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Demography and migration | Should nations stay within their historical boundaries, or change as their populations do? Kosovo is a cautionary tale | There are only two questions in politics: who decides? and who decides who decides? Every country solves these questions in its own way, be it through democracy, autocracy or dictatorship. But however it answers, the same dilemma emerges again at a deeper level. Who gets to say what is or is not a country? For most of ... | Charles Crawford | https://aeon.co//essays/who-gets-to-say-what-counts-as-a-country | |
Family life | My father rescued me time after time when I was lost in addiction. What kind of father will I be for my new daughter? | I was cruised the other night at a park near my house in Denver, Colorado. It’s a normal park with tennis courts and a lake and a playground and Mexican families throwing fun-looking picnics on the grassy hills. I was pushing my four-month-old daughter around the lake when I noticed a man following me. He was probably ... | Peter Stenson | https://aeon.co//essays/i-never-imagined-id-turn-into-my-dad-but-perhaps-i-need-to | |
Biotechnology | It’s made in a lab, no factory farms and no killing, but it’s still meat. Looks like we’ll need a whole new food ethics | The chef Richard McGeown has faced bigger culinary challenges in his distinguished career than frying a meat patty in a little sunflower oil and butter. But this time the eyes and cameras of hundreds of journalists in the room were fixed on the 5oz (140g) pink disc sizzling in his pan, one that had been five years and ... | Julian Baggini | https://aeon.co//essays/is-there-any-reason-vegetarians-can-t-eat-lab-grown-meat | |
Physics | If human history turns on the tilt of the multiverse, can we still trust our ideas of achievement, progress and morality? | Andy Murray’s unexpectedly strong start against Roger Federer in the Wimbledon 2012 final put the Daily Telegraph columnist Matthew Norman in a science-fiction mood. ‘It seemed we’d been transported to one of those parallel universes into which Doctor Who likes to slip with insouciant ease,’ he commented. A year later,... | Andrew Crumey | https://aeon.co//essays/can-the-multiverse-explain-the-course-of-history | |
Anthropology | If you want to know what money is, don’t ask a banker. Take a leap of faith and start your own currency | I don’t have much money. Then again, I couldn’t say exactly how much I do have. In the Co‑operative Bank’s IT system is a database entry that says I have £97 in electronic money. In my wallet I have three £10 notes, pieces of paper with pictures of the Queen on them, issued by the Bank of England, promising me £30. I h... | Brett Scott | https://aeon.co//essays/so-you-want-to-invent-your-own-currency | |
Mood and emotion | I am an atheist and a Quaker. Does it matter what I believe, when I recognise that religion is something I need? | I read voraciously as a child, even obsessively. Our family drove across the US when I was 13, and I hardly noticed the scenery, eyes glued to a mammoth book of classic science-fiction stories. As I recall, this ticked off my parents. Magical stories moved me to tears. I vividly remember, at the age of eight, being sur... | Nat Case | https://aeon.co//essays/im-an-atheist-so-how-did-i-end-up-such-a-committed-quaker | |
Film and visual culture | Schizophrenics used to see demons and spirits. Now they talk about actors and hidden cameras – and make a lot of sense | Clinical psychiatry papers rarely make much of a splash in the wider media, but it seems appropriate that a paper entitled ‘The Truman Show Delusion: Psychosis in the Global Village’, published in the May 2012 issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, should have caused a global sensation. Its authors, the brothers Joel and ... | Mike Jay | https://aeon.co//essays/a-culture-of-hyper-reality-made-paranoid-delusions-true | |
Consciousness and altered states | Consciousness is the ‘hard problem’, the one that confounds science and philosophy. Has a new theory cracked it? | Scientific talks can get a little dry, so I try to mix it up. I take out my giant hairy orangutan puppet, do some ventriloquism and quickly become entangled in an argument. I’ll be explaining my theory about how the brain — a biological machine — generates consciousness. Kevin, the orangutan, starts heckling me. ‘Yeah,... | Michael Graziano | https://aeon.co//essays/how-consciousness-works-and-why-we-believe-in-ghosts | |
Architecture | It might be a piece of paradise, a refuge from urban mayhem – but can a garden embody something deeper and wilder? | I am not a gardener. A few square metres of paved back yard offered me little scope for horticulture as a London child. Faced with a larger square of neglected lawn that came with a later house, my parents were helpless and I absorbed their bafflement. Yet I am passionate about gardens. They promise escape and comfort,... | Emma Crichton Miller | https://aeon.co//essays/any-garden-i-love-must-be-wild | |
Architecture | At bookstores it’s easy to confuse the kids section for the nature section. Why are so many children’s books about animals? | There are times when I’m Skyping with my father that, for a moment or so, I confuse his image on the screen with mine. We are both grey-haired and bearded now, and though his facial wrinkles are more deltaic than mine, the resemblance between us is close enough to fool me briefly. After all, in my first memories of him... | Liam Heneghan | https://aeon.co//essays/what-do-our-children-learn-from-the-very-hungry-caterpillar | |
Ethics | Can America face up to the terrible reality of slavery in the way that Germany has faced up to the Holocaust? | On 22 December 2012, the distinguished African-American film director Spike Lee tweeted: ‘American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust.’ He ignited a small storm in the US media, saying that he would not see Quentin Tarantino’s new film Django Unchained because it was an insult to his a... | Susan Neiman | https://aeon.co//essays/dare-we-compare-american-slavery-to-the-holocaust | |
Demography and migration | Romany and Traveller songs inspired a century of popular music. Now Sam Lee is searching for the last of them | The first time the London-born folk singer Sam Lee met Freda Black, he thought she was dying. It was December 2011 and he had finally secured an introduction, three years after hearing about her through a chance encounter with some of her relatives. Lee was keen to hear the traditional songs that had been passed down t... | Dorian Lynskey | https://aeon.co//essays/for-britain-s-travellers-songs-can-still-summon-ghosts | |
