engage with them creatively, athletically and intellectually, to feed them nutritious food and make them floss their teeth. Even when not being given direct advice, we listen out, comparing ourselves with others, wondering what we’re getting right o... | Lara Feigel | https://aeon.co//essays/bold-parenting-tips-from-the-child-free-author-d-h-lawrence | |
Global history | Centuries of capitalism saw the global countryside ruthlessly converted into cheap commodities. But at what cost? | Sometimes, what is most common is most remarkable. For those of us living in a city or suburb, a typical day starts with rising from (cotton) sheets, hopping under the shower for a quick wash with (palm oil-based) soaps, dressing in (cotton) shirts and pants, drinking a hot beverage (coffee or tea) and then eating a (s... | Sven Beckert & Ulbe Bosma | https://aeon.co//essays/the-capitalist-transformations-of-the-countryside | |
Religion | The story of a working-class radical from Ireland who became a celebrated monk and challenged the British Empire in Asia | On 2 March 1901, the Buddhists of Rangoon (today’s Yangon) in Burma celebrated the full moon festival, the largest of the year. Visitors, respectfully barefoot, filled the grounds of the huge gold-plated Shwedagon Pagoda, the country’s most important Buddhist pilgrimage site, its glimmering spire visible from miles awa... | Laurence Cox | https://aeon.co//essays/u-dhammaloka-the-irish-buddhist-monk-who-faced-down-imperialism | |
Consciousness and altered states | An evolutionary approach to consciousness can resolve the ‘hard problem’ – with radical implications for animal sentience | The cover of New Scientist magazine 50 years ago showed a picture of a rhesus monkey, with the headline ‘A Blind Monkey That Sees Everything’. The monkey, named Helen, was part of a study into the neuropsychology of vision, led by Lawrence (Larry) Weiskrantz in the psychology laboratory at the University of Cambridge. ... | Nicholas Humphrey | https://aeon.co//essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness | |
Evolution | Attaining and maintaining power lies at the heart of almost all animal societies. And it’s as devious as human politicking | The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power … We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end … The object of power is power.– from Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George O... | Lee Alan Dugatkin | https://aeon.co//essays/its-not-enough-to-be-the-toughest-animals-must-be-shrewd-too | |
Subcultures | For children like me, growing up in an utopian community, life was a bewildering chaos of freedom and indoctrination | A man’s black beard tickles my face. We’re lying on a dirty carpet, in a gigantic hallway. He squeezes my seven-year-old-hand. ‘Look up,’ he says. Above us a grand staircase turns, coiling in three wooden flights. Landings with balustrades lead to corridors, to 60 rooms, attics and basements. Since we arrived this morn... | Susanna Crossman | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-communal-utopia-was-hard-work-for-its-children | |
Human rights and justice | Thousands of victims of political executions lie in anonymous graves. Forensics offers hope for the ‘forgotten’ ones | On 11 September 1939 in the city of Guadalajara in Spain, 13-year-old Ascensión Mendieta Ibarra opened the door to a group of ‘well-spoken’ men who had come to talk with her father, Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá. Timoteo, 41 years old, was a butcher, president of the local union, and father of seven. Upon gaining entrance to... | Nicole Iturriaga | https://aeon.co//essays/how-forensic-science-can-aid-the-human-rights-movement | |
Subcultures | Naturists believed nudity was profoundly beneficial to society. In order to spread the message, they took to photography | For around 100 years, naturists – formerly known as nudists – have been arguing that public disrobing is physically and morally improving. They first promoted their ideas in illustrated books and magazines in the 1920s and ’30s, and soon extended their claims to the pleasures and practices of viewing nude bodies in pho... | Annebella Pollen | https://aeon.co//essays/a-history-of-the-pleasures-and-powers-of-showing-the-nude-body | |
Addiction | The neuroscientific picture of addiction overlooks the psychological and social factors that make cravings so hard to resist | Human beings crave all sorts of things: coffee, sugar, sex, gambling, Xanax, porn, binge-watching TV shows, doomscrolling on social media, cocaine, online gaming, heroin, methamphetamines, hoarding. We each find different substances and activities alluring, and we develop distinct habits of choice. Cravings are an espe... | Zoey Lavallee | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-pull-of-addictive-cravings-is-so-hard-to-resist | |
Thinkers and theories | Eric Voegelin and Hans Kelsen fled the Nazis. In the US, they clashed over the nature of modernity and government | In the 1930s, many European academics sought refuge in the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation in their home countries. Jewish scholars were ‘cleansed’ from the academy in Germany with the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service and could sense that they were likely to lose m... | David Dyzenhaus | https://aeon.co//essays/eric-voegelin-hans-kelsen-and-the-debate-over-nazism | |
