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Nations and empires | The fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t a tragedy for civilisation. It was a lucky break for humanity as a whole | For an empire that collapsed more than 1,500 years ago, ancient Rome maintains a powerful presence. About 1 billion people speak languages derived from Latin; Roman law shapes modern norms; and Roman architecture has been widely imitated. Christianity, which the empire embraced in its sunset years, remains the world’s ... | Walter Scheidel | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire-paved-the-road-to-modernity | |
Beauty and aesthetics | From the Big Bang to a heartbeat in utero, sounds are a scaffold for thought when logic and imagery elude us | When John Lennon was asked in 1975 why so many adults disliked rock and roll, calling it the ‘devil’s music’, he replied: ‘I always thought that it’s because it came from Black music.’ Reflecting on the past 400 years of white supremacy in the United States, including the recent attempted insurrection at the US Capitol... | Christina Rawls | https://aeon.co//essays/the-universal-forces-of-sound-and-rhythm-enhance-thought-and-feeling | |
Sleep and dreams | I’m a dream engineer. Through touch, scent and sound, we help people rescript the dramas of their sleeping lives | Most of us have had a nightmare or a few. They’re a normal response to stress. But for a significant minority of people, they’re so frequent – about 5 per cent of the population experiences nightmares on a weekly basis or worse – that the disruption to sleep can be severely harmful to mental health, increasing symptoms... | Michelle Carr | https://aeon.co//essays/in-sleep-the-body-is-a-channel-to-communicate-with-the-dreaming-mind | |
Sex and sexuality | He was a literary lion and an infamous pederast: what might we learn from his life about monstrosity and humanity? | The British writer Norman Douglas was so famous during his lifetime (1868-1952) that he frequently turned up as a character in fiction. D H Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Richard Aldington all put him in their novels, while Douglas’s own bestselling novel South Wind (1917) appeared on the shelves of characters in Evelyn W... | Rachel Hope Cleves | https://aeon.co//essays/pederasts-as-monsters-and-the-problem-of-active-not-knowing | |
Anthropology | Humans need closeness and belonging but any society that closes its gates is doomed to atrophy. How do we stay open? | Many of us will recall Petri dishes from our first biology class – those shallow glass vessels containing a nutrient gel into which a microbe sample is injected. In this sea of nutrients, the cells grow and multiply, allowing the colony to flourish, its cells dividing again and again. But just as interesting is how the... | David Napier | https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-dynamics-of-social-trust-in-human-cultures | |
Animals and humans | Human exceptionalism is dead: for the sake of our own happiness and the planet we should embrace our true animal nature | When I visited my grandmother at the undertakers, an hour or so before her funeral, I was struck by how different death is from sleep. A sleeping individual shimmers with fractional movements. The dead seem to rest in paused animation, so still they look smaller than in life. It’s almost impossible not to feel as if so... | Melanie Challenger | https://aeon.co//essays/to-be-fully-human-we-must-also-be-fully-embodied-animal | |
Consciousness and altered states | Instead of a code encrypted in the wiring of our neurons, could consciousness reside in the brain’s electromagnetic field? | Some 2,700 years ago in the ancient city of Sam’al, in what is now modern Turkey, an elderly servant of the king sits in a corner of his house and contemplates the nature of his soul. His name is Katumuwa. He stares at a basalt stele made for him, featuring his own graven portrait together with an inscription in ancien... | Johnjoe McFadden | https://aeon.co//essays/does-consciousness-come-from-the-brains-electromagnetic-field | |
Ageing and death | Are women really at greater risk from dementia? Until we reckon with social roles and inequalities, it’s impossible to say | Auguste Deter died on the 8 April 1906, aged 55, after spending the last years of her life in a psychiatric hospital in Frankfurt, Germany. A photo of her from 1902, after she was institutionalised, shows a woman in a white gown, in a messy bed with her knees drawn up to her chest. She isn’t looking at the camera, and ... | Kate Gregorevic | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-life-paths-of-men-and-women-affect-the-diagnosis-of-dementia | |
