title
stringclasses
114 values
description
stringlengths
71
138
essay
stringlengths
412
63.4k
authors
stringlengths
7
67
source_url
stringlengths
52
104
thumbnail_url
stringlengths
113
249
Music
A song can take you on a journey of ecstatic arousal. Is music imitating sex, inviting it, or something else altogether?
Can music give you an orgasm? The short answer is yes. A longer answer will unlock the secrets of the evolution of music. But let’s begin with orgasms. Listen to Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ from the film The Bodyguard (1992). She begins by singing quietly, breathily and alone, in a low register, with tho...
Michael Spitzer
https://aeon.co//essays/can-music-give-you-an-orgasm-the-short-answer-is-yes
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Oceans and water
Instead of letting waves of exploitation sweep through the deep ocean, we could choose to protect this vast living realm
‘Speak, thou vast and venerable head … Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations.’ So says Captain Ahab as he peers over the side of his whaling ship, Pequod, at the head of a sperm whale. Herman Melville would have been astounded ...
Helen Scales
https://aeon.co//essays/how-we-can-protect-the-vast-living-space-of-the-deep-ocean
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Film and visual culture
You might think that horror movies are a delicious, trashy pleasure. But watching them has surprisingly wholesome effects
I’m a full-time horror researcher with my own lab. I read Stephen King novels at bedtime, watch slasher movies on the weekends, and play survival horror video games whenever I have a spare moment. But it wasn’t always like that. The first time I saw a horror film at the movie theatre, I left halfway through. It was too...
Mathias Clasen
https://aeon.co//essays/fear-not-horror-movies-build-community-and-emotional-resilience
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
History of science
Looking past conventional histories of medicine we see that women delivered much of medieval healthcare. Just as today
Sometime in the 1220s CE, a young woman named Ida was walking the city streets of Leuven in Belgium when she was called into the home of a dying man. The sick man was so certain of his imminent death that he had already summoned a priest to administer last rites. Entering his home and having learned something of his af...
Sara Ritchey
https://aeon.co//essays/women-were-the-unseen-healthcare-providers-of-the-middle-ages
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Physics
Does the existence of a multiverse hold the key for why nature’s laws seem so simple?
It’s May 1964 and, on a low hillside in New Jersey, the physicists Robert Woodrow Wilson and Arno Allan Penzias are listening in on the Universe. They are standing beneath what looks like a gargantuan ear trumpet attached to a garden shed: the Holmdel Horn Antenna, built by Bell Laboratories to investigate microwaves a...
Johnjoe McFadden
https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-simplicity-so-unreasonably-effective-at-scientific-explanation
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Mood and emotion
What if emotions are not universal and hardwired but exquisite acts of meaning-making specific to context and culture?
The first time I saw Pixar’s movie Inside Out (2015), I was too entranced by its craftsmanship to realise that there was something odd, almost eerie, about its human characters. I was charmed by little Riley, the protagonist, with the chattering critters prancing around in her head. There’s Joy, a feisty version of Tin...
Elitsa Dermendzhiyska
https://aeon.co//essays/what-if-emotions-arent-universal-but-specific-to-each-culture
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Nations and empires
To be Persian before nationalism was to belong to a generous, plural identity woven through language, kin and manners
At the end of the 19th century, under the looming shadow of European colonial encroachment, political and intellectual elites in Iran began to draw on nationalist forms of belonging as a way to unify the various ethnic and religious groups that lived within its territory. The nation was gaining ground at this time as t...
Mana Kia
https://aeon.co//essays/when-persian-belonging-was-a-generous-cosmopolitan-belonging
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Architecture
Our movies and offices are engineered to sound natural based on what rang false in the theatres of 18th-century Paris
A low-level hum of talking and typing punctuated by the occasional warble of a ringing phone: the ambient murmur of a large open-plan office is, to a surprising degree, an intentionally orchestrated one. Not only do office designers use carpeting and absorptive ceiling tiles to reduce reverberation; in some cases they ...
Joseph L Clarke
https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-art-and-science-of-making-buildings-sound-natural
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
For Hannah Arendt, hope is a dangerous barrier to courageous action. In dark times, the miracle that saves the world is to act
As Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher waited in Montauban, France in the summer of 1940 to receive emergency exit papers they did not give into anxiety or despair. They found bicycles and explored the beautiful French countryside during the day and delighted in the detective novels of Georges Simenon at nig...
Samantha Rose Hill
https://aeon.co//essays/for-arendt-hope-in-dark-times-is-no-match-for-action
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
History
The story of Marie Aymard and five generations of her family tells an intimate history of slavery in a small French town
The story began with a rumour. In 1764, a woman named Marie Aymard, who was illiterate, appeared before a notary in the small French town of Angoulême, and recounted that her late husband, a carpenter, had gone as an indentured labourer to the island of Grenada in the Antilles. He made ‘a small fortune’ while he was t...
Emma Rothschild
https://aeon.co//essays/family-history-and-the-problem-of-slavery-in-everyday-life
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Biology
How can animals whose brains have been drastically remodelled still recall their kin, their traumas and their skills?
I began exploring the concept of cellular memory – the idea that memory can be stored outside the brain, in all the body’s cells – after reading an article on Reuters headlined ‘Tiny Brain No Obstacle to French Civil Servant’ in 2007. It seems that a 44-year-old French man had gone to hospital complaining of a mild wea...
Thomas R Verny
https://aeon.co//essays/how-memories-persist-where-bodies-and-even-brains-do-not
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Animals and humans
For the K’iche’ Mayans, animals were not lower beings but neighbours, alter egos and a way to communicate with the gods
Animals are everywhere in the Popol Vuh. They leap and lick and crawl and bite and squawk and hoot and screech and howl. They are considered sacred, not as disembodied beings in some faraway place, but in their coexistence with humans, day by day in the forests. The Sovereign and Quetzal Serpent, with its gorgeous blue...