History of technology | For over a century telemedicine has promised healthcare for all. But will it ever replace seeing a human being in person? | She had been alone in the electronic waiting room for a long time. Yet the face that appeared in the two-dimensional window was composed and thoughtful as she tilted her head to show the angle of her right jaw. ‘It’s my ear,’ she said. ‘It’s hurting something fierce.’ She brought the smartphone closer to her ear canal,... | Jeremy A Greene | https://aeon.co//essays/virtual-medicine-and-the-ethics-of-presence-and-absence | |
Animals and humans | She has deep emotions, complex social needs and a large, elephant brain. Her legal personhood should be recognised too | Happy is a 51-year-old Asian elephant in the Bronx Zoo in New York City. But she didn’t start out there. She was born in the wild then kidnapped – taken away from her family as a baby in Thailand – and sold, along with six other calves, to Lion Country Safari, Inc in California. In 1977, Happy and another elephant, Gru... | Lori Marino | https://aeon.co//essays/why-nonhuman-beings-should-be-granted-personhood-rights | |
Religion | In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, Parwati Soepangat pioneered a Buddhist feminist theology with deep roots | Parwati Soepangat (1932-2016), fondly known as ‘Ibu Parwati’ to the Indonesian Buddhist community, was one of the first women disciples of Ashin Jinarakkhita (1923-2002). Ashin Jinarakkhita was the so-called father of modern Indonesian Buddhism – and a prominent founding member of the Indonesian Buddhayāna movement. Wh... | Jack Meng-Tat Chia | https://aeon.co//essays/parwati-soepangats-pioneering-buddhist-feminist-theology | |
Ethics | Even when individual perpetrators and victims are dead, states and institutions have a responsibility to make restitutions | As a country, the United States enforced slavery and segregation, engaged in bombings that killed civilians all over the world, imprisoned alleged ‘conspirators’ under false pretences during the Red Scare, and on and on. The US continues to grapple with devastating harms caused by the state, and it isn’t alone. Nearly ... | Joshua Stein | https://aeon.co//essays/states-have-a-moral-responsibility-to-settle-their-debts | |
Religion | In the 17th century, Dutch proselytisers set out for Asia, Africa and the Americas. The legacy of their travels endures | At the turn of the 1600s, a handful of Protestant pastors and chaplains in Amsterdam began accompanying ships of the United East India Company (VOC) to small Dutch commercial settlements in Southeast Asia. These Calvinist (also Reformed Protestant) ministers went to faraway lands to keep company employees from falling ... | Charles H Parker | https://aeon.co//essays/the-legacies-of-calvinism-in-the-dutch-empire | |
Biology | Inside a rainforest or on the city pavement, moss asks so little yet offers so much: a tactile encounter with time itself | On the cusp of winter 2021, I went for a walk in the woods near my house in Oxford. By a bench that overlooks the city, I happened upon a moss-covered log that glistened green under the overcast sky. The moss’s leaves were as tiny and intricate as the finest embroidery, and as thin as – I hate to admit – cling film. I ... | Nikita Arora | https://aeon.co//essays/a-history-of-botany-and-colonialism-touched-off-by-a-moss-bed | |
History | Ken Burns’s account of prohibition tells a popular story of booze in America. The historical record is far more sobering | I have only the highest respect for the documentarian Ken Burns. He’s America’s storyteller: an unrivalled filmmaker whose creativity, passion and style shine through every history he portrays. My intent is not to dunk on anyone, but rather to start a conversation about how Americans as a society grapple with our own c... | Mark Lawrence Schrad | https://aeon.co//essays/why-ken-burns-got-the-prohibition-story-so-very-very-wrong | |
Knowledge | Science and mathematics may never fully capture the physical universe. Are there hard limits to human intelligence? | Despite his many intellectual achievements, I suspect there are some concepts my dog cannot conceive of, or even contemplate. He can sit on command and fetch a ball, but I suspect that he cannot imagine that the metal can containing his food is made from processed rocks. I suspect he cannot imagine that the slowly leng... | David H Wolpert | https://aeon.co//essays/ten-questions-about-the-hard-limits-of-human-intelligence | |
History | Is history a matter of individual agency and action, or of finding and quantifying underpinning structures and patterns? | At a cotton plantation in Louisiana owned by Bennet H Barrow, in 1841 and 1842, ‘a total of 160 whippings were administered, an average of 0.7 whippings per hand per year.’ Or so calculated the economists Robert Fogel and Stanley L Engerman, drawing on tables created by the historian of Louisiana Edwin Adams Davis, fro... | Claire Lemercier & Claire Zalc | https://aeon.co//essays/historical-data-is-not-a-kitten-its-a-sabre-toothed-tiger | |