Global history | Abolition in Africa brought longed-for freedoms, but also political turmoil, economic collapse and rising enslavement | On one of my first visits to West Africa, more than 20 years ago, I went to the Fuuta Djalon (also known as Fouta Djallon) mountains of Guinea-Conakry. These beautiful mountains range across high waterfalls, cliffs and lonely paths leading from one village to another over high plateaux. Many settlements can be reached ... | Toby Green | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-end-of-atlantic-slavery-paved-a-path-to-colonialism | |
History | How Ivy Litvinov, the English-born wife of a Soviet ambassador, seduced America with wit, tea and soft diplomacy | In late 1941, the society pages of American newspapers alighted with news of the newest power couple in Washington, DC: Maxim and Ivy Litvinov. Maxim Litvinov – Stalin’s commissar of foreign affairs in the 1930s – was already known to Americans as the affable Old Bolshevik who’d paved the way for the United States to f... | Brigid O’Keeffe | https://aeon.co//essays/the-peoples-ambassadress-the-forgotten-diplomacy-of-ivy-litvinov | |
Physics | Physics as we know it is elegant and exquisitely accurate. It tells almost nothing about the deepest riddles of the Universe | One afternoon in February 2016, I watched in rapt attention as a team of scientists unveiled the first definitive evidence for the existence of gravitational waves – ripples in space and time, produced by a pair of massive black holes crashing together 1.3 billion light-years away from Earth. These ripples had been pre... | Pedro G Ferreira | https://aeon.co//essays/we-are-at-a-crossroads-in-the-search-for-a-new-physics | |
Thinkers and theories | She was a French revolutionary and a politician’s wife. But Manon Roland should be remembered for her philosophical writings | On 8 November 1793, Madame Roland was led to the scaffold. She was a healthy, middle-class woman in her late 30s, and cast a pleasant and dignified rather than a dramatic figure on the tumbrel that carted her through the streets of Paris. The mob waved at her and sent her encouragement – she was well loved. Like many o... | Sandrine Bergès | https://aeon.co//essays/manon-roland-revolutionary-philosopher-and-housewife | |
Dance and theatre | Imagination is a powerful tool, a sixth sense, a weapon. We must be careful how we use it, in life as on stage or screen | When I performed in the play The Iceman Cometh (1946) by Eugene O’Neill, I played a character who stands up near the end and pours his heart out on stage. My character was almost like a messenger in a Greek tragedy but, instead of describing some nightmarish battle, he had to recount the horror of his own failures and ... | Paul Giamatti & Stephen T Asma | https://aeon.co//essays/imagination-is-the-sixth-sense-be-careful-how-you-use-it | |
Biography and memoir | Growing up in the shadow of a serial killer I came to understand that danger within a locked house might exceed that without | Four children sit on a rockery by an ornamental pond in an English family snap. Someone has written ‘summer 1976’ in biro on the back. I am the oldest in the picture. I am nine. My parents moved us that July to the countryside below the Yorkshire Dales, and this is a photograph of us in our new garden. We had an acre o... | Alicia Foster | https://aeon.co//essays/the-yorkshire-ripper-stalked-the-streets-but-home-was-no-haven | |
Neuroscience | Each human brain possesses a unique, intricate pattern of 86 billion neurons. If science can map it, immortality beckons | In the Asturias region of northwest Spain, a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth has a single, internal feature: a large red heart. This work of art, at least 14,000 years old, likely depicts a successful hunt and bloody wound. From the earliest days of our species, the detection of a pulse, the preservation of respiratio... | Phil Jaekl | https://aeon.co//essays/mapping-the-brains-connective-structure-could-unlock-immortality | |
Animals and humans | The search for dolphin intelligence and the quest for alien life have moved in historical lockstep. What does the future hold? | Despite putting questions to nature, as the philosopher Francis Bacon once suggested, science has revealed to us a strangely silent world. Where once divinity’s lessons were read out from the structure of the cosmos itself, now outer space answers our outward-bound signals with only stony stillness. There is no respons... | Thomas Moynihan | https://aeon.co//essays/dolphin-intelligence-and-humanitys-cosmic-future | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | From termite queens to the carbon cycle, nature knows how to avoid network collapse. Human designers should pay heed | Nature is famously, gloriously complex. But it wasn’t always so. When the Earth was young, physics ruled. Steam spewed from prodigious volcanoes and seeped through the cracked surface, transforming our planet into an ocean-covered mass, circling in the darkness. The physics that governs a phase change from steam to wat... | Ruth DeFries | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-we-learn-from-natures-experience-of-catastrophes | |