Cognition and intelligence | Our instincts for privacy evolved in tribal societies where walls didn’t exist. No wonder we are hopeless oversharers | In October 2012 a woman from Massachusetts called Lindsey Stone went on a work trip to Washington DC, and paid a visit to Arlington National Cemetery, where American war heroes are buried. Crouching next to a sign that said ‘Silence and Respect’, she raised a middle finger and pretended to shout while a colleague took ... | Ian Leslie | https://aeon.co//essays/facebooks-privacy-settings-arent-the-problem-ours-are | |
Human reproduction | Many promising male contraceptives are in development, but none have come to market. What’s taking so long? | ‘I am too young to die,’ said my patient. ‘My kids are small. They still need me.’ I explained that having a heart attack did not mean that she would die. We had caught it early. Within the next minutes, she would have an angiogram to remove the blood clot in her coronary artery, and we had already started her on a nit... | Jalees Rehman | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-there-still-no-contraceptive-pill-for-men | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | History tells us that plant diseases cause famines, pestilence and war. Now one is coming for our chocolate | A few degrees north of the equator, in the hot, humid rainforests of Ghana, two groups of farmers are vying for dominance over the world’s most productive chocolate-growing region. Chocolate is made from cocoa beans found in the large, rugby-ball-shaped pods of cocoa trees. People have been planting these trees in Ghan... | Ed Yong | https://aeon.co//essays/an-army-of-ants-is-besieging-the-world-s-chocolate-supply | |
Childhood and adolescence | How can scientists act ethically when they are studying the victims of a human tragedy, such as the Romanian orphans? | We drove to the orphanage on a pleasant December morning, under a sky that seemed too blue. It was a short ride through a residential neighbourhood of Bucharest, littered with posters of politicians’ heads for the upcoming elections. Nervous, I mentally recited the two rules the American professor had given me the nigh... | Virginia Hughes | https://aeon.co//essays/romanian-orphans-a-human-tragedy-a-scientific-opportunity | |
Stories and literature | We yearn for silence, yet the less sound there is, the more our thoughts deafen us. How can we still the noise within? | Years ago, in my novel Cleaver (2006), I imagined a media man who is used to frantic bustle and talk going in search of silence. He flees to the Alps, looking for a house above the tree line – above, as he begins to think of it, the noise line; a place so high, the air so thin, that he hopes there will be no noise at a... | Tim Parks | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-sound-of-silence-the-end-of-the-self | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | From Atlantis to Noah’s Ark, we have long been drawn to stories of submerged lands. What lies beneath the flood myths? | In 1931, a trawler called the Colinda sank its nets into the North Sea, 25 miles off the coast of Norfolk, and dredged up an unlikely artefact — a handworked antler, 21cm long, with a set of barbs running along one side. Archeologists identified it as a prehistoric harpoon and dated it to the Mesolithic age, when sea l... | Edward Platt | https://aeon.co//essays/why-lost-civilisations-under-the-waves-still-fascinate-us | |
Love and friendship | Felines walk the line between familiar and strange. We stroke them and they purr, then in a trice they pounce | Saturday was a small snake. Each morning for six days, Berzerker — half-Siamese, half-streetcat, with charcoal fur and a pure white undercoat — had deposited a new creature on the doormat. On this last day, the snake was as stiff as a twig; rigor mortis had already set in. I wondered if there was a mortuary under the p... | David Wood | https://aeon.co//essays/the-uncanny-familiar-can-we-ever-really-know-a-cat | |
Biology | Ancient yet playful, endangered but resurgent, the North Atlantic right whale is a living reminder of how little we know | Late spring, Cape Cod Bay; dark blue water, pale blue sky. Skipper the ship’s dog barked loudly over the side of the research vessel, Shearwater. ‘That’s a big rabbit, Skipper!’ joked Brigid McKenna, one of the two young women on the top deck of the small boat where we had spent the past seven hours staring out to sea.... | Philip Hoare | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-the-right-whale-returning-to-the-waters-off-cape-cod | |
Cosmology | Ditching the leap second would mean decoupling clock time from the Earth’s rotation – from day and night itself | Every now and then — once in two years, say — an extra second of time is legislated into the end of a day. This so-called leap second leads time on a tiny detour, from 23:59:59 to 24:00:00, via 23:59:60. It’s just a second. Most people take no notice. But everyone is affected, because we all share the same civil time, ... | Dava Sobel | https://aeon.co//essays/what-would-happen-if-clock-time-no-longer-tracked-the-sun | |
Dance and theatre | Life on the road with a rock band: memories blur, cities blend. Only in the frenzy of performance does the world pause | I’ve just returned home after a long tour. I’m in a band, one of those travelling circuses of night salesmen, and we ply our shows all over the world. When we’re offered a gig, we usually say yes, as much for the experience as for the money. One day, presumably, people will stop asking. In the meantime, the long months... | Claire L Evans | https://aeon.co//essays/the-world-blurs-when-i-m-on-tour-with-the-band | |
Cities | Reclaiming the streets through civic participation does more than change the city: it creates citizens | We’d gathered by the ticket booth outside the South Bank Centre in London at 6.30pm. It was the last Friday in May but there was a slight chill in the air, so we clustered in groups — couples sticking together, friends facing in towards each other. Those who’d arrived alone looked around, checking cell phones and waiti... | Leo Hollis | https://aeon.co//essays/cities-thrive-when-public-space-is-open-to-all | |
Cognition and intelligence | Shyness is a part of being human. The world would be a more insipid, less creative place without it | If I had to describe being shy, I’d say it was like coming late to a party when everyone else is about three glasses in. All human interaction, if it is to develop from small talk into meaningful conversation, draws on shared knowledge and tacit understandings. But if you’re shy, it feels like you just nipped out of th... | Joe Moran | https://aeon.co//essays/shyness-cannot-be-cured-it-is-part-of-being-human | |
Cosmology | Planets in potato fields and asteroids in gravel: how a Maine highway illuminates the strange history of the solar system | A few Septembers back, on a Saturday afternoon, I took a long drive, from a leafy neighbourhood in Boston, Massachusetts, to the remotest parts of the outer solar system. I set out from Cambridge in a dusty, rented Volkswagen, with my co-pilot Andrew Youdin, a planet-formation theorist from the University of Colorado a... | Lee Billings | https://aeon.co//essays/driving-the-solar-system-is-a-lesson-in-space-and-time | |