The environment | Unkempt, beguiling and lacking conventional geometry, wetlands bring a roguish, raffish wildness to the city | A sword of Damocles of sorts has hung over the Swanscombe Marshes in Kent for so many years that its long shadow is starting to weaken. The threat takes the form of a prospective theme park, thrillingly called ‘The London Resort’ and described as England’s answer to Disneyland. Until now, the realisation of the plan an... | Tom Blass | https://aeon.co//essays/can-cities-learn-to-embrace-wetlands-while-letting-them-be-wild | |
Evolution | The more we understand how cells produce shape and form, the more inadequate the idea of a genomic blueprint looks | Where in the embryo does the person reside? Morphogenesis – the formation of the body from an embryo – once seemed so mystifying that scholars presumed the body must somehow already exist in tiny form at conception. In the 17th century, the Dutch microscopist Nicolaas Hartsoeker illustrated this ‘preformationist’ theor... | Philip Ball | https://aeon.co//essays/how-xenobots-reshape-our-understanding-of-genetics | |
Illness and disease | People with multiple chemical sensitivity seem to be allergic to the world. What, if anything, can medicine do for them? | Sharon calls herself a universal reactor. In the 1990s, she became allergic to the world, to the mould colonising her home, the paint coating her kitchen walls, but also deodorants, soaps and anything with plastic. Public spaces rife with artificial fragrances were unbearable. Scented disinfectants and air fresheners i... | Xi Chen | https://aeon.co//essays/can-medicine-help-those-with-multiple-chemical-sensitivity | |
Global history | His communism brought the great American singer Paul Robeson trouble in the US, but helped make him a hero in China | Several times in recent years, Chinese broadcasters have aired shows that feature Paul Robeson (1898-1976), one of the most popular African American singers and actors of his era and a well-known civil rights activist. China National Radio and various channels of the widely influential China Central TV showcased Robeso... | Gao Yunxiang | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-peoples-republic-of-china-embraced-paul-robeson | |
Cosmology | Could primordial black holes from the beginning of time explain ‘dark matter’, the mysterious missing mass in the Universe? | The Universe began as a strange sort of soup. Large galaxies hadn’t yet formed, and flying particles were hotter than the centres of stars in the Universe today. Of these, tiny particles known as quarks clumped together to form the building blocks of atoms: neutrons, protons and electrons. Through a process called cosm... | Briley Lewis | https://aeon.co//essays/how-primordial-black-holes-might-explain-dark-matter | |
Human rights and justice | It is unjust, cruel and profoundly wasteful to consign a person to prison for life. A decent society must not do it | It is common knowledge that the United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other country – indeed, five times the rate of most countries. My state of Maryland, which has a below-average rate compared with other states, incarcerates 531 people per 100,000 of the population. The United Kingdom – the count... | Judith Lichtenberg | https://aeon.co//essays/why-sentencing-people-to-life-in-prison-makes-no-kind-of-sense | |
Religion | Buddhist monks have mostly escaped the label of proselytisers, but they’ll still spread the word to those who seek them out | In the seminar room in Wat Suan Dok, I found one senior monk, Phra Kyo, standing alone amid a circle of about 15 foreigners from North America and Europe. As soon as he began to speak, Phra Kyo captured the audience’s attention for the next hour with the peaceful and universal nature of Buddhism and its contrast with C... | Brooke Schedneck | https://aeon.co//essays/buddhists-missionaries-let-prospective-converts-come-to-them | |
Cities | Urban density was once seen as a sign of unhealthiness and poverty. But today it is necessary to make cities sustainable | In cities, the frenetic energy of crowds is feared and fetishised. Fear takes hold when we hear the great din of stampeding masses running from a shooting, a fire or a collapsing building. Municipal governments and police departments feel it too, when they’re required to manage crowds during demonstrations, concerts, s... | Max Holleran | https://aeon.co//essays/how-urban-density-can-make-our-neighbourhoods-better | |
Virtues and vices | Mischievousness requires humour, wit and a playful humaneness: qualities that make for a particular kind of virtue | Now let it work, mischief, thou art afoot.Take thou what course thou wilt!— from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act III, Scene II) One of the stranger sights on the University College London campus is the clothed skeleton of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Stranger still is that a waxwork head sits on... | Alex Moran | https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-moral-virtues-of-mischief-and-mischievous-people | |