Neuroscience | Saturated with rites and symbols, psychology feeds a deep human need once nourished by mythology | Psychology is not solely the science of the mind. It’s a form of knowledge enmeshed with our mythical understanding of deeper questions of significance. In our secular age, many people no longer turn to sacred books to understand who and what they are. Psychology is where many find meaning. Indeed, the stories we tell ... | Rami Gabriel | https://aeon.co//essays/how-psychology-fills-the-gap-from-the-disenchantment-of-the-world | |
Anthropology | Pastoralists are experts in managing extreme variability. In a volatile world economy, bankers should learn how they do it | What are the connections between a banker working on a trading floor in London and a pastoralist herding animals across the grasslands of East Africa? More than you’d think. Let me explain how they’re connected; and why they can both learn from each other. Both bankers and pastoralists must, as a matter of course, work... | Ian Scoones | https://aeon.co//essays/what-bankers-should-learn-from-the-traditions-of-pastoralism | |
Genetics | The pioneers of social genetics were racists and eugenicists: should we give up on the science they founded altogether? | ‘What’s your favourite Woody Allen movie?’ Dylan Farrow asked the readers of The New York Times, before giving her account of Allen molesting her when she was seven years old. She challenged the continued acclaim for Allen’s movies: ‘Imagine your seven-year-old daughter being led into an attic by Woody Allen … Are you ... | Kathryn Paige Harden | https://aeon.co//essays/what-do-we-do-with-the-science-of-terrible-men | |
Global history | Democracy is not a torch passed from ancient Athens but a globally common form of government with much to teach us today | Today, many people see democracy as under threat in a way that only a decade ago seemed unimaginable. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed like democracy was the way of the future. But nowadays, the state of democracy looks very different; we hear about ‘backsliding’ and ‘decay’ and other descriptio... | David Stasavage | https://aeon.co//essays/democracy-is-common-and-robust-historically-and-across-the-globe | |
Meaning and the good life | Do deathbed regrets give us a special insight into what really matters in life? There are good reasons to be sceptical | How do we find out what really matters in life? One way might be to ask those who are dying. They might occupy a perspective that allows them to see better what’s trivial and what’s truly significant. The prospect of imminent death might carry them above petty squabbles and the pursuit of money and status, and allow th... | Neil Levy | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-the-deathbed-perspective-considered-so-valuable | |
Anthropology | On a regular cycle, the Nias islanders of Indonesia would retreat into enforced seclusion. What can we learn from them? | With lockdown now as inevitable as death and taxes, our confinements have become as regular as the seasons. Like recidivists in and out of prison, we head through the revolving door, scarcely aware of direction or purpose. Beyond the challenges of provisioning and isolation, glued to our screens, we struggle to make se... | Andrew Beatty | https://aeon.co//essays/lockdown-on-nias-island-in-indonesia-served-as-a-spiritual-reset | |
History of science | With evidence for efficacy so thin, and the stakes so high, why is ‘electroshock’ therapy still a mainstay of psychiatry? | In the early 1970s, I was a naive 21-year-old, in love with my first job since graduating university, as a nursing aide on a psychiatric ward in New York. Three times a week, several older women would sit in a line against the wall in the corridor. Some were slumped motionless in their chairs. Others seemed scared and ... | John Read | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-electroshock-therapy-still-a-mainstay-of-psychiatry | |
History | How a flawed logic of economic scarcity and social climbing spurred witch hunts in early modern Germany | Margaretha Hönin had a bad reputation. Even though she lived in the late 16th century, we know that her neighbours, the people of Coburg in Thuringia, despised her for being a parvenu and a money-grabbing miser. Hönin was also said to be a witch who met regularly with a dragon. For her neighbours, her economic behaviou... | Johannes Dillinger | https://aeon.co//essays/how-economic-behaviour-drove-witch-hunts-in-pre-modern-germany | |
Dance and theatre | A devastating loss can shatter the façade we put up for others, exposing our deepest, rawest self. A work of art can do the same | ‘Don’t show off! Don’t pretend to be, be!’ The piercing voice of my stern ballet teacher with the stick and the square glasses still echoes in my mind. These two sentences were standard at almost every rehearsal when I was a young ballet student. Something about how we danced wasn’t quite right, even though, technicall... | Julia F Christensen | https://aeon.co//essays/art-like-loss-can-shock-us-into-our-authentic-self | |