Jessica Sequeira
https://aeon.co//essays/belonging-among-the-beasts-and-the-gods-in-mayan-cosmology
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
It is a powerful, liberating therapy that lets you (literally) shift perspective on who you are, and who you could become
It was 2002 when I (Scott) had one of my first encounters with a form of therapy known as ‘chairwork’ at the Gestalt Center for Psychotherapy and Training in New York City. ‘It’s not fair. It’s just not fair, and what you’re doing is wrong.’ I was speaking to my daughter Nicole’s soccer coaching team sitting in the cha...
Scott Kellogg & Amanda Garcia Torres
https://aeon.co//essays/chairwork-invites-you-to-shift-perspective-on-who-you-are
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Human rights and justice
Patients and psychiatrists at Saint-Alban in France fought against fascism side by side. What can we learn from them?
Over the course of the Second World War, approximately 45,000 psychiatric patients died of starvation and disease in France, imprisoned in hospitals that were supposed to care for them. In 1979, one psychiatrist was interviewed by a newspaper about what he had witnessed during that time: It was a terrible period at the...
Ben Platts-Mills
https://aeon.co//essays/patients-and-psychiatrists-fought-against-fascism-together-at-saint-alban
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Cognition and intelligence
Knowing the content of one’s own mind might seem straightforward but in fact it’s much more like mindreading other people
In 1978, David Premack and Guy Woodruff published a paper that would go on to become famous in the world of academic psychology. Its title posed a simple question: does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? In coining the term ‘theory of mind’, Premack and Woodruff were referring to the ability to keep track of what so...
Stephen M Fleming
https://aeon.co//essays/is-there-a-symmetry-between-metacognition-and-mindreading
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Biology
Solving the mystery of how and why fireflies flash in time can illuminate the physics of complex systems
In the still of the Tennessee night, my colleagues and I are watching thousands of dim little orbs of light, moving peacefully in the forest around us. We try to guess where the next flash will appear, but the movements seem erratic, even ephemeral. This summer, as we set up our cameras and tents, I feel a crippling se...
Orit Peleg
https://aeon.co//essays/how-firefly-flashes-illuminate-the-physics-of-complex-systems
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Political philosophy
While the West belonged to a European geography, its name meant something. Now it is a vague invocation, laden with fear
When asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Gandhi apparently responded that he thought it would be a good idea. While this celebrated statement is taken to be an ironic dismissal, Gandhi had in fact given the matter of Western civilisation much thought. In his manifesto of 1909 called Hind Swaraj or ‘Indian Ho...
Faisal Devji
https://aeon.co//essays/the-idea-of-the-west-has-always-been-in-motion-and-in-crisis
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Sleep and dreams
Adults sleep less than babies. Sperm whales sleep less again. A new mathematical theory unlocks the mysteries of slumber
‘That we come to this earth to live is untrue. We come but to sleep, to dream.’ – Aztec poemHumans have long wondered why we sleep. A well-rested prehistoric mind probably pondered the question, long before Galileo thought to predict the period of the pendulum or to understand how fast objects fall. Why must we put our...
Van Savage & Geoffrey West
https://aeon.co//essays/a-quantitative-theory-unlocks-the-mysteries-of-why-we-sleep
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Education
Sex education is a battlefield over morals and young bodies, and has exposed fractures in American life for over a century
The state of sex education in the United States is dismal. Shaped by divergent state policies and local school board decisions, programmes are uneven in their content and coverage. There is confusion about what is being taught where. Most programmes are limited in scope, some are even harmful. Proponents of comprehensi...
Kristy Slominski
https://aeon.co//essays/sex-ed-in-the-us-is-a-lesson-in-the-complex-legacy-of-religion
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Evolution
Having a concept of death, far from being a uniquely human feat, is a fairly common trait in the animal kingdom
When the Virginia opossum feels threatened, she plays dead. Lying on the ground, curled up into something resembling the foetal position, with her eyes and mouth open and her tongue hanging out, she stops responding to the world. Her body temperature drops. Her breathing and heart rate are severely reduced. Her tongue,...
Susana Monsó
https://aeon.co//essays/animals-wrestle-with-the-concept-of-death-and-mortality
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
Brilliant and fierce, the philosopher and educator Amalia Holst demonstrated how the German Enlightenment failed women
Something new took place in the German states in 1802. A work of philosophy was published under a woman’s name. In her audacious book On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Development (Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung), Amalia Holst declared that it was time someone spoke out about the...
Andrew Cooper
https://aeon.co//essays/amalia-holst-and-how-the-german-enlightenment-failed-women
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Music
Look beneath the surface of Bach’s music and you will find a fascinating hidden world of numerology and cunning craft
Some 14 billion miles from here floats a 12-inch gold-plated record. This artefact was placed onboard the Voyager 1 space probe in 1977 (and another on the Voyager 2 sister vessel) and now, having long completed its scheduled planetary flybys, it hurtles at nearly 500 times the speed of sound into deep space. Created t...
Milton Mermikides
https://aeon.co//essays/look-into-the-secret-world-of-numerology-and-puzzles-in-bach
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Stories and literature
Machine-written literature might offend your tastes but until the dawn of Romanticism most writers were just as formulaic
Since its inception in 2015, the research laboratory OpenAI – an Elon Musk-backed initiative that seeks to build human-friendly artificial intelligence – has developed a series of powerful ‘language models’, the latest being GPT-3 (third-generation Generative Pre-trained Transformer). A language model is a computer pro...
Yohei Igarashi
https://aeon.co//essays/machine-writing-is-closer-to-literatures-history-than-you-know
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Gender
Was there no room for the queer individual in Arab history? Have people like us simply never belonged?
‘I’m sure you’ve heard about Sarah Hegazy,’ read the text on my phone. It was 2020; I was tying a red bandana around my face – for both aesthetic and pandemic purposes – en route to a BLM protest in the thick of Manhattan’s June. ‘You’re always checking in on me when something tragic happens in my community. I’d like t...
Aya Labanieh
https://aeon.co//essays/was-there-no-room-for-the-queer-individual-in-arab-history
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Food and drink
Vitamins or whole foods; high-fat or low-fat; sugar or sweetener. Will we ever get a clear idea about what we should eat?
Several years ago, Arla, one of the largest dairy companies in the world, set out to create a product to take advantage of an inviting opportunity. Consumers were increasingly seeking out protein as a healthful nutrient, and whey protein, derived from milk, was seen as the most desirable kind, especially by athletes. I...