Subcultures | To understand why so many adults are acting just like children, don’t blame Millennials – look to Japan in the 1990s | These are trying times. People are working harder and earning less. They’re buffeted by terrifying headlines and grim predictions. They’re having less sex and living with parents longer. And they’re burrowing under weighted blankets and escaping into the childish comforts of colouring books (or the fairytale fantasies ... | Matt Alt | https://aeon.co//essays/a-history-of-kidults-from-hello-kitty-to-disney-weddings | |
Animals and humans | In all its baroque and sometimes cruelly overbred forms, the dog is a paramount symbol of both human hopes and foibles | Walt Disney’s animated movie Lady and the Tramp (1955) is a telling, through dogs, of a classic human tale. The privileged woman falling for a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. The golden-haired uptown girl and the ethnically ambiguous guy from the streets. Dogs can easily represent these types due to our notions ... | Katrina Gulliver | https://aeon.co//essays/dogs-are-symbolic-containers-of-human-hopes-desires-and-vices | |
Politics and government | Buka Town in Bougainville shows how bureaucratic states could be reimagined, not as concrete buildings but as living gardens | We live in Canberra and Washington, DC, two stately capital cities that embody all the trappings and the ethos of the bureaucratic state. With their monuments, statues and symmetrical lines, the architects of both cities dreamt them as manifestations of the rational administrations that would work there. Imposing gover... | Gordon Peake & Miranda Forsyth | https://aeon.co//essays/how-a-small-island-capital-reimagines-the-bureaucratic-state | |
Religion | Think less of a holding pen for Heaven and more as a flow of love from the living, and the weirdness starts making sense | Up until recently, there existed a place where pretty much everyone who’d ever lived and then died was thought to dwell. This place is known to Catholics as Purgatory, a kind of eschatological holding pen where the souls of the deceased are cleansed of their sins by fire, thus allowing their ultimate entry into Heaven.... | Magnus Course | https://aeon.co//essays/why-purgatory-is-less-a-holding-pattern-and-more-a-tribute-to-love | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | Hot, strenuous and unsung. There is nothing soft and fluffy about the caretaking work that enables our digital lives | The ‘cloud’ is not an intangible monolith. It’s a messy, swelling tangle of data centres, fibre optic cables, cellular towers and networked devices that spans the globe. From the tropical megalopolis of Singapore to the remote Atacama Desert, or the glacial extremes of Antarctica, the material infrastructure of the clo... | Steven Gonzalez Monserrate | https://aeon.co//essays/downtime-is-not-an-option-meet-the-stewards-of-the-cloud | |
Environmental history | As storms, droughts and floods become more intense, what can the world learn from Japan’s profoundly wet history? | In early June 2018, I landed at Kansai airport in Japan, with a full day of travel ahead. A few hours later, I was sitting on a Shinkansen – the high-speed train connecting Osaka to Tokyo. Jetlagged, I tried to concentrate on the countryside as it streamed by at over 300 km per hour. Water was everywhere: a steady flow... | Giulio Boccaletti | https://aeon.co//essays/how-can-history-help-the-never-ending-human-dance-with-water | |
History of ideas | A cheery mood, you might think, is a terribly self-absorbed response to serious times. But history tells us otherwise | ‘Power dwells with cheerfulness,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Though we often think of cheerfulness as the opposite of power, as an insincere urge to liven things up, Emerson knew it to be a resource of the self, a tool for shaping our emotional lives that can help to relocate us in the social world and link us to commu... | Timothy Hampton | https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-surprising-history-of-cheerfulness-and-its-subtle-power | |
Meaning and the good life | Life can be better appreciated when you remember how wonderfully and frighteningly unlikely it is that you exist at all | Family lore has it that my grandfather, having spent some time doing business in England and about to return to the United States, received an invitation to seek additional sales opportunities in Scotland. At the last minute, he cancelled the passage he had booked on the Titanic. If the story is true, then, but for a c... | Timm Triplett | https://aeon.co//essays/think-about-it-your-existence-is-utterly-astonishing | |
Love and friendship | Contemporary wisdom says that happiness is the measure of a marriage. But is that a harmful way of judging relationships? | It is not uncommon in my practice to hear people wonder if they married the wrong person. It’s a painful reality to consider, and something I thought about in my current marriage in the early years after the birth of our twin sons. At some point in that era, my wife and I fell into a disconsolate rhythm of sniping and ... | Joshua Coleman | https://aeon.co//essays/how-do-you-decide-if-you-should-move-on-from-a-relationship | |