Ethics | Christine Korsgaard argues that we can extend a Kantian moral framework to include other animals. But her argument fails | Some of the most pressing moral issues we face today arise from how humans treat nonhuman animals, especially in farming and scientific experiments. High-intensity or ‘factory’ farming raises the biggest questions because of its sheer scale, and because routine practices there, once we look closely, often appear shocki... | Peter Godfrey-Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/why-korsgaards-kantian-argument-about-animals-doesnt-work | |
Demography and migration | To respect exiles as real and important political actors, we should get over casting them as saints, threats or victims | The Xinjiang Victims Database documents more than 12,000 victims of Chinese repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Using testimony from family, friends and survivors, this database provides a record to protect the detained today, and to create the basis for accountability and reparations in the future – r... | Ashwini Vasanthakumar | https://aeon.co//essays/to-respect-exiles-dont-think-of-them-as-angels-or-demons | |
War and peace | As a soldier, I was hard-wired to seek meaning and purpose. Gray’s philosophy helped me unhook from utopia and find peace | ‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’Blaise Pascal (1623-62)I first read the English philosopher John Gray while sitting in the silence of the still, mid-afternoon heat of Helmand Province in Afghanistan. In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)... | Andy Owen | https://aeon.co//essays/how-john-grays-philosophy-helped-me-understand-my-war-experience | |
Ethics | The ethical life means being good to ourselves, to others, and to the world. But how do you choose if these demands compete? | Conventional wisdom depicts moral struggle as an internal conflict between a higher moral self and an untamed dark side. This picture pervades popular imagination: the angel and the devil on either shoulder, the ‘two wolf’ parable, the Ego and the Id, the ‘true self’ and the ‘false self’. It resonates with religious tr... | Irene McMullin | https://aeon.co//essays/how-should-you-choose-the-right-right-thing-to-do | |
Nations and empires | How a country used myth and mystique to tempt global investors – and seeded a toxic Hindu nationalism in the process | The early 1990s was a moment of fragile hope and anxiety in India. The nation had just ‘opened up’ its economy to join the world of free markets, a post-Cold War ‘end of history’ global world. The seductive formula held out the promise of foreign investments, high economic growth, and of unleashing the caged spirit of ... | Ravinder Kaur | https://aeon.co//essays/how-indias-economic-liberalisation-enabled-strongman-nationalism | |
Thinkers and theories | A powerful cadre of scientists and economists sold Karl Popper’s ‘falsification’ idea to the world. They have much to answer for | If you ask philosophically minded researchers – in the Anglophone world at least – why it is that science works, they will almost always point to the philosopher Karl Popper (1902-94) for vindication. Science, they explain, doesn’t presume to provide the final answer to any question, but contents itself with trying to ... | Charlotte Sleigh | https://aeon.co//essays/how-popperian-falsification-enabled-the-rise-of-neoliberalism | |
Biology | Boned, spined, spiked, corkscrewed or double-headed: why did so much variety arise when a simple tube would do? | Every year, thanks to perfectly timed cues of temperature, chemical signals and the phase of the Moon, corals mate, shamelessly, in the ocean. Their spawning events are spectacular annual shows that attract human gawkers, scientific voyeurs in snorkel gear hoping to catch corals in the act. When the cues align for male... | Emily Willingham | https://aeon.co//essays/a-biography-of-the-penis-in-the-animal-kingdom | |
Future of technology | Sooner or later a technology capable of wiping out human civilisation might be invented. How far would we go to stop it? | One way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling balls out of a giant urn. The balls represent ideas, discoveries and inventions. Over the course of history, we have extracted many balls. Most have been beneficial to humanity. The rest have been various shades of grey: a mix of good and bad, whose net ... | Nick Bostrom & Matthew van der Merwe | https://aeon.co//essays/none-of-our-technologies-has-managed-to-destroy-humanity-yet | |
Thinkers and theories | Susan Stebbing’s little Pelican book on philosophy had a big aim: giving everybody tools to think clearly for themselves | ‘There is an urgent need today for the citizens of a democracy to think well.’ These words, which could have been written yesterday, come from Thinking to Some Purpose, a popular book by the British philosopher Susan Stebbing, first published in 1939 in the Penguin ‘Pelican’ books series, with that familiar blue-and-wh... | Peter West | https://aeon.co//essays/on-susan-stebbing-and-the-role-of-public-philosophy | |