Amos Zeeberg
https://aeon.co//essays/will-we-ever-get-a-clear-idea-about-what-foods-we-should-eat
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Education
Thomas Jefferson founded a university believing it would safeguard republican freedom. Slavery was another matter altogether
I teach at the University of Virginia, where the 19th-century founder has become controversial and divisive. For many students, alums and state legislators, Thomas Jefferson remains a pioneer of higher education and a champion of democratic values. But critics charge that Jefferson imbued the university with a malign l...
Alan Taylor
https://aeon.co//essays/did-jefferson-believe-that-his-university-would-reform-the-south
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Genetics
The ‘selfish gene’ persists for the reason all good scientific metaphors do: it remains a sharp tool for clear thinking
In late summer of 1976, two colleagues at Oxford University Press, Michael Rodgers and Richard Charkin, were discussing a book on evolution soon to be published. It was by a first-time author, a junior zoology don in town, and had been given an initial print run of 5,000 copies. As the two publishers debated the book’s...
J Arvid Ågren
https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-selfish-genes-metaphor-remains-a-powerful-thinking-tool
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Spirituality
Pilgrims have long sought in India’s holiest city an antidote to the modern West, but Varanasi is more dream than reality
On a sweltering summer’s day five years ago, as I returned to my rented home in the holy city of Varanasi in India, I was greeted by an astonishing sight: a blue-eyed white man, dressed only in a thin orange cloth knotted around his waist – the garb of a baba or holy man. Matted dreadlocks snaked down his back and his ...
Manini Sheker
https://aeon.co//essays/can-enlightenment-still-be-found-on-the-banks-of-the-ganges
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Philosophy of mind
The terms ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ are messy, harmful and distracting. We should get rid of them
Someone’s probably told you before that something you thought, felt or feared was ‘all in your mind’. I’m here to tell you something else: there’s no such thing as the mind and nothing is mental. I call this the ‘no mind thesis’. The no-mind thesis is entirely compatible with the idea that people are conscious, and tha...
Joe Gough
https://aeon.co//essays/why-theres-no-such-thing-as-the-mind-and-nothing-is-mental
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Pleasure and pain
The COVID-19 pandemic, like other catastrophes before it, got some of us hooked on phobic energy and terror. Why?
To read the news in the spring of 2021 was to encounter every day a deluge of columns, editorials and think-pieces – so many think-pieces – on the diverse psychological traumas unique to our liminal moment, our transition out of quarantine, our return to something pundits insist on calling ‘normal’. We read, for instan...
Travis Alexander
https://aeon.co//essays/why-do-some-get-hooked-on-pandemic-terror-and-phobic-energy
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
History of technology
An exact mathematical concept, pixels are the elementary particles of pictures, based on a subtle unpacking of infinity
I have billions of pixels in my cellphone, and you probably do too. But what is a pixel? Why do so many people think that pixels are little abutting squares? Now that we’re aswim in an ocean of zettapixels (21 zeros), it’s time to understand what they are. The underlying idea – a repackaging of infinity – is subtle and...
Alvy Ray Smith
https://aeon.co//essays/a-biography-of-the-pixel-the-elementary-particle-of-pictures
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Human rights and justice
What the United States and other settler societies can learn from South Africa’s push to create a nonracial democracy
In the course of the struggle against apartheid, South Africans did something remarkable: they tried, with incomplete success, to destroy the settler and the native by reconfiguring both as survivors. They did so by adopting a response to extreme violence that defied the logic of Nuremberg – the logic of separating per...
Mahmood Mamdani
https://aeon.co//essays/the-world-can-learn-from-south-africas-ideal-of-nonracial-democracy
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
Is there something special about the way women do philosophy or is that just another essentialist idea holding us back?
What do philosophers contribute to philosophy? How do they enrich it? This sounds like a strange question, yet women in philosophy are often asked to explain what they contribute to philosophy now that they are allowed to do philosophy professionally. Underlying this question is a sense that our voices are not seen as ...
Elly Vintiadis
https://aeon.co//essays/is-there-something-special-about-the-way-women-do-philosophy
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Art
Louise’s Parkinsonism didn’t tamp her artistic drive, but exposed the link between perception, thought and creativity
‘It’s a very strange scene,’ Louise said, staring at the photograph, during one of our more recent sessions. ‘Can you make out what’s going on?’ I asked her. She squinted and searched the picture. ‘There’s a little man over on the left side. He’s looking at a window in the middle of the room.’ ‘Do you notice anything u...
Michael Stanley
https://aeon.co//essays/how-a-neurological-condition-affects-an-artists-creativity
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Economic history
A new form of trade is reshaping our world, and it’s driven by the movement of bits and bytes, not goods, around the globe
If globalisation were to have a meme, the maritime shipping container would be a likely choice. Piled high on the decks of vast oceangoing ships and stacked deep in their holds, these simple steel boxes, typically 40 feet long and eight feet high, emblemise an era in which massive quantities of stuff move around the wo...
Marc Levinson
https://aeon.co//essays/the-globalisation-of-ideas-will-be-different-than-that-of-goods
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Life stages
The five stages of grief can’t begin to explain it: grief affects the body, brain and sense of self, and patience is the key
When the hospice nurse called on the morning of 2 April to tell me that my father had died at 7:38am, just two days after he was released from the hospital and seven hours after I arrived in town to see him, the world suddenly felt strange, half-formed. I recognised the shapes of things, but struggled to comprehend wha...
April Reese
https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-brain-responds-to-grief-can-change-who-we-are
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Political philosophy
Reason and facts cannot be the basis of political debates and civic life. Love and laughter are the heart of the matter
Something is amiss with democracy. Ask people from any or no political persuasion and they’re likely to give a similar story: contemporary politics has gone haywire because one side (or both) has lost touch with reality. We are living in a ‘post-truth’ partisan news hellscape that prioritises ‘feelings over facts’ and ...