Demography and migration | Workers in the West have indeed been repressed – but not by immigrants. The policies of their own governments are to blame | One summer evening in 2015, a deranged young man entered a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. After spending nearly an hour with the assembled prayer group, he began screaming that they were ‘rapists’ who were ‘taking over our country’, and proceeded to spray them with bullets. When he left the church, nine in... | John Rapley | https://aeon.co//essays/the-great-replacement-is-real-but-its-not-what-the-right-says | |
Thinkers and theories | Inspired by Kant, Fichte launched a radical philosophical system based on subjectivity and aspiring to freedom for all | Johann Gottlieb Fichte is one of the most underappreciated post-Kantian philosophers. Yet during the peak of his career in the 1790s, when he was lecturing in his private garden and within the walls of the University of Jena in Germany, he was hailed as a ‘new hero’ arriving ‘in the land of truth’, as F W J Schelling p... | Gabriel Gottlieb | https://aeon.co//essays/on-freedom-and-the-limits-of-agency-the-philosophy-of-fichte | |
Mathematics | These odd values were long dismissed as bookkeeping. Now physicists are proving that they describe the hidden shape of nature | Many science students may imagine a ball rolling down a hill or a car skidding because of friction as prototypical examples of the systems physicists care about. But much of modern physics consists of searching for objects and phenomena that are virtually invisible: the tiny electrons of quantum physics and the particl... | Karmela Padavic-Callaghan | https://aeon.co//essays/how-imaginary-numbers-describe-the-fundamental-shape-of-nature | |
Ethics | It’s impossible to shed our individual biases. So the best way to establish objectivity is by taking on new perspectives | Years ago, my friend Julie and I took a road trip to Maine in my car. I drove most of the way, but one night she offered to drive us back from a lobster shack so I could enjoy another beer. I gratefully accepted but, as I watched her take the tight country corners in fourth gear, I came to regret my decision. When I co... | Heidi Maibom | https://aeon.co//essays/real-objectivity-rests-on-identifying-with-others | |
War and peace | Throughout history, the most effective combatants have powered to victory on commitment to core values and collective resolve | Leonidas, King of Sparta, arrived at Thermopylae with a small advance guard to hold off a massive Persian assault in 480 BCE. The invading Persian army was thousands-strong, and the Greek states had yet to mobilise a response. Plutarch records that Xerxes, Persia’s ‘King of Kings’, made a written offer he thought Leoni... | Scott Atran | https://aeon.co//essays/wars-are-won-by-people-willing-to-fight-for-comrade-and-cause | |
History of ideas | Romanticism once radically challenged conventional pieties. Now it’s little more than marketable schlock. What happened? | Growing up in Britain means encountering a certain kind of early 19th-century culture as a given. Address book, china mug or wall calendar, the decoration is sure to be that overloaded harvest wagon, The Hay Wain (1821), painted by John Constable. Elsewhere, riffing comedians and headline writers crank out pun after pu... | Fiona Sampson | https://aeon.co//essays/radicals-at-the-tea-party-how-romanticism-lost-its-edge | |
Anthropology | Frantic human activity has reduced both cultural and biological diversity. Now we must protect the dwindling alternatives | The parallels between the warnings from biologists about the loss of biodiversity and from anthropologists about the loss of cultural diversity are striking. In both cases, modernity – or globalisation if you wish – is the key cause of loss. This is a dual track worth pursuing because the main causes of loss in both ca... | Thomas Hylland Eriksen | https://aeon.co//essays/globalisation-lessens-our-world-but-we-do-have-alternatives | |
Nations and empires | Lenin envisioned Soviet unity. Stalin called Russia ‘first among equals’. Yet Russian nationalism never went away | On 19 November 1990, Boris Yeltsin gave a speech in Kyiv to announce that, after more than 300 years of rule by the Russian tsars and the Soviet ‘totalitarian regime’ in Moscow, Ukraine was free at last. Russia, he said, did not want any special role in dictating Ukraine’s future, nor did it aim to be at the centre of ... | Joy Neumeyer | https://aeon.co//essays/the-soviet-union-never-really-solved-russian-nationalism | |
The ancient world | Ancient Romans bought mementos to commemorate their travels. These speak eloquently of their world, if we care to listen | Souvenirs, an omnipresent facet of modern tourism, trace their roots to the ancient Mediterranean. In the Roman Empire, the common languages of Greek (koine) and Latin, standardised coinage and centralised bureaucracy increased the ease of travel, all of which helped a culture of souvenirs flourish. Indeed, a broad ran... | Maggie Popkin | https://aeon.co//essays/how-ancient-roman-souvenirs-made-memories-and-meanings | |