Nations and empires | Americans liked to believe that Japan was Westernising through the 20th century but Japan was vigorously doing the opposite | In 1860, Fukuzawa Yukichi, a young Japanese student still learning English himself, accompanied the first ever Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States as its English interpreter. This American encounter, along with a second trip with a Japanese Embassy to Europe in 1862 and a third trip back to the US in 1867,... | Jon Davidann | https://aeon.co//essays/is-westernisation-fact-or-fiction-the-case-of-japan-and-the-us | |
Anthropology | A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale | When the anthropologist Irven DeVore suggested in 1962 to then-graduate student Richard Lee that they study hunter-gatherers, neither expected to transform the modern understanding of human nature. A baboon expert, DeVore mostly wanted to expand his research to human groups. Lee was searching for a dissertation project... | Manvir Singh | https://aeon.co//essays/not-all-early-human-societies-were-small-scale-egalitarian-bands | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | Can a robot pray? Does an AI have a soul? Advances in automata raise theological debates that will shape the secular world | The wooden monk, a little over two feet tall, ambles in a circle. Periodically, he raises a gripped cross and rosary towards his lips and his jaw drops like a marionette’s, affixing a kiss to the crucifix. Throughout his supplications, those same lips seem to mumble, as if he’s quietly uttering penitential prayers, and... | Ed Simon | https://aeon.co//essays/can-a-robot-pray-does-an-automaton-have-a-soul-ai-and-theology-meet | |
Psychiatry and psychotherapy | In a clinical setting, playful activities are not distractions; they take patients deep into trauma – and out the other side | ‘Take a pen. Place it on the paper. Draw wherever you want. However you want. You know, Paul Klee said: “Drawing is like taking a line for a walk.”’ In the hospital workshop, I turn towards a patient, smile and continue: ‘So, let’s draw together. We could draw houses, and draw a path between our homes. Let’s grab paint... | Susanna Crossman | https://aeon.co//essays/play-is-cathartic-allowing-people-to-sit-with-their-shadows | |
Oceans and water | Captive orcas are tormented by boredom and family separation, but they cannot be simply released. What’s the solution? | Alone, the female orca, also known as a killer whale, circles her small, shallow tank stopping only to surface and open her mouth as trainers drop in dead fish. She thinks of a time when she shared her tank with her children. But they are long gone – all five having died in captivity by the age of seven. And she rememb... | Lori Marino | https://aeon.co//essays/concrete-tanks-are-torture-for-social-intelligent-killer-whales | |
History of science | Why the finest minds in 1930s Europe believed that scientists must engage with citizens or risk losing their moral compass | In the 1930s, as Jewish and dissident scientists were forced from their posts in Nazi Germany, many found refuge at universities in the United States. At the time, American scientists were trying to shield themselves from the winds of politics by honing arguments for the value of ‘pure’ science. It was in this spirit t... | Deborah R Coen | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-finest-minds-in-1930s-europe-believed-in-public-engagement | |
Political philosophy | Human rights, health, the rule of law – why are these concepts inflated to the status of totalising, secular religions? | As political philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls have emphasised, a flourishing democracy has a robust culture of public reason, one in which all citizens are able to participate as equals in collective deliberation and decision-making about the common good of society. In recent years, we’ve heard a lot... | John Tasioulas | https://aeon.co//essays/conceptual-overreach-threatens-the-quality-of-public-reason | |
Work | Jobs have become, for so many, a relentless, unsatisfying toil. Why then does the work ethic still hold so much sway? | When Andrew Russell became a teenager, he took the first job he could get. Late in the Nebraska summer, he walked through the long corn rows in muddy fields detasseling seed corn. He often worked into the hours when the sun perched on the horizon, sending light right through the rows, dancing off the husks and into his... | Jamie McCallum | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-work-ethic-became-a-substitute-for-good-jobs | |