Elizabeth Cantalamessa
https://aeon.co//essays/democracy-should-be-sentimentalist-not-rationalist
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Addiction
Our inability to treat substance use disorders stems from a narrow-minded view that brains and genes are their real cause
By the time I realised that my drug use was killing me, I was institutionalised deep in the woods of Minnesota, at least a three-day drive from home, and without a car. My 1983 Corolla, including all my stuff, had been repossessed several months earlier. I was in a treatment centre at the unripe age of 23 as a result o...
Judith Grisel
https://aeon.co//essays/theres-no-neural-fix-for-reversing-the-addiction-pandemic
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Beauty and aesthetics
Tempting it might be, but the idea that culture has become vacuous and banal comes with unsavoury implications
I’ll admit that when I turn on the TV or radio or dig around on the internet, I am often appalled at what I find. When I hear the vapid pronouncements of influencers or the mind-numbing inanity of much of today’s pop culture, my reflex is to become angry and depressed. I’ve dedicated my life to the humanities, to readi...
Christy Wampole
https://aeon.co//essays/the-idea-of-cultural-degeneration-has-an-unsavoury-pedigree
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
For the political economist Albert O Hirschman, democracy thrives not on strong opinions but on doubt and flexibility
Like most disciplines, the field of development economics came into being not because of disinterested intellectual curiosity but rather due to pressing contemporary events. In the late 1960s, one prominent international civil servant and development economist reflected that: the cue to the continual reorientation of o...
Michele Alacevich
https://aeon.co//essays/from-probable-to-possible-the-ideas-of-albert-o-hirschman
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Archaeology
Vanished beneath the waves in 373 BCE, Helike is a byword for thinking about disaster, for ancients and moderns alike
One night nearly 2,500 years ago, the people of Helike, a city in the northern Peloponnese, were in their homes. Perhaps they were winding down with a glass of watered wine or already sleeping after spending the day about their business in the bustling town. Some had been busy at the market, selling or buying the produ...
Guy D Middleton
https://aeon.co//essays/how-a-vanished-ancient-greek-city-helps-us-think-about-disasters
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Stories and literature
I self-published erotica to make ends meet. Could I follow in Anaïs Nin’s footsteps or was I doomed to churn out filth?
The pack: that’s what they called it. A secret guide, discreetly passed to literary authors in need of money to sustain their ‘real’ art. Compiled by such an author, happy to share their experience of publishing erotica on Amazon, it offered advice to avant-garde writers keen to turn their hand to this lucrative genre....
Sam Mills
https://aeon.co//essays/how-i-joined-the-literary-prostitutes-club-writing-erotica-for-cash
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Neurodiversity
We live in a world that must move beyond identity politics and embrace new models of the mind. Enter psydiversity
The concept of ‘neurodiversity’ has gained enormous cultural influence in recent years. Computer scientists and ‘techies’ wear the ‘neurodiverse’ label with pride; businesses are building ‘neurodiverse’ workforces; scriptwriters strive to represent and cast ‘neurodivergent’ people. Those framed as ‘different’ have been...
Bonnie Evans
https://aeon.co//essays/neurodiversity-is-not-enough-we-should-embrace-psydiversity
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Bioethics
Insect farming bakes, boils and shreds animals by the trillion. It’s immoral, risky and won’t resolve the climate crisis
The future of animal farming is taking shape in a small city in central Illinois. A startup called InnovaFeed is building a production site that will house more farmed animals than any other location in the history of the world. But the animals in question are not cows, pigs or chickens – they are black soldier fly lar...
Jeff Sebo & Jason Schukraft
https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-torment-of-insect-minds-and-our-moral-duty-not-to-farm-them
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Language and linguistics
Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology
English spelling is ridiculous. Sew and new don’t rhyme. Kernel and colonel do. When you see an ough, you might need to read it out as ‘aw’ (thought), ‘ow’ (drought), ‘uff’ (tough), ‘off’ (cough), ‘oo’ (through), or ‘oh’ (though). The ea vowel is usually pronounced ‘ee’ (weak, please, seal, beam) but can also be ‘eh’ (...
Arika Okrent
https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-the-english-spelling-system-so-weird-and-inconsistent
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Ethics
Moral philosophy is bogus, a mere substitute for God that licenses ugly emotions. Here are five reasons to reject it
Let me start with a disclosure. I am not a ‘moral philosopher’, but I have taught moral philosophy for several decades. I have come to regard the very idea of morality as fraudulent. Morality, I now believe, is a shadow of religion, serving to comfort those who no longer accept divine guidance but still hope for an ‘ob...
Ronnie de Sousa
https://aeon.co//essays/five-reasons-why-moral-philosophy-is-distracting-and-harmful
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Childhood and adolescence
Adolescence isn’t a time of life so much as a frame of mind. Liberating yet damaging, it’s transformed the US and the world
Most of us are familiar with the law of unintended consequences. In the 1920s, Prohibition put a halt to the legal production and sale of alcohol in the United States only to generate a new set of social ills connected to bootlegging and wider criminal activity. More recently, mainstream news media outlets, in pursuit ...
Paul Howe
https://aeon.co//essays/how-us-high-school-culture-brought-teen-values-to-the-world
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Stories and literature
At 700, Dante’s Divine Comedy is as modern as ever – a lesson in spiritual intelligence that makes us better at being alive
Dante Alighieri was early in recognising that our age has a problem. He was the first writer to use the word moderno, in Italian, and the difficulty he spotted with the modern mind is its limited capacity to relate to the whole of reality, particularly the spiritual aspects. This might sound surprising, given that his ...
Mark Vernon
https://aeon.co//essays/the-fractal-consciousness-of-dantes-divine-comedy
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Cosmology
Most cosmologists say dark matter must exist. So far, it’s nowhere to be found. A widely scorned rival theory explains why
The standard theory of cosmology is called the Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model. As that name suggests, the theory postulates the existence of dark matter – a mysterious substance that (according to the theorists) comprises the bulk of the matter in the Universe. It is widely embraced. Every cosmologist working tod...
David Merritt
https://aeon.co//essays/we-should-explore-alternatives-to-the-standard-model-of-cosmology
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Childhood and adolescence
From cradle to grave, we are soothed and rocked by attachments – our source of joy and pain, and the essence of who we are
The scene is a familiar one: an urban park, with young couples picnicking, dog owners playing fetch, parents chatting while their children scamper around. Marie – a young child – becomes entranced by a new wonder of her world – maybe a springtime butterfly, maybe another child throwing an impressive fit. Eventually, lo...