Philosophy of science | I am a geneticist, my sister works a dairy farm. Our lives are so different we might as well be living in parallel worlds | ‘I had to take a sick baby goat to bed with me last night,’ my sister said. ‘I found her lying in a corner of the greenhouse barn getting ready to die.’ ’Did she make it?’ I asked. ‘Yep,’ said Jennifer. ‘I tubed her and gave her some electrolytes when I brought her in, fed her and wrapped her up in a towel, and took he... | Anne Buchanan | https://aeon.co//essays/the-two-cultures-of-academia-are-insignificant-here | |
Consciousness and altered states | Digital technology allows us to lose ourselves in ever more immersive fantasy worlds. But what are we fleeing from? | The only people who hate escapism are jailers, said the essayist and Narnia author C S Lewis. A generation later, the fantasy writer Michael Moorcock revised the quip: jailers love escapism — it’s escape they can’t stand. Today, in the early years of the 21st century, escapism — the act of withdrawing from the pressure... | Damien Walter | https://aeon.co//essays/does-fantasy-offer-mere-escapism-or-real-escape | |
Economics | The cosy coastal world of pretend farmers’ markets bears no resemblance to the actual back end of America | Every time you set foot in a Whole Foods store, you are stepping into one of the most carefully designed consumer experiences on the planet. Produce is stacked into black bins in order to accentuate its colour and freshness. Sale items peek out from custom-made crates, distressed to look as though they’ve just fallen o... | Venkatesh Rao | https://aeon.co//essays/america-still-has-a-heartland-it-s-just-an-artificial-one | |
Childhood and adolescence | Imaginary friends can seem to have a life of their own. Where do they go when their human creators grow up? | No one in my family knows where those names came from, least of all me. Temmy was a boy, Clugga a girl, and I remember them now in the way you might remember beloved cousins not seen since childhood. They were my friends, constant companions. I can’t tell you what they looked like, but they were vivid to me then. I kne... | Sophie Elmhirst | https://aeon.co//essays/let-me-introduce-you-to-my-imaginary-friends | |
Biology | The strange biology of island populations highlights the role of chance, not just selection, in evolutionary change | Over a pint of beer, the great biologist, polymath and pub-lover J B S Haldane was asked if he would give his life to save his drowning brother. He is supposed to have said: ‘No, but I would to save two brothers, or eight cousins.’ He was referring to one of evolution’s puzzles: why animals (including humans) help one ... | Lewis Spurgin | https://aeon.co//essays/how-much-does-evolution-depend-on-chance | |
Ethics | Our genes and our culture tell us to live as long as possible – even when living is misery. Should we listen? | My last remaining grandparent is 97 years old. She has dementia, can barely hear, has no real friends, and spends most of her waking hours shouting ‘Garbage!’ at the TV that sits in the corner of her small room in an assisted living home. It’s not all grim. My brother and I love her, and she gets to see her daughter, m... | Rhys Southan | https://aeon.co//essays/is-a-long-life-necessarily-a-good-life | |
Death | When someone close to you dies, the very fabric of your life is ripped to shreds. Is philosophy any consolation? | I’m dealing with the death of my father the way I deal with most things: by thinking, and processing those thoughts through writing, fingers to keyboard. Given my philosophical bent, these thoughts wander from his particular death to mortality in general. That might strike you as cold, excessively rational, analytic. B... | Julian Baggini | https://aeon.co//essays/would-philosophy-help-me-to-deal-with-my-fathers-death | |
Evolution | Evolution has changed all we know about how humans behave, compete and co-operate. When will economics catch up? | In 2008, as it was becoming clear that a once-in-a-generation financial crisis was upon us, a friend of mine who is a senior corporate executive asked me a peculiar question. Might evolutionary theory have something to say about what caused the crisis? Those of us who labour away in the biological sciences are unaccust... | David Sloan Wilson | https://aeon.co//essays/social-darwinism-is-back-but-this-time-it-s-a-good-thing | |
Life stages | I’m 43 years old now, damn it, and my life is amazing. So why am I comparing myself to some styled professional? | Today I have to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get my driver’s licence renewed. My current licence photo is 10 years old, so old that the carefree woman in the picture always takes me by surprise. Her hair looks unnaturally shiny. Her smile says, ‘I have nowhere in particular to be. Let’s go grab a cocktail!... | Heather Havrilesky | https://aeon.co//essays/how-did-i-end-up-growing-old | |
Bioethics | Animals have thoughts, feelings and personality. Why have we taken so long to catch up with animal consciousness? | I met my first semipalmated sandpiper in a crook of Jamaica Bay, an overlooked shore strewn with broken bottles and religious offerings at the edge of New York City. I didn’t know what it was called, this small, dun-and-white bird running the flats like a wind-up toy, stopping to peck mud and racing to join another bir... | Brandon Keim | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bird-the-science-of-animal-consciousness | |
Human reproduction | If you were a poor Ugandan mother with a desperately ill baby, would you turn to Western medicine or the village healer? | It was late February when I heard the story of a young seamstress whose baby girl had died from an unknown illness. The mother, Evelyn Bonabone, lived with her grandmother about an hour outside Mbarara, a compact, hectic city in western Uganda with a medical school and one of the country’s better hospitals – although t... | Brendan Borrell | https://aeon.co//essays/how-medicine-and-ritual-got-hopelessly-entangled-in-uganda | |
Food and drink | There’s nothing so atavistic and satisfying in the morning as sinking your hands into a sticky, bubbling live sourdough | The sort of bread I really like to make is the sort of bread that takes time. You have to start early in the morning, set your alarm even. Though if the thought is in your head you might find you wake naturally with the sunlight, feeling refreshed, squatting on time’s hoard. Just before seven, you pad down in your dres... | Sam Leith | https://aeon.co//essays/time-to-bake-a-manly-loaf-of-sourdough-bread | |