Human evolution | We have thought of humans for a century or more as creatures of the savannah, shaped in every way by grassland life. Not so | In a sweltering tropical rainforest on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, I started to appreciate why archaeologists and anthropologists had long ignored ‘jungles’ in their search for humanity’s origins. The mosquitoes, leeches, harsh terrain and difficult footing were bad enough, but now a summer monsoon dow... | Patrick Roberts | https://aeon.co//essays/we-are-creatures-of-tropical-jungles-as-much-as-the-savannah | |
Cities | The city, for all its mechanical speed, artificial light and industrialisation, is the most uncanny of human habitats | A train pulls into London Paddington. A disembodied voice announces the name of the station to the passengers onboard. The lights on the doors blink. The voice sounds again. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform. An ocean of people pour out of the carriages. They step over the gap with little thought, ... | Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel | https://aeon.co//essays/ghosts-haunt-cities-seeking-revenge-for-the-disappeared-past | |
Biology | Driven by insatiable curiosity, early histologists revealed the hidden structures of cells in works of sensual artistry | The locked drawer, the unopened box – we all know how it feels to want to see inside. In most of us, curiosity peaks at childhood, or morphs, in adulthood, into a hobby. But there are those for whom the desire to see becomes an almost spiritual imperative, one that they must live by. They are scientists, in particular ... | Benjamin Ehrlich | https://aeon.co//essays/the-sensual-artistry-we-first-used-to-visualise-our-cells-and-tissues | |
Language and linguistics | At the crossroads of south and central Asia lies one of the world’s most multilingual places, with songs and poetry to match | Dardistan is one of the most diverse linguistic regions in the world. In the 1930s, the Norwegian linguist Georg Morgenstierne called it one of the most polyglot parts of Asia. More recently, the Italian anthropologist Augusto Cacopardo has called it ‘Peristan’, an area with an ‘enormous diversity of tongues and cultur... | Zubair Torwali | https://aeon.co//essays/how-dardistan-became-one-of-the-most-multilingual-places-on-earth | |
Evolution | Bat friends, monkeys sharing, and humans holding hands: the brains of social animals synchronise and expand one another | Humans are not the only creatures that show a refined grasp of social norms. If a group of adult male rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) find themselves sitting around a turning table set with food, they will display an ‘I scratch your back, you scratch mine’ ethos of reciprocity. One monkey will offer another one a piece... | Sofia Quaglia | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-brains-of-social-animals-synchronise-and-expand-one-another | |
Philosophy of religion | The history of natural theology shows that Intelligent Design and New Atheism both got it wrong, in strangely similar ways | The first thing I learned about natural theology was that it was wrong. The idea that God’s existence could be proven by simply observing life on Earth – that divine presence could be found in human eyes, the wings of bees, the order of orchids or the movements of the planets – seemed archaic in a secular world where s... | Adam R Shapiro | https://aeon.co//essays/for-natural-theologians-proving-god-was-beside-the-point | |
The ancient world | Linear B has yielded its secrets, but Linear A remains elusive. Can linguistic analysis unlock the meaning of Minoan script? | At the end of the 19th century, when Arthur Evans was the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, he became fascinated with a tiny carved agate gemstone. It was donated to the museum by a Reverend Greville John Chester, in 1886, who seems to have purchased it in a bazaar in Greece. The stone bore sm... | Ester Salgarella | https://aeon.co//essays/without-a-rosetta-stone-can-linguists-decipher-minoan-script | |
Ageing and death | Here’s a puzzle: why do we neglect and disdain the one vulnerable group we all eventually will join? Beauvoir had an answer | Old age is not exactly a time of life that most of us welcome, although globally speaking it is a privilege to reach it. In Western societies, the shocked realisation that we are growing old often fills us with alarm and even terror. As Simone de Beauvoir writes in her magisterial study of the topic, La vieillesse (197... | Kate Kirkpatrick & Sonia Kruks | https://aeon.co//essays/simone-de-beauvoir-on-facing-old-age-and-avoiding-bad-faith | |
Political philosophy | Democracy is a system of politics that has disagreement at its heart. But how do we stop conflicts becoming destructive? | A cursory online search will provide you with nearly 100 million web pages concerning ‘the Left’s circular firing squad’. The idea of a circular firing squad is meant to evoke people so torn by their minor differences that they eliminate any possibility for solidarity or collective work. Rather than aiming our weapons ... | Rochelle DuFord | https://aeon.co//essays/what-types-of-conflict-are-good-for-democracy | |