Mostafa El-Kalliny & Zoe R Donaldson
https://aeon.co//essays/what-do-we-know-about-social-attachment-and-human-nature
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Nations and empires
There is no American history without the histories of Indigenous and enslaved peoples. And this past has consequences today
Nations need history; it is a key genre for explaining the status quo. Modern nations and modern historical practices in the West developed over the same centuries, so the effort to harness the latter to the former is no surprise. Yet whether about the removal of statues, the veracity of journalism and public history p...
Karin Wulf
https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-history-of-the-vast-early-america-matters-today
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Global history
What can the decline of the Roman Empire and the end of European feudalism tell us about COVID-19 and the future of the West?
Early in 2020, after a mysterious coronavirus emerged out of China and then raced across the globe, a quiet new year took a screeching turn. Stark images of ventilated patients in Italian hospital hallways soon filled our newsfeeds. Panic erupted across the West. One after another, governments that had been telling the...
John Rapley
https://aeon.co//essays/empires-pandemics-and-the-economic-future-of-the-west
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Social psychology
Disagreements can be unpleasant, even offensive, but they are vital to human reason. Without them we remain in the dark
In the town of Dayton, Ohio, at the end of the 19th century, locals were used to the sound of quarrels spilling out from the room above the bicycle store on West Third Street. The brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright opened the shop in 1892, shortly before they became obsessed with the problem of manned flight. Downstair...
Ian Leslie
https://aeon.co//essays/why-disagreement-is-vital-to-advancing-human-understanding
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
Simone Weil: mystic, philosopher, activist. Her ethics demand that we look beyond the personal and find the universal
The short life of Simone Weil, the French philosopher, Christian mystic and political activist, was one of unrelenting self-sacrifice from her childhood to her death. At a very young age, she expressed an aversion to luxury. In an action that prefigured her death, while still a child, she refused to move until she was ...
Deborah Casewell
https://aeon.co//essays/for-simone-weil-our-capacity-to-suffer-united-us-all
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Death
We no longer have a clear sense of how to introduce our children to death. But their questions can help us face up to it
One of my four-year-old twins is obsessed with death. She wants to know everything about dying. Again and again, she asks me to tell her about what happens when people die. Initially, I was a little surprised by her fascination with ‘died’ people, as she calls them, but then it became clear that she was thinking a lot ...
Pragya Agarwal
https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-need-to-discuss-a-death-in-the-family-with-the-children
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Mental health
Deep brain stimulation not only treats psychiatric disease – it changes the whole person, boosting confidence and openness
A mother in her mid-20s begins to have recurring thoughts of physically harming her baby. These thoughts make no sense to her. She deeply loves her baby, and thoughts of hurting him intentionally are immensely distressing to her, as they would be for any parent. She decides to take a shower while her baby sleeps. The s...
Julian Kiverstein, Erik Rietveld & Damiaan Denys
https://aeon.co//essays/how-deep-brain-stimulation-changes-a-persons-sense-of-confidence
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Virtues and vices
Our crisis of public knowledge is an ethical crisis. Rewarding ‘truthfulness’ above ‘truth’ is a step towards a solution
The other day, I told a friend that Knoxville is the capital of Tennessee. Five seconds and a blur of fingers later, he said: ‘No, it’s Nashville.’ My statement was obviously not true. But since I sincerely believed in the accuracy of what I was saying, I was nonetheless being truthful. I was mistaken, not mendacious. ...
Richard V Reeves
https://aeon.co//essays/our-epistemic-crisis-is-essentially-ethical-and-so-are-its-solutions
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Space exploration
Asteroids could pay for so much space exploration. We just need to mine those valuable resources – and duck a direct hit
Asteroids are the remnants of our solar system’s youthful exuberance, the leftover crumbs from when the planets formed. For much of the space age, asteroids were ignored in favour of the far more glamorous planets, and the Moon. The asteroids – dark, misshapen rocks, hard to see and hard to find – have long flown benea...
Martin Elvis
https://aeon.co//essays/asteroid-mining-could-pay-for-space-exploration-and-adventure
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Anthropology
Mead, so radical about gender and sex in her early work, doubled down on the differences between men and women later. Why?
Viola Klein was vexed. She did not know the world-famous anthropologist Margaret Mead personally, but she had glimpsed Mead’s mind in her groundbreaking early books, especially the radical study Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). Klein also studied gender roles, although her own first book, The Fe...
Elesha J Coffman
https://aeon.co//essays/when-it-came-to-sex-and-gender-margaret-mead-had-it-both-ways
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Economics
Everyone on the planet has a stake in making investment more ethical. What’s new is that they have the power to do so too
In 1947, Wilma Soss rose to speak at the annual general meeting of US Steel, asking the corporation to take the unusual step of appointing a woman to the board. The gentlemen declined, and showed their displeasure at Soss’s temerity. But, as she said later, ‘if they had treated me better there would have been no Federa...
Ellen Quigley
https://aeon.co//essays/here-are-responsible-shareholder-tactics-that-actually-work
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Political philosophy
It’s become a commonplace that demographic anxiety is driving white voters to the far Right. This is dangerously wrong
Why are so many white people throughout the liberal democratic world moving to the illiberal Right? The conventional explanation is that they are being driven by fear of the ‘demographic shift’. That is, because of immigration, both legal and illegal, and differing fertility rates among the relevant groups, white peopl...
Mark R Reiff
https://aeon.co//essays/the-demographic-shift-isnt-driving-white-people-to-the-right
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
The ancient world
White supremacists fetishise ancient Rome – but antiquity was more diverse and polychromatic than racists will admit
At the dawn of the 20th century, Italian patriots were struggling to overcome a profound inferiority complex. Ever since 1861, when Giuseppe Garibaldi unified the country’s disparate regions into a nation-state, politicians and intellectuals had been anticipating the arrival of a glorious new era. Decades on, however, ...