Cognition and intelligence | I travelled the world and trawled the archive to unearth the hidden lessons from history’s most brilliant people | Don’t get me wrong – yes, I’m a professor at Yale University, but I’m no genius. When I first mentioned to our four grown children that I was going to teach a new course on genius, they thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. ‘You, you’re no genius! You’re a plodder.’ And they were right. So how did it c... | Craig Wright | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-we-learn-from-the-secret-habits-of-genius | |
Technology and the self | Cognitive scientists and corporations alike see human minds as predictive machines. Right or wrong, they will change how we think | The machine they built is hungry. As far back as 2016, Facebook’s engineers could brag that their creation ‘ingests trillions of data points every day’ and produces ‘more than 6 million predictions per second’. Undoubtedly Facebook’s prediction engines are even more potent now, making relentless conjectures about your ... | Joseph Fridman | https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-dangers-of-seeing-human-minds-as-predictive-machines | |
Human rights and justice | The glittering city-states of the Persian Gulf fit the classicist Moses Finley’s criteria of genuine slave societies | The six city-states on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf, each formerly a sleepy, pristine fishing village, are now all glitzy and futuristic wonderlands. In each of these city-states one finds large tracts of ultramodern architecture, gleaming skyscrapers, world-class air-conditioned retail markets and malls, buzzing ... | Bernard Freamon | https://aeon.co//essays/are-the-persian-gulf-city-states-slave-societies | |
Gender and identity | A pang of hunger, a stab of pain, a sense of dread – these experiences emerge on the shore where biology and culture meet | I know no woman – virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate – whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves – for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its chang... | Mallory Feldman & Kristen Lindquist | https://aeon.co//essays/womens-bodies-emerge-on-the-shoreline-between-biology-and-culture | |
Illness and disease | ‘Natural’ remedies are metaphysically inconsistent and unscientific. Yet they offer something that modern medicine cannot | What follows is a list of ‘natural remedies’, familiar to anyone with more than a passing interest in contemporary natural healing. These were put together specially in April 2020, as a COVID-19 protocol by Cristina Cuomo, founder of the wellness magazine Purist, after she and her husband, the CNN anchor Chris Cuomo (b... | Alan Jay Levinovitz | https://aeon.co//essays/natural-healing-is-metaphysically-incoherent-but-valuable | |
Stories and literature | Samuel Beckett turned an obscure 17th-century Christian heresy into an artistic vision and an unusual personal philosophy | Samuel Beckett’s writing often seems to have a religious air about it. Take his most famous play, Waiting for Godot (1953). Two Chaplinesque tramps – Vladimir and Estragon – wait at a crossroads by a tree for someone who might provide an answer to their prayers: Mr Godot. This is a man who has a suspiciously divine whi... | Andy Wimbush | https://aeon.co//essays/how-samuel-beckett-sought-salvation-in-the-midst-of-suffering | |
Mental health | The skilled manipulator casts a shadow of doubt over everything that you feel or think. Therapy can bring the daylight in | ‘He didn’t mean anything by it, stop making such a big deal out of it.’‘Here, let me take care of it, you don’t know what you are doing.’‘You’re too sensitive.’‘Stop overreacting.’‘You keep imagining things.’‘That’s not how it happened.’‘Your memory seems to be slipping.’Such comments undermine our trust in ourselves a... | Ramani Durvasula | https://aeon.co//essays/what-gaslighting-does-in-exploiting-trust-therapy-can-repair | |
Cities | The exclusion of poorer people from their own neighbourhoods is not just a social problem but a philosophical one | In the Mission District in San Francisco, there’s a popular soccer field nestled between elegant Victorian homes and neighbourhood taquerías. Over the years, an informal system for using the field developed among locals. If there wasn’t enough space for everyone, some played while others watched from the sidelines. Onc... | Daniel Putnam | https://aeon.co//essays/how-does-philosophy-explain-whats-wrong-with-gentrification | |
Human evolution | Not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’: half were women. What can archaeologists tell us about how they lived? | The first Neanderthal face to emerge from time’s sarcophagus was a woman’s. As the social and liberal revolutions of 1848 began convulsing Europe, quarry workers’ rough hands pulled her from the great Rock of Gibraltar. Calcite mantling her skull meant that, at first, she seemed more a hunk of stone than a once warm-bl... | Rebecca Wragg Sykes | https://aeon.co//essays/what-do-we-know-about-the-lives-of-neanderthal-women | |