Architecture | Most architecture sets out to make us civil and efficient. Where are the homes that give us passion and pleasure? | Morningside, a late-Victorian suburb on the south side of Edinburgh is an extremely good-looking place, possessing an architectural integrity rare in Britain today. Never threatened by wartime bombs, post-war developers, or the vicissitudes of the housing market, this suburb has a direct line to the ‘Victorian city’ — ... | Richard J Williams | https://aeon.co//essays/can-architecture-improve-our-sex-lives | |
Ethics | Vegetarian and vegan ethics are not a recent fad in Asia, but a longstanding human aspiration and virtue | It’s not so long ago that George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), called vegetarianism an affront to ‘decent people’ and the obsession of the ‘food crank… out of touch with common humanity’. It was, he thought, a symptom of the hijacking of the socialist cause by ‘every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wear... | Kapil Komireddi | https://aeon.co//essays/mercy-toward-animals-runs-deep-in-asian-cultural-traditions | |
Astronomy | The Universe seems to be bursting with planets, and this is profoundly important — but not in the way we might expect | The rites of spring are many and varied. As a child in rural England, I was once given the chore of finding and rearranging the bulbs of a long-unattended flowerbed. I’m not sure if spring was a wise time to do this from a horticultural point of view. It seemed to me that, having survived the rigours of winter, these h... | Caleb Scharf | https://aeon.co//essays/the-real-meaning-of-the-exoplanet-revolution | |
Biology | Nobody expects atoms and molecules to have purposes, so why do we still think of living things in this way? | One of my favourite dinosaurs is the Stegosaurus, a monster from the late Jurassic (150 million years ago), noteworthy because of the diamond-like plates all the way down its back. Since this animal was discovered in the late 1870s in Wyoming, huge amounts of ink have been spilt trying to puzzle out the reason for the ... | Michael Ruse | https://aeon.co//essays/what-s-a-stegosaur-for-why-life-is-design-like | |
Art | One emotion inspired our greatest achievements in science, art and religion. We can manipulate it – but why do we have it? | When I was growing up in New York City, a high point of my calendar was the annual arrival of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus — ‘the greatest show on earth’. My parents endured the green-haired clowns, sequinned acrobats and festooned elephants as a kind of garish pageantry. For me, though, it ... | Jesse Prinz | https://aeon.co//essays/why-wonder-is-the-most-human-of-all-emotions | |
Demography and migration | ‘You need to fill that in, love,’ they told me at the jobcentre. Would my communist work experience count in the UK? | I came to the UK from Bulgaria in 1990, and every job I saw advertised wanted experience. The application forms had box after box for me to list my previous jobs. But all I had ever done was go to school. I tried leaving those pages empty. The forms were handed back. ‘You need to fill that in, love,’ they told me at th... | Elena Seymenliyska | https://aeon.co//essays/how-i-learned-to-work-in-communist-bulgaria | |
Biology | As the American people got fatter, so did marmosets, vervet monkeys and mice. The problem may be bigger than any of us | Years ago, after a plane trip spent reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Weight Watchers magazine, Woody Allen melded the two experiences into a single essay. ‘I am fat,’ it began. ‘I am disgustingly fat. I am the fattest human I know. I have nothing but excess poundage all over my body. My finge... | David Berreby | https://aeon.co//essays/blaming-individuals-for-obesity-may-be-altogether-wrong | |
Biology | Dolphins are smart, sociable predators. They don’t belong in captivity and they shouldn’t be used to ‘cure’ the ill | Imagine this. Jay, an eight-year-old autistic boy, whose behaviour has always been agitated and uncooperative, is smiling and splashing in the pool. A pair of bottlenose dolphins float next to him, supporting him in the water. Jay’s parents stand poolside as a staff member in the water engages him in visual games with ... | Lori Marino | https://aeon.co//essays/dolphin-therapy-doesn-t-work-for-the-child-or-the-animal | |
Cosmopolitanism | Contrary to popular belief, migration from Muslim countries is one reason why Europe is becoming more secular, not less | The European relationship between religion, law and politics is a strange creature. Religious influence over political life is weaker in Europe than in almost any other part of the world. To adapt the phrase first used by Alastair Campbell when he was spokesman for the British prime minister Tony Blair, politicians in ... | Ronan McCrea | https://aeon.co//essays/is-migration-making-europe-more-secular | |
Architecture | Gardens expand our thinking. At times of crisis they console, school us in emotional generosity, and show us that life goes on | The doctor had a calm, sing-song voice. Every word was measured and mild. The only jarring note was sartorial: his navy blue striped shirt and gold cufflinks clashed with the Miami Vice pastels of my wife’s quarantined hospital room. As if he were casually pulling down options from a computer menu, the specialist told ... | Damon Young | https://aeon.co//essays/gardens-cannot-make-us-good-but-they-invite-us-to-be-better | |
Medicine | Traditional Chinese medicine is an odd, dangerous mix of sense and nonsense. Can it survive in modern China? | A few minutes after getting her traditional Chinese medicine injection in a hospital in Chongqing, southwest China, 25 year-old Zhang Mingjuan began hyperventilating. She’d had only a slight fever, but wanted to try the appealing combination of traditional medicine with the more rapid vector of a jab. Now she felt like... | James Palmer | https://aeon.co//essays/traditional-chinese-medicine-needs-its-own-revolution | |
Childhood and adolescence | Is our culture quietly hostile to something deeply important – loving our children in a genuine and attentive way? | There’s a liminal moment, at the end of each day, when I pull my son’s door to and whisper goodnight. My daughter’s door is already part-closed, and I hope she is sleeping. As I descend the stairs, doing my best not to clump on the painted steps, a layer of awareness slips from my shoulders. By the time I’m at the bott... | Helen Hayward | https://aeon.co//essays/is-motherhood-always-about-self-sacrifice | |
Automation and robotics | Hod Lipson’s artificial organisms have already escaped from the virtual realm. Now he wants to send them out of control | In a laboratory tucked away in a corner of the Cornell University campus, Hod Lipson’s robots are evolving. He has already produced a self-aware robot that is able to gather information about itself as it learns to walk. Like a Toy Story character, it sits in a cubby surrounded by other former laboratory stars. There’s... | Emily Monosson | https://aeon.co//essays/can-life-evolve-from-wires-and-plastic | |