Jamie Mackay
https://aeon.co//essays/colonialism-is-built-on-the-rubble-of-a-false-idea-of-ancient-rome
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
History of ideas
Truth, knowledge, justice – to understand how our loftiest abstractions earn their keep, trace them to their practical origins
‘Ideas, Mr Carlyle, ideas, nothing but ideas!’ scoffed a hard-headed businessman over dinner with Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian essayist and historian of the French Revolution. The businessman had had enough of Carlyle’s endless droning on about ideas – what do ideas matter anyway? Carlyle shot back: ‘There was once a ...
Matthieu Queloz
https://aeon.co//essays/our-most-abstract-concepts-emerged-as-solutions-to-our-needs
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Gender
Mass incarceration means police and prisons are not simple allies for feminists who want a more just world
In the past few years, Americans have begun to recognise that the United States, with fewer than 5 per cent of the world’s population and more than 20 per cent of its prison population, has a mass incarceration problem. People from across the political spectrum agree that criminal law has been the solution to too many ...
Aya Gruber
https://aeon.co//essays/in-the-fight-for-gender-justice-criminal-law-should-be-a-last-resort
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
George Berkeley was a visionary immaterialist. And a philosopher whose views on subordination to God legitimised slavery
George Berkeley is known for his doctrine of immaterialism: the counterintuitive view that there’s no material substance underlying the ideas perceived by the senses. We tend to think of a horse-drawn coach as a thing, but Berkeley tells us it’s really a set of ideas – the sound of the coach in the street, the sight of...
Tom Jones
https://aeon.co//essays/from-immaterialism-to-obedience-in-the-philosophy-of-berkeley
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Language and linguistics
European ideas of African illiteracy are persistent, prejudiced and, as the story of Libyc script shows, entirely wrong
Four different writing systems have been used in Algeria. Three are well known – Phoenician, Latin and Arabic – while one is both indigenous to Africa and survives only as a writing system. The language it represents is called Old Libyan or Numidian, simply because it was spoken in Numidia and Libya. Since it’s possibl...
D Vance Smith
https://aeon.co//essays/africas-ancient-scripts-counter-european-ideas-of-literacy
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Astronomy
An alien-made artefact or just interstellar debris? What ʻOumuamua says about how science works when data is scarce
There’s an iconic moment, filmed in the shadow of the Very Large Array in New Mexico, that many people who visit this giant telescope try to duplicate. A young astronomer sits cross-legged on the bonnet of her car, the towering line of radio dishes vanishing into the distance behind her. With her laptop in front of her...
Matthew Bothwell
https://aeon.co//essays/aliens-science-and-speculation-in-the-wake-of-oumuamua
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Mood and emotion
The painful feelings you avoid grow twisted in the dark. By facing your sorrows and struggles you can take back your life
Terrible things can happen. You get diagnosed with an incurable disease. Your accident changes your ability to do the activities that made life fun and meaningful. Your spouse decides that they want someone else. Even if you’re lucky enough to avoid huge life-changing events, you’re going to be faced with disappointmen...
Joshua Coleman
https://aeon.co//essays/free-yourself-from-the-tentacles-of-pain-with-radical-acceptance
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
History of ideas
For centuries, all philosophers seem to have done is question and debate. Why do philosophical problems resist solution?
Philosophy seems to be on a hiding to nothing. It has a 2,500-year history in the West and an extensive back-catalogue – of problems. There are questions about what exists, and what we know about it, such as: Do we have free will? Is there an external world? Does God exist? and so on. There are also questions of analys...
Chris Daly
https://aeon.co//essays/why-doesnt-philosophy-progress-from-debate-to-consensus
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Anthropology
For 97 per cent of human history, all people had about the same power and access to goods. How did inequality ratchet up?
Most of us live in social worlds that are profoundly unequal, where small elites have vastly more power and wealth than everyone else. Very few of the have-nots find this congenial. As experimental economists have shown, we tend to enter social situations prepared to take a chance and cooperate in collective activities...
Kim Sterelny
https://aeon.co//essays/for-97-of-human-history-equality-was-the-norm-what-happened
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
War and peace
Conflicts only fully end when the delicate threads of peace have been steadily and quietly woven by ordinary, dedicated folk
We live in an age in which – for obvious reasons – it’s vital to understand how to build peace. Nuclear proliferation, inter-state and civil wars, terrorism and insurgencies, rising extremisms and hate crimes, social polarisation and increasingly vituperate online diction mean that learning how to reconcile enemies has...
Tobias Jones
https://aeon.co//essays/peacebuilding-is-an-artform-crafted-by-divided-peoples
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Love and friendship
Sure, lovers and children are great. But friends are more than ever the heart of happiness, of family and of love itself
As an evolutionary anthropologist, I have wrestled with the question ‘What is love?’ for more than a decade. At first glance, the answer is straightforward. After all, my many research subjects all have their own answers to share. And herein lies the fundamental problem for someone who would like to find a nice straigh...
Anna Machin
https://aeon.co//essays/treasure-your-friends-the-top-of-your-love-hierarchy
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Nations and empires
Shaking off Nazism was no simple matter: the work to create a plural and peacable Germany was prolonged and painful
After 12 years of fascism, six years of war, and the concentrated genocidal killing of the Holocaust, nationalism should have been thoroughly discredited. Yet it was not. For decades, nationalist frames of mind continued to hold. They prevailed on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain and predominated in the Global ...
Helmut Walser Smith
https://aeon.co//essays/germany-became-a-tolerant-nation-only-by-painful-small-steps
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
A radical therapy based on eye movements can desensitise painful memories, heal hurts and aid transformation at warp speed
Thirty years ago, in the summer of 1991, I travelled to Denver to visit my graduate school mentor, Andy Sweet. I had received my doctorate in clinical psychology in 1989, and Andy had taught me most of what I knew about working with people suffering from the effects of trauma. As we sat in his backyard, Andy said: ‘You...
Deborah Korn
https://aeon.co//essays/how-emdr-helps-to-reprocess-traumatic-memories-at-warp-speed
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
History of ideas
Humanism did not replace Scholasticism, nor is it clear that ideas like the Renaissance help us understand history at all
Renaissance philosophy started in the mid-14th century and saw the flowering of humanism, the rejection of scholasticism and Aristotelianism, the renewal of interest in the ancients, and created the prerequisites for modern philosophy and science. At least, this is the conventional story. But, in fact, there was no Ren...