History | How our toothy modern smile was invented by a confluence of French dentistry and Parisian portrait-painting in the 1780s | The smile is the most easily recognised facial expression at a distance in human interactions. It is also an easier expression to make than most others. Other facial expressions denoting emotion – such as fear, anger or distress – require up to four muscles. The smile needs only a single muscle to produce: the zygomati... | Colin Jones | https://aeon.co//essays/a-history-of-the-smile-through-art-culture-and-etiquette | |
Art | When 1970s women artists put the female body under the female gaze, why did the critics see only obscene monsters? | We read in Rabelais of how the devil took to flight when the woman showed him her vulva.– from the essay ‘Medusa’s Head’ (1922) by Sigmund FreudI’m listening to an episode of The New York Times podcast Sway, in which the host, Kara Swisher, interviews the model-turned-writer Emily Ratajkowski about her book, My Body (2... | Lauren Elkin | https://aeon.co//essays/the-female-body-under-the-female-gaze-poses-a-monster-problem | |
Sleep and dreams | The psychic lives of nonhuman dreamers reveal colours, harmonies and beauties of which we had little inkling until now | Due to a case of partial blindness, the French painter Henri Matisse began experimenting with a new artistic method in the final decades of his life. He called it ‘drawing with scissors’. He would cut out large chucks of gouache-painted paper and arrange the pieces into visually arresting feats of abstraction, often de... | David M Peña-Guzmán | https://aeon.co//essays/what-do-the-dreams-of-nonhuman-animals-say-about-their-lives | |
History of ideas | Zhuangzi thought Confucians were like frogs trapped in a well, unable to perceive the limitlessness of the sea | There is a well-known story in the Zhuangzi, the ‘Fable of a Frog in the Well’. It is a conversation between a well frog and a sea turtle. The frog brags about its own comfortable abode and way of life in a caved-in well to a visiting sea turtle. When the turtle describes for the frog what the sea is like, the frog is ... | Tao Jiang | https://aeon.co//essays/zhuangzis-ancient-fable-about-the-personal-and-the-political | |
Animals and humans | Scientists study animals to illuminate human psychology. So why are we blind to the mental lives of our caged subjects? | Of the thousands of bodies in this room, only five of us reflect the fluorescent lights. A low ceiling fan blows germfree air down onto the stainless-steel countertop and over three mice in an open cage, and their sister wriggling between my thumb and index finger. As I pinch back the loose skin over her shoulders, her... | Garet Lahvis | https://aeon.co//essays/what-do-caged-animals-really-tell-us-about-our-mental-lives | |
Global history | For a century before the rise of European empires, Britons and North Africans lived together in amicable peace | When you hear the words ‘Barbary pirate’, images of violence, slavery and alien culture probably come to mind. They might even conjure associations with jihad and crusade, wars between Christians and Muslims, and European battles with piratical enemies. It might be hard to imagine Europeans ever freely migrating to the... | Nat Cutter | https://aeon.co//essays/from-enemies-to-neighbours-british-merchants-in-the-maghreb | |
Self-improvement | To listen well is not only a kindness to others but also, as the psychologist Carl Rogers made clear, a gift to ourselves | Writing in Esquire magazine in 1935, Ernest Hemingway offered this advice to young writers: ‘When people talk, listen completely… Most people never listen.’ Even though Hemingway was one of my teenage heroes, the realisation crept up on me, somewhere around the age of 25: I am most people. I never listen. Perhaps never... | M M Owen | https://aeon.co//essays/the-psychologist-carl-rogers-and-the-art-of-active-listening | |
Earth science and climate | The most protected place on Earth has become one of the most threatened – and threatening. Can its problems be solved? | For more than 2,000 years, Antarctica existed only as a landscape of the imagination. If there was an Arctic continent, Aristotle reasoned in his treatise Meteorology, there ought to be an antipode, an ‘ant-Arctic’. For centuries, scientists, explorers and cartographers speculated about this antipodean Terra nondum cog... | Alejandra Mancilla & Peder Roberts | https://aeon.co//essays/how-do-we-solve-the-paradox-of-protection-in-antarctica | |
Knowledge | We need a new kind of approach to learning that shifts imagination from the periphery to the foundation of all knowledge | A chasm divides our view of human knowledge and human nature. According to the logic of the chasm, facts are the province of experimental science, while values are the domain of religion and art; the body (and brain) is the machinery studied by scientists, while the mind is a quasi-mystical reality to be understood by ... | Stephen T Asma | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-need-a-new-kind-of-education-imagination-studies | |