Anthropology | They predicted the Boxing Day tsunami, but can Thailand’s sea gypsies stay afloat on the waves of modernity? | Back when it was still known as Burma, Moo Hning’s family fled by sea from the civil war in Myanmar. On rafts and without papers, they sailed from one island to the next, fishing with tackle, scavenging from rock pools and the seabed, and gradually learning which of the sea’s creatures they could safely eat. Over time,... | Julian Sayarer | https://aeon.co//essays/do-thailand-s-sea-gypsies-need-saving-from-our-way-of-life | |
Religion | I have turned away from the church but, up on Mount Athos, I turned on to the mysteries of Orthodox meditation | I travelled on the night train from Athens and arrived in Thessaloniki six hours later, in a sleepless daze. The small neon-lit café by the bus stop was crammed with plastic tables and chairs. I must have fallen asleep while I waited there, as I found myself being shaken back to consciousness just as the bus for Ourano... | George Zarkadakis | https://aeon.co//essays/an-encounter-with-meditation-on-mount-athos | |
Economics | In today’s world, web developers have it all: money, perks, freedom, respect. But is there value in what we do? | There’s this great moment in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) when the world’s most celebrated sushi chef turns to his son, who is leaving to start his own restaurant, and says: ‘You have no home to come back to.’ Which, when you think about it, isn’t harsh or discouraging but is in fact the very best thing ... | James Somers | https://aeon.co//essays/dad-s-company-made-burgers-mine-just-eats-them | |
Neuroscience | Some people have neurological quirks that give them extraordinary perceptual powers. What can we learn from them? | Ordinary people with superior perceptual skills walk among us, absorbing information from the everyday world which is debarred to the rest of us. We can’t spot them, but they can pick up the faintest traces of smell or taste. They might see coloured auras that correspond to the expressed emotions of others. Some of the... | Michael Banissy | https://aeon.co//essays/neuro-quirks-and-super-human-perceptions | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | In places once thick with farms and cities, human dispossession and war has cleared the ground for nature to return | I stepped out into the sunlight, scarcely able to believe what I had seen or, rather, what I had not. I stared at the hills around me, contrasting them with the old photos of those same hills I had seen. Where dense forests now grew, forming a high, closed canopy — in the valleys, over the hills and up the mountain wal... | George Monbiot | https://aeon.co//essays/why-humanitarian-disasters-are-good-for-nature | |
History of ideas | Trying to resolve the stubborn paradoxes of their field, physicists craft ever more mind-boggling visions of reality | Theoretical physics is beset by a paradox that remains as mysterious today as it was a century ago: at the subatomic level things are simultaneously particles and waves. Like the duck-rabbit illusion first described in 1899 by the Polish-born American psychologist Joseph Jastrow, subatomic reality appears to us as two ... | Margaret Wertheim | https://aeon.co//essays/the-paradoxes-that-sit-at-the-very-core-of-physics | |
Mental health | I had a phobia of anyone hearing me play the piano. With practice, could my memory help me overcome it? | Most days, I play the piano for at least an hour, usually longer. But my dedication springs from fear not love. Of course, many soloists suffer from perfectly rational performance nerves, but my fear is less rational: it’s the fear of anybody, anybody at all, actually hearing me play and it’s so powerful it stops me fr... | Katie Grant | https://aeon.co//essays/one-year-30-variations-could-i-master-my-fears | |
Mental health | Governments are now providing free psychotherapy to their citizens. Is there a limit to state-sponsored happiness? | ‘Who wants to go first?’ It’s 2001. There are eight of us sitting in a circle. I’m in a support group for sufferers of social anxiety, which meets every Thursday evening in a corner of the Royal Festival Hall. It’s the one place where it’s OK for us to discuss the panic attacks, loneliness, inhibition and low self-este... | Jules Evans | https://aeon.co//essays/should-the-state-legislate-for-individual-happiness | |
Art | Repairing things is about more than thrift. It is about creating something bold and original | The 16th-century Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyū is said to have ignored his host’s fine Song Dynasty Chinese tea jar until the owner smashed it in despair at his indifference. After the shards had been painstakingly reassembled by the man’s friends, Rikyū declared: ‘Now, the piece is magnificent.’ So it went in old J... | Philip Ball | https://aeon.co//essays/its-time-to-rediscover-the-art-and-beauty-of-repair | |
Architecture | Heady with beauty, in cherry tree season Japan celebrates environmental values that Western greens have lost | It is peak sakura — the short, spring season of cherry-tree flowering that so besots Japan. In Ueno Park in Tokyo, falling blossoms settle over the sleeping salarymen, recumbent on tarpaulins with traffic masks yanked down around their necks. Curtains of petals draw open and closed in the wind around huddled teenagers.... | Rebecca Giggs | https://aeon.co//essays/whats-wrong-with-japans-cherry-blossom-picnics | |
Information and communication | More human beings can write and type their every thought than ever before. Something to celebrate or deplore? | At some point in the past two million years, give or take half a million, the genus of great apes that would become modern humans crossed a unique threshold. Across unknowable reaches of time, they developed a communication system able to describe not only the world, but the inner lives of its speakers. They ascended —... | Tom Chatfield | https://aeon.co//essays/the-world-is-awash-with-more-text-than-ever-before | |
Consciousness and altered states | The peculiar vividness of the world becomes clear when we slow down and attend, learning to see all things anew | It starts with the slightly awkward heave — leg up and over the seat, feet locating the stirrups — and the indrawn breath that says ‘Let’s go.’ This is a new discipline for me, this stationary bike, and I make sure to pace myself. I tip from side to side, easily and rhythmically, with a hint of a pulse, my movements me... | Sven Birkerts | https://aeon.co//essays/paying-close-attention-is-an-art-and-an-act-of-the-spirit | |
Food and drink | We might deplore the practice, but posting pictures of our meals online is a way to bring everyone to the table | In February, I attended the wedding of a former colleague in Washington, DC. The reverend’s homily touched on the role that food had played in the bride and groom’s relationship. Their love, cultivated while sharing meals, reflects the role of food in the human experience. The reverend described a picture that the groo... | Jared Keller | https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-we-choose-to-serve-our-dinner-on-social-media | |