Henrik Lagerlund
https://aeon.co//essays/there-was-no-such-thing-as-renaissance-philosophy
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Physics
Physics displays an uncanny alignment at its very deepest levels. Is a grand theory of everything finally within reach?
When trying to explain what motivates me as a physicist, the film A Passage to India (1984) comes to mind. Based on the play by Santha Rama Rau, adapted from the novel by E M Forster, it describes the fallout from a rape case in the fictional city of Chandrapore, during the British Raj in India in the 1920s. What keeps...
James Wells
https://aeon.co//essays/how-physics-at-the-roots-of-reality-point-to-a-grand-unified-theory
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Art
Tearing down sexist paintings or racist monuments raises as many problems as it resolves. There’s a better way to combat hate
In 1970, Allen Jones exhibited Hatstand, Table, and Chair: three sculptures of women wearing fetish clothing, posed as pieces of furniture. The sculptures were met with protests and stink-bomb attacks, particularly from feminists, who argued that the works objectified women. Despite the artist’s intentions for this pie...
Daisy Dixon
https://aeon.co//essays/a-philosophical-guide-on-how-to-manage-dangerous-art
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Neuroscience
Social media makes us feel terrible about who we really are. Neuroscience explains why – and empowers us to fight back
Levi Jed Murphy smoulders into the camera. It’s a powerful look: piercing blue eyes, high cheekbones, full lips and a razor-sharp jawline – all of which, he says, cost him around £30,000. Murphy is an influencer from Manchester in the UK, with a large social media following. Speaking on his approach to growing his fans...
Mark Miller & Ben White
https://aeon.co//essays/social-media-and-the-neuroscience-of-predictive-processing
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Gender
Rape in the Middle Ages was seen as a routine part of women’s lives, even as it was condemned. How far have we really come?
One of the most memorable lies about medieval rape appears early in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster film Braveheart (1995). As he ponders how to entice his English noblemen to live in Scotland, King Edward I declares that it’s time to reinstitute an old custom called prima nocte, or first night. He explains: ‘When any common ...
Carissa Harris
https://aeon.co//essays/the-hypocrisies-of-rape-culture-have-medieval-roots
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Mental health
When a person is in distress, we can draw on deep, evolved mechanisms to calm the storm, through attention, touch and care
When I talk to my patients about emotion regulation, among the first things that come into their minds are usually deep breathing and meditation. Those who’ve gone through counselling might describe cognitive-behavioural approaches, where they follow set steps to challenge the assumptions underlying their emotional rea...
Brandon Kohrt
https://aeon.co//essays/we-have-evolved-powerful-mechanisms-for-healing-one-another
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Political philosophy
For Leo Strauss, public life was muddied by opinion and persecution, so philosophers should shield their work from view
In his essay ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing’ (1941), the political philosopher Leo Strauss painted a picture of intellectual life that should offend me as a person with political commitments to democracy and egalitarianism, and philosophical commitments to pluralism and against monism, yet I return to it again and...
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
https://aeon.co//essays/the-dangers-of-public-philosophy-according-to-leo-strauss
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Philosophy of mind
You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity
Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it. Is my identity determined by my DNA or am I product of how I’m raised? Can I change, and if so, how much? Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one? Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to ...
Kathleen Wallace
https://aeon.co//essays/the-self-is-not-singular-but-a-fluid-network-of-identities
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Nations and empires
Vandals, Goths, Alemanni, Sueves… the Romans grappled endlessly with the status of ethnic peoples in their vast empire
A series of bizarre night-time incidents in the woods of northern Europe, around 360 CE, reveals the perils that outsiders and foreigners faced in a world dominated by ancient Rome. For centuries, many ethnic tribes – of Alans, Quadi, Marcomanni, Sueves and Vandals – had called these forests their home. East of the Rhi...
Douglas Boin
https://aeon.co//essays/who-was-allowed-to-call-the-roman-empire-home
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Mental health
The p-factor is the dark matter of psychiatry: an invisible, unifying force that might lie behind a multitude of mental disorders
The voices told him that he was God, and Oliver believed them. Only 17 years old, he was special, chosen, a higher being whose wisdom and intelligence were beyond compare. Psychiatrists, however, labelled these voices as auditory hallucinations, his first psychotic episode. A diagnosis of schizophrenia soon followed. F...
Alex Riley
https://aeon.co//essays/what-the-p-factor-says-about-the-root-of-all-mental-illness
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Archaeology
What if the need for fabric, not food, in the face of a changing climate is what first tipped humanity towards agriculture?
Archaeologists and other scientists are beginning to unravel the story of our most intimate technology: clothing. They’re learning when and why our ancestors first started to wear clothes, and how their adoption was crucial to the evolutionary success of our ancestors when they faced climate change on a massive scale d...
Ian Gilligan
https://aeon.co//essays/how-clothing-and-climate-change-kickstarted-agriculture
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Knowledge
Kids don’t just say ‘the darndest things’. Playful and probing, they can be closer to the grain of life’s deepest questions
When I tell someone that I run a centre that brings philosophy into children’s lives, much of the time I’m greeted with puzzlement, and sometimes open scepticism. How can children do philosophy? Isn’t it too hard for them? What are you trying to do, teach Kant to kindergarteners? Or, somewhat more suspiciously, what ki...
Jana Mohr Lone
https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-do-philosophy-for-and-with-children
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
War and peace
Innocent, passive, apolitical: after the Holocaust, the standard for ‘true’ victimhood has worked to justify total war
In September 1945, a month after the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States issued the Charter of the Nuremberg Trials, the chief US prosecutor, Robert Jackson, wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine to explain the impending proceedings to the US public. In ‘The Worst Crime...