Thinkers and theories | In the long 19th century, many women philosophers were marginalised or ignored. We need to rediscover them | Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche – there is no shortage of geniuses in 19th-century philosophy. This, for many of us, is the philosophy we first fell in love with: a philosophy that asks deep existential questions while, all the same, analysing modern society with razor-sharp categories and concepts. The period g... | Kristin Gjesdal & Dalia Nassar | https://aeon.co//essays/a-rescue-mission-on-behalf-of-women-philosophers | |
Stories and literature | Today, the ancient Greek storyteller would be winning Oscars. To learn how, turn to the Poetics, his masterwork on writing | If you wanted to write a screenplay for a blockbuster film, Aristotle is the last person you might ask for advice. He lived more than 2,000 years ago, spent his days lecturing on ethics and earthworms, and never saw a movie in his life. But some of the best contemporary writers of stage and screen, such as Aaron Sorkin... | Philip Freeman | https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-write-a-hollywood-blockbuster-with-aristotles-poetics | |
Psychiatry and psychotherapy | Some psychotherapeutic approaches are not only ineffective, they’re actively harmful. We’re now starting to identify them | In 2000, Jeane Newmaker took her adopted 10-year-old daughter Candace to an ‘attachment therapy’ retreat designed to increase their emotional bond. While there, Candace underwent an intervention that’s supposed to replicate the birthing process. Therapists wrapped her in a flannel sheet and covered her with pillows to ... | Yevgeny Botanov, Alexander Williams & John Sakaluk | https://aeon.co//essays/psychotherapy-is-meant-to-help-but-what-about-when-it-harms | |
Thinkers and theories | From the ashes of the Second World War, Günther Anders forecast a new catastrophe: technology would overwhelm its creators | As the commander of the weather plane that supported the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, Claude Eatherly did not feel any particular animosity towards the Japanese, involved as he was in committing arguably one of the most barbaric acts of the Second World War with complete indifference. Eath... | Audrey Borowski | https://aeon.co//essays/gunther-anders-a-forgotten-prophet-for-the-21st-century | |
Earth science and climate | How did the planet replace the nation-state to become the prime political object of the 21st century? | Imagine a vast circular chamber, with walls covered in a towering painted map of planet Earth. Picture this hall ‘like a theatre, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage’. Enormous rings of tiered seating circle its outer walls. Imagine that working in these ... | Erik Isberg | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-planet-became-the-prime-political-entity-of-our-century | |
Mood and emotion | Hope is usually seen as a positive agent of change that spares us from pain. But it can also undermine healing and growth | The word ‘hope’ seems to hold an unambiguous quality in our vocabulary, imbued with a kind of purity that makes it unquestionably good. From old sayings to modern slogans, we are encouraged to develop and sustain a sense of hope. As a psychotherapist, I believe there is good reason for this. I have repeatedly witnessed... | Santiago Delboy | https://aeon.co//essays/when-clinging-to-old-hopes-gets-in-the-way-of-healing-and-growth | |
Quantum theory | Metaphysical debates in quantum physics don’t get at ‘truth’ – they’re nothing but a form of ritual, activity and culture | I first learnt about Plato’s allegory of the cave when I was in senior high school. A mathematics and English nerd – a strange combination – I played cello and wrote short stories in my spare time. I knew a bit about philosophy and was taking a survey class in the humanities, but Plato’s theory of ideal forms arrived a... | Timothy Andersen | https://aeon.co//essays/how-wittgenstein-might-solve-both-philosophy-and-quantum-physics | |
Human rights and justice | It wasn’t all young men and guns: the Black Panther Party’s programs fed more hungry kids than the state of California | Starting in 1969, and for several years afterwards, in church basements and community centre kitchens in cities and towns around the United States, thousands of kids sat around a table every school day morning, eating hot breakfast served by the young adults of the Black Panther Party. At each seat there was a plate an... | Suzanne Cope | https://aeon.co//essays/the-black-panthers-fed-more-hungry-kids-than-the-state-of-california | |
Thinkers and theories | A golden generation of French philosophers dismantled truth and other traditional ideas. What next for their successors? | On 2 October 2020, the French president Emmanuel Macron gave a two-hour speech entitled ‘The Fight Against Separatism – The Republic in Action’ at Les Mureaux, a north-western suburb of Paris. In it, Macron described Islam as ‘a religion that is in crisis all over the world today’ due to ‘an extreme hardening of positi... | Peter Salmon | https://aeon.co//essays/after-jacques-derrida-whats-next-for-french-philosophy |
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