History of ideas | Verbal gaffes can profoundly challenge our sense of self, offering insight into our idiosyncrasies and desires | I have been interested in Freudian slips for as long as I can remember. Where I grew up, etiquette was everything. My mother spent considerable time doing ‘meals on wheels’ for the elderly, helping local disabled youngsters, and was much admired for these virtues. She never had a cross word for anyone, and always dress... | Jay Watts | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-freudian-slip-still-a-road-to-the-unconscious | |
Earth science and climate | The Equator once marked the edge of the civilised world. If we put it at the centre, we might see our place in the heavens | Though he never actually crossed it, the Greek mathematician Pythagoras is sometimes credited with having first conceived of the Equator, calculating its location on the Earth’s sphere more than four centuries before the birth of Christ. Aristotle, who never stepped over it either and knew nothing about the landscape s... | Kurt Hollander | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-should-turn-the-world-map-on-its-side | |
Ethics | You are entitled to believe what you will, but your beliefs must be subject to criticism and scrutiny just like mine | Here is a true story. A young philosophy lecturer — let us call him Shane — is charged with the task of introducing young minds to the wonders of philosophy. His course, a standard Introduction to Philosophy, contains a section on the philosophy of religion: the usual arguments-for-and-against-the-existence-of-God stuf... | Mark Rowlands | https://aeon.co//essays/everyone-is-entitled-to-their-beliefs-if-not-to-act-on-them | |
Art | Eduard Bersudsky chose to be mute in Soviet days. Ever since, his moving musical sculptures have done the talking | You press the pedal at the base of Eduard Bersudsky’s sculpture Piper (2013). The shadow on the wall moves, the cogs begin to hum, the little bell rings, and the pair of gendered fauns flex their legs to activate the dog typist at the typewriter hammering out memos lost to history. Tip, tap, tippity-tap, its tail sways... | Kapka Kassabova | https://aeon.co//essays/nothing-is-happier-or-sadder-than-life-s-union-with-art | |
Ethics | Filthy and violent it may be, but life is still precious for the world’s street children. Can you look them in the eye? | Years ago, along the cacophonous roads leading from Ramses Train Station in Cairo, I came across a small girl with a bright red headscarf weaving her way in and out of the slow-moving traffic, her bare feet shrouded in a haze of exhaust fumes. I watched as she banged on the windows of vehicles, the red of her headscarf... | Ben Faccini | https://aeon.co//essays/the-grim-intensity-of-a-childhood-on-the-street | |
Evolution | Troglodytes who couldn’t compete, or humans with complex culture? The mystery of our nearest relatives deepens | Among the oldest human objects that unequivocally defy practical explanations are shells punctured with holes. Try as you might, it’s hard to see them as anything other than beads or pendants. Traces of ochre at sites occupied by ancient humans offer earlier hints of adornment, perhaps even of symbolism, but sceptics a... | Marek Kohn | https://aeon.co//essays/you-might-be-closer-to-the-neanderthals-than-you-thought | |
Architecture | America’s national parks are overrun with cars and visitors – what happened to the spirit of wilderness preservation? | It is early morning, and I am sitting on a boulder near the bottom of Yosemite Falls. I have lost my bearings, meandering around in a maze of paved trails that I never knew existed until today. I worked and lived in Yosemite for about 15 years and thought I knew the place like the back of my hand but these new paths ha... | John Lemons | https://aeon.co//essays/busy-and-degraded-americas-national-parks-are-in-decline | |
Automation and robotics | Computers could take some tough choices out of our hands, if we let them. Is there still a place for human judgment? | In central London this spring, eight of the world’s greatest minds performed on a dimly lit stage in a wood-panelled theatre. An audience of hundreds watched in hushed reverence. This was the closing stretch of the 14-round Candidates’ Tournament, to decide who would take on the current chess world champion, Viswanatha... | Steven Poole | https://aeon.co//essays/which-decisions-should-we-leave-to-algorithms | |
Religion | It must have been one of the last Passovers to be celebrated by the Jews of Damascus, before the last families left | In 2004 Damascus was on the cusp of modernity. The first privately operated bank had just been established, plans for a securities exchange were underway, the internet was in its infancy, and the Old City’s first boutique hotel was getting ready to open its doors. All the while the Al-Assads, Syria’s first couple — if ... | Adam Blitz | https://aeon.co//essays/passover-in-damascus-carries-a-bittersweet-savour-of-the-past | |
Art | The Arab Spring began in Tunisia, and now its artists and dancers are keeping the flame of protest alive | The Tunisian torture choir, as I dubbed them for convenience, should have been competing for sound-space with the group of rappers and streetdancers wearing V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes masks. But somehow it all blended pretty well amid the sprawling outdoor space at Tunisia’s World Social Forum, an annual gathering of in... | Rachel Shabi | https://aeon.co//essays/first-came-revolution-then-rappers-graffiti-and-streetdance | |
Death | Is cryonics an ambulance into the future or the latest twist on our ancient fantasy of rebirth? | Boulder, Colorado, 1989: the young Norwegian’s phone rang. On the line was his mother in Oslo, where it was already evening; dark with a November chill. She needed to tell him that his beloved grandfather had gone to take a short nap. But he had not woken up: he had had another heart attack in his sleep. He was dead. T... | Stephen Cave | https://aeon.co//essays/is-it-rational-to-think-we-can-cheat-death-with-cryonics | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Environmental activists have been jailed, persecuted and spied on. What fuels such an absolute commitment to a cause? | One day last summer, a young woman looked down on a small crowd of vocal supporters and police officers from her hammock or ‘sky pod’, 60ft above an old logging road in Moshannon State Forest in Pennsylvania. The pod was tied to trees and anchored to a blockade across the road, so that anyone trying to move the blockad... | Sarah Pike | https://aeon.co//essays/eco-activists-speak-about-their-conversion-experiences | |