A Dirk Moses
https://aeon.co//essays/the-pantomime-drama-of-victims-and-villains-conceals-the-real-horrors-of-war
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Philosophy of religion
Modern mindfulness strips Buddhism of its spiritual core. We need an ethics of reincarnation for an interconnected world
When people outside of Asia think of Buddhism, they tend to think about just philosophy and meditation. Buddhists are often said not to have gods, wars or empires. Their religion isn’t about ritual or belief, but a dedicated exploration into what causes suffering and how to end it through meditation and compassion. Alt...
Avram Alpert
https://aeon.co//essays/why-modern-buddhists-should-take-reincarnation-seriously
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Quantum theory
Physics has long looked to harmony to explain the beauty of the Universe. But what if dissonance yields better insights?
Quantum physics is weird and counterintuitive. For this reason, the word ‘quantum’ has become shorthand for anything powerful or mystical, whether or not it has anything whatsoever to do with quantum mechanics. As a quantum physicist, I’ve developed a reflexive eyeroll upon hearing the word applied to anything outside ...
Katie McCormick
https://aeon.co//essays/uniting-the-mysterious-worlds-of-quantum-physics-and-music
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
The environment
Far from being profoundly destructive, we humans have deep capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight
In December 1968, the ecologist and biologist Garrett Hardin had an essay published in the journal Science called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. His proposition was simple and unsparing: humans, when left to their own devices, compete with one another for resources until the resources run out. ‘Ruin is the destination t...
Michelle Nijhuis
https://aeon.co//essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Cities
Entangled with, yet critical of, colonial oppression and the evils of slavery, the true history of Boston can now be told
The United States, people around the world say, was founded by Puritans. The Puritan colonists were inspired by ‘the magnificence of leading an exodus of saints to found a city on a hill [my emphasis], for the eyes of all the world to behold.’ Those are the words of Perry Miller, the 20th century’s pre-eminent scholar ...
Mark Peterson
https://aeon.co//essays/new-england-kept-slavery-but-not-its-profits-at-a-distance
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Human evolution
What pea-sized brain organoids reveal about consciousness, the self and our future as a species
When I moved from Brazil to the United States to train as a neuroscientist, I was shocked to discover that most of our ‘knowledge’ about the human brain in fact came from another species: the mouse. This struck me as pretty strange. After all, it wasn’t the mouse brain that put us on the Moon or that decoded the human ...
Alysson Muotri
https://aeon.co//essays/what-might-brainlets-in-a-dish-tell-us-about-what-it-means-to-be-human
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Nations and empires
Globalism is out. Nationalism is in. Progressives who think they can jump aboard are dangerously naive
It’s hard to remember that, a generation ago, pundits, bankers and scholars formed a loud chorus declaring the nation obsolete. Flows of capital, ideas and goods ushered in a global age with new metaphors and a new narrative of globalisation, movement and circulation. Now, the global promise and plotline look shopworn....
Jeremy Adelman
https://aeon.co//essays/liberal-nationalism-is-back-it-must-start-to-think-globally
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Meaning and the good life
From monks to existentialists and hipsters, the search for a true self has been a centuries-long project. Should we give it up?
‘Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.’ This popular quip, often misattributed to Oscar Wilde, appears without any apparent irony in self-help books and blog posts celebrating authenticity. Understandably, they take the dictum to ‘be oneself’ as a worthy, nearly unassailable goal. Our culture is saturated with a...
Alexander Stern
https://aeon.co//essays/a-history-of-authenticity-from-jesus-to-self-help-and-beyond
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Stories and literature
He spoke truth to power and made heresy a virtue. Lessons on free speech and intellectual combat from John Milton
Published at the height of the first English Civil War, Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England (1644), remains a powerful defence of free expression. Printing might now have almost given way to digital media as the form in which beliefs and ideas ar...
Nicholas McDowell
https://aeon.co//essays/reading-john-miltons-areopagitica-in-the-information-age
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Stories and literature
Women who write about their pain suffer a double shaming: once for getting injured, twice for their act of self-exposure
In the second episode of I May Destroy You (2020), Michaela Coel’s highly praised TV drama series about the interconnected lives of a group of young Black Londoners, Arabella, a writer and the series protagonist, is sitting in a police station with her friend Kwame and two women assigned to her ‘case’. Arabella (played...
Katherine Angel
https://aeon.co//essays/shame-heaps-upon-shame-in-womens-memoirs-of-suffering
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Art
Gazing at a painting feels like an almost magical encounter with another mind but what real effects does art have on us?
Scenario 1: suppose you’ve been gazing intensely at Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait (1659), which hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and later you’re told that this was actually a painting made by a deep-learning machine that had internalised Rembrandt’s style through exposure to his paintings. You immed...
Ellen Winner
https://aeon.co//essays/works-of-art-compel-our-attention-but-can-they-change-us
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Mathematics
If philosophers and mathematicians struggle with probability, can gamblers really hope to grasp their losing game?
A mathematician, a philosopher and a gambler walk into a bar. As the barman pulls each of them a beer, he decides to stir up a bit of trouble. He pulls a die from his pocket and rolls it ostentatiously on the bar counter: it comes up with a 1. The mathematician says: ‘The probability that 1 would come up is 1/6, and at...
Catalin Barboianu
https://aeon.co//essays/a-mathematician-a-philosopher-and-a-gambler-walk-into-a-bar
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Thinkers and theories
Though far more often remembered as a poet, Coleridge’s theory of ideas was spectacular in its originality and bold reach
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stands tall in the cultural pantheon for his poetry. It’s less well known that in his own lifetime, and in the decades following his death, this canonical poet had an equal reputation as a philosopher. His published works containing much of his philosophical prose span from The State...
Peter Cheyne
https://aeon.co//essays/the-spectacular-originality-of-coleridges-theory-of-ideas
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto
Information and communication
Lies and distortions don’t just afflict the ignorant. The more you know, the more vulnerable you can be to infection
There’s a new virus in town and it’s not fooling around. You can catch it through face-to-face contact or digitally – that is, via a human or bot. Few of us possess immunity, some are even willing hosts; and, despite all we’ve learned about it, this virus is proving more cunning and harder to eradicate than anyone coul...
Elitsa Dermendzhiyska
https://aeon.co//essays/why-humans-find-it-so-hard-to-let-go-of-false-beliefs
https://images.aeonmedia…y=75&format=auto