Evolution | Organisms do not evolve blindly under forces beyond their control, but shape and influence the evolutionary environment itself | Humans are shaping the evolutionary future of life on Earth. We’re not only causing mass extinctions, we’re also forcing animals, plants and fungi to adapt to our manufactured world: city birds, for instance, are now singing higher notes, since the pitch seems to help their song carry over the sound of traffic. But whi... | Kevin Laland & Lynn Chiu | https://aeon.co//essays/organisms-are-not-passive-recipients-of-evolutionary-forces | |
Philosophy of mind | The injunction to immerse yourself in the present might be psychologically potent, but is it metaphysically meaningful? | Many spiritual teachers have emphasised the notion of being fully present ‘in the now’. Proponents of meditative practices of various sorts tout meditation as a way of immersing oneself fully in the present moment, and not attending to the past or future. The spiritual teachers (including prominent authors) and propone... | John Martin Fischer | https://aeon.co//essays/the-metaphysical-claims-behind-the-injunction-to-be-in-the-now | |
History of science | How a father’s mere curiosity about nature evolved during the Dutch Golden Age into the son’s focused scientific enquiry | During the 1650s, the admired Dutch diplomat Constantijn Huygens often found himself with time on his hands. He was the loyal secretary to successive princes in the House of Orange, the ruling dynasty in the northern Netherlands during the Eighty Years’ War with Spain, and had been knighted by both James I of England a... | Hugh Aldersey-Williams | https://aeon.co//essays/why-huygens-father-and-son-personify-the-scientific-revolution | |
War and peace | Rich nations with strong governments can no longer assume that political violence is a problem for other, poorer countries | Thailand’s prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha aired a dire warning to the thousands of protesters who thronged the streets of Bangkok for days in the summer of 2020 demanding his resignation. Prayuth accused the demonstrators of bringing Thailand to the brink of collapse. ‘If that happens, just wait, everybody will be on... | Mark Kukis | https://aeon.co//essays/political-violence-is-not-just-for-poor-countries-anymore | |
Thinkers and theories | No one with an interest in philosophy or debates about identity can afford to be ignorant of the work of Saul Kripke | Born in 1940 in New York, Saul Kripke is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, yet few outside philosophy have heard of him, let alone have any familiarity with his ideas. Still, Kripke’s arguments are often fairly easy to grasp. And, as I explain here, his conclusions challenge widely held phil... | Stephen Law | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-philosophers-philosopher-saul-kripke-illuminates-identity | |
Sleep and dreams | We live in a wake-centric world that devalues dreaming, yet we need to experience dreams to be our authentic selves | In the Old Testament, Jacob, on the run for his life from the twin brother he betrayed, beds down for the night in the wilderness and there dreams of a ladder stretching between heaven and Earth, of angels ascending and descending, and of God assuring him of an auspicious future. With his head on a pillow of stone – sy... | Rubin Naiman | https://aeon.co//essays/we-live-in-a-wake-centric-world-losing-touch-with-our-dreams | |
Space exploration | In the 1960s, NASA went to huge expense to contain possible pathogens from the Moon. What can we learn from the attempt? | In May 2020, as many of us stockpiled food and retreated indoors to escape the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley entered quarantine. In two weeks, they would lift off for the International Space Station, restoring the United States’ capacity to send humans in... | Dagomar Degroot | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-we-learn-from-the-lunar-pandemic-that-never-was | |
Thinkers and theories | Plato travelled to the decadent strife-torn court of Syracuse three times, risking his life to create a philosopher-king | In 388 BCE, Plato was nearly forty. He had lived through an oligarchic coup, a democratic restoration, and the execution of his beloved teacher Socrates by a jury of his fellow Athenians. In his youth, Plato seriously contemplated an entry into Athens’ turbulent politics, but he determined that his envisioned reforms o... | Nick Romeo & Ian Tewksbury | https://aeon.co//essays/when-philosopher-met-king-on-platos-italian-voyages | |
History | What shaped the thought of E P Thompson, the great historian of ordinary working people and champion of their significance? | After the Second World War, historians asked us to shift our focus from great men to the actions and experiences of ordinary people, to culture rather than institutions. This methodological shift to ‘history from below’ was political, supporting a democratic vision of political, social, intellectual and cultural agency... | Priya Satia | https://aeon.co//essays/what-shaped-e-p-thompson-historian-and-champion-of-working-people | |