History of ideas | He is the dramatic thunderstorm at the heart of philosophy and his provocation is more valuable than ever | I fell for Søren Kierkegaard as a teenager, and he has accompanied me on my intellectual travels ever since, not so much side by side as always a few steps ahead or lurking out of sight just behind me. Perhaps that’s because he does not mix well with the other companions I’ve kept. I studied in the Anglo-American analy... | Julian Baggini | https://aeon.co//essays/happy-birthday-kierkegaard-we-need-you-now | |
Philosophy of mind | Evangelical Christians in California tried to ban yoga in schools. So where is the line between the body and the soul? | I started practising yoga 12 years ago at a newly opened studio in San Francisco called the Yoga Tree. One day, I was coming out of a back bend — ustrasana, or camel pose, to be exact — when my bodymind abruptly and briefly fluttered into a tingling otherworld of uncanny and dizzying bliss. After the class, I asked the... | Erik Davis | https://aeon.co//essays/are-you-flexible-enough-to-worship-the-sun | |
Subcultures | Leaving LA? Forget the scenic route along the coast: hit the Five instead and see what’s on California’s mind | The most beautiful way to drive between Los Angeles and the Bay Area is generally reckoned to be along Highway 1: the Pacific Coast Highway, the first State Scenic Highway (so declared in 1964), which clings to the coastline all the way up to an intricately winding section above the glorious and terrifying cliffs of Bi... | Maria Bustillos | https://aeon.co//essays/driving-the-five-is-a-meditation-on-the-state-of-california | |
Food and drink | Intrigued by the buzz around medical fasting, I tried it. A rollercoaster of boredom and energy ensued | It all began in March last year when I read an article by Steve Hendricks in Harper’s magazine titled ‘Starving Your Way to Vigour’. Hendricks examined the health benefits of fasting, including long-term reduced seizure activity in epileptics, lowered blood pressure in hypertensives, better toleration of chemotherapy i... | S Abbas Raza | https://aeon.co//essays/is-fasting-good-for-you-what-we-know-so-far | |
Anthropology | Figurines, fishers, bugs and bats – how things in the world become sacred objects in a museum | I’ve been nursing a gentle obsession with a quartet of bone-white, thumb-sized figurines. I first saw them, lined up in a row, on the cover of Miguel Tamen’s book Friends of Interpretable Objects (2001). They rested in a pair of open hands, looking toothy, and vital, exuding a cool glimmer, while evoking the long Arcti... | Matthew Battles | https://aeon.co//essays/a-museum-s-cabinet-of-curiosities-is-also-a-chamber-of-secrets | |
Knowledge | I have books on chopping wood, baking bread and butchery. But what do I really know if I never set foot in the forest? | Anyone serious about their firewood will tell you that they get theirs early in the spring. They will also tell you that the best way to dry your wood is to chop it into short logs and arrange them in loose airy stacks somewhere that the wind can get at them. By weight, dry wood of all kinds releases roughly the same a... | Michael Gibb | https://aeon.co//essays/do-real-men-get-their-know-how-from-books | |
Stories and literature | City life is a constant, maddening hum. Only in a place like the Sahara can we hear the nothingness that revives | By the twisted, paradoxical nature of things, a 4x4 with a throbbing engine — the 4.2 litre non-turbo diesel in a Nissan Patrol or Toyota Landcruiser — is the best way to experience the single most entrancing characteristic of the desert, the one that sucks you in and leads you to all the others you had only glimpsed o... | Robert Twigger | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-sound-of-silence-rejuvenates-the-soul | |
Economics | Governments now answer to business, not voters. Mainstream parties grow ever harder to distinguish. Is democracy dead? | Last September, Il Partito Democratico, the Italian Democratic Party, asked me to talk about politics and the internet at its summer school in Cortona. Political summer schools are usually pleasant — Cortona is a medieval Tuscan hill town with excellent restaurants — and unexciting. Academics and public intellectuals g... | Henry Farrell | https://aeon.co//essays/the-left-is-now-too-weak-for-democracy-to-survive | |
Love and friendship | I love her and it’s a secret. I love her so much it kills me, and you bet I’d sooner die than tell her | My mom runs fast for a 65-year-old. She’s small — 5 ft even — and clocks in at just over 100 lbs. Her compact frame slays in the juniors section of American department stores. I see her sprinting toward me as I stand on the corner of Austin’s busiest intersection, on its busiest fortnight — the two weeks it plays host ... | Mary H K Choi | https://aeon.co//essays/i-love-my-mom-a-not-normal-amount-and-it-makes-me-crazy | |
Astronomy | Dark matter is the commonest, most elusive stuff there is. Can we grasp this great unsolved problem in physics? | I’m sitting at my desk at the University of Washington trying to conserve energy. It isn’t me who’s losing it; it’s my computer simulations. Actually, colleagues down the hall might say I was losing it as well. When I tell people I’m working on speculative theories about dark matter, they start to speculate about me. I... | Alexander B Fry | https://aeon.co//essays/will-cosmologists-ever-illuminate-us-about-dark-matter | |
Travel | We were a group of secular Buddhists visiting the cave temples of India. What would we learn on the journey? | A rooster crowed at 4am in downtown Mumbai. Where could it be coming from in this network of tightly woven buildings and streets and shops and people and cars? In the morning we saw the proud specimen patrolling in front of our hotel. This was the start of our journey where ancient and modern, nature and traffic, would... | Martine Batchelor | https://aeon.co//essays/my-secular-pilgrimage-to-indias-ancient-buddhist-temples | |
Beauty and aesthetics | The Gothic is more than vampires and flying buttresses, burgundy lips and black lace: it is the thrill of transgression | As I walked the green miles of the Undercliff where the French Lieutenant’s Woman met her lover, there came a change of air. The dense undergrowth was obscenely verdant — bees worrying at pink rhododendron, peacock butterflies crossing my path — and now and then I’d burst out and find I stood at the cliff’s edge overlo... | Sarah Perry | https://aeon.co//essays/gothic-the-ancient-roots-of-a-dark-thrill | |
Politics and government | Colombia’s FARC guerrillas still resist the coming peace. Is it drug money or the romance of revolution that’s to blame? | In October 2012, the Colombian government sat down to peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) — among the last of Latin America’s left-wing guerrilla armies. Hopes were high that an end to a conflict that has raged for close to 50 years might be at hand. Colombians, weary of decades of violen... | Tom Feiling | https://aeon.co//essays/the-toxic-romance-of-revolution-keeps-guerilla-warfare-alive | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | What to eat, when to meditate and whether to call your parents: can self-monitoring tools make a difference? | Last Sunday, my mother telephoned. We had a good chat. Afterwards, instead of switching off my iPhone, I opened an app called Lift and, beside the words ‘Call mom/dad,’ I awarded myself a big green tick. I noted this was the ninth time I had spoken to my parents in the last month — higher than in the period immediately... | John-Paul Flintoff | https://aeon.co//essays/the-quantified-self-is-a-spirituality-for-our-times | |
Cosmology | Living in space was meant to be our next evolutionary step. What happened to the dream of the final frontier? | Back in the 1970s, my brother and I shared a cabin aboard a space cruiser. Dominated by a sturdy bunk bed, it was roughly four by four metres square with a porthole at one end and an airlock at the other. Our little cabin was wonderfully hermetic: it contained all necessary life support systems — a plastic bottle to pe... | Greg Klerkx | https://aeon.co//essays/space-habitat-for-humanity-or-backdrop-to-fading-fantasies | |
History | Even in the decade of dissent, Thomas Szasz stood alone when he attacked the idea of madness from the political Right | In 1961, a young psychiatrist initiated a one-man insurgency against his own profession. ‘Psychiatry is conventionally defined as a medical specialty concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of mental diseases,’ he wrote. ‘I submit that this definition, which is still widely accepted, places psychiatry in the company... | Holly Case | https://aeon.co//essays/the-psychiatrist-who-didn-t-believe-in-mental-illness | |
Sleep and dreams | Insomnia brings many gifts — the noises of the night, the twist of narrative, and a stolen march on time | Insomniacs rarely forget when their sleeplessness first began. For some, like the writer Margaret Drabble, it emerges with the birth of a child; for others, it’s an episode of illness or the loss of someone they love. For me, it starts at an uncle’s house in Essex. I am four or five and my uncle is telling me wonderful... | Melanie McGrath | https://aeon.co//essays/can-t-sleep-then-let-me-tell-you-a-story | |
Cities | Most of us now live in cities, so it is within the metropolis that our future salvation or death warrant will be drafted | Earlier this spring, I found myself walking through Lower Manhattan. There was still a chill in the air; a few flakes of snow had fallen the night before but nothing had settled. As I wandered, I was interested to see whether there were any residual signs of Hurricane Sandy, which had struck the island on 29 October la... | Leo Hollis | https://aeon.co//essays/is-technology-the-key-to-future-proofing-our-cities | |
Future of technology | New technologies are emerging that could radically reduce our need to sleep - if we can bear to use them | Work, friendships, exercise, parenting, eating, reading — there just aren’t enough hours in the day. To live fully, many of us carve those extra hours out of our sleep time. Then we pay for it the next day. A thirst for life leads many to pine for a drastic reduction, if not elimination, of the human need for sleep. Li... | Jessa Gamble | https://aeon.co//essays/technology-to-cut-down-on-sleep-is-just-around-the-corner | |
Biology | Simplistic ideas of how genes ‘cause’ traits are no longer viable: life is an orderly collection of uncertainties | DNA is a metaphor for our age. It conveys the powerful idea that our identity is scientifically reducible to an unambiguous, determinative code. We hear this idea expressed all the time. The car company Bentley advertises for employees saying: ‘Hard work is in our DNA.’ The footballer David Beckham says: ‘Football is i... | Anne Buchanan & Kenneth Weiss | https://aeon.co//essays/dna-is-the-ruling-metaphor-of-our-age | |
Demography and migration | There’s a reason why the Bible is silent about the colour of Jesus’ skin. So why has this become an issue for our age? | Last month, American television audiences were shocked: when Satan showed up in the History Channel’s new mini-series The Bible, he looked strikingly like President Barack Obama. Responses were quick, and they came on all types of media from Twitter and Facebook to CNN and Fox News. Complaints sounded so loudly that th... | Edward J Blum | https://aeon.co//essays/was-jesus-a-white-man-and-the-devil-black | |
Stories and literature | UFO sightings are down. Ghosts are in decline. Are we more discerning now, or just afraid to trust anything? | One late evening in the early summer of 1981, lying sleepless in my student bedsit at the top of a house in the Fallowfield district of Manchester, I became aware of a pattern of bright flashing lights on the wall. All I could see through the curtainless window on the opposite side of the room was a strip of rather clo... | Stuart Walton | https://aeon.co//essays/why-have-we-stopped-seeing-ufos-in-the-skies | |
History | If my grandfather could survive the Siege of Leningrad and still distinguish between a German and a Nazi, so can I | It has been seven years now since I moved from Russia to Germany, and not a month goes by without me landing in the same predicament. A party is in full swing. The plates and bottles are half-empty, the hurdle of small talk has just been overcome, and everybody is in pursuit of one, imperative theme to seal the evening... | Polina Aronson | https://aeon.co//essays/how-could-a-russian-jew-not-hate-the-germans | |
Addiction | While one person dabbles in drugs with few ill-effects, another will become a chronic addict. What’s the difference? | Sarah started using heroin when she was 16, and soon after that she left home to live with her dealer. Heroin was one of the ways he had power over her. He was older than her, and often unfaithful. Over the three years that they were together, they frequently fought, sometimes violently. She would end up staying with f... | Hanna Pickard | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-addict-a-depraved-criminal-or-a-suffering-soul | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Geoengineers are would-be deities who dream of mastering the heavens. But are humans the ones who are out of control? | At a small conference in Germany last May, I found myself chuckling at the inability of the meeting organisers to control the room’s electronic blinds. It’s always fun when automated technology gets the better of its human masters, but this particular malfunction had a surreal pertinence. Here was a room full of geoeng... | Adam Corner | https://aeon.co//essays/modern-geoengineers-are-part-rainmaker-part-dr-strangelove |
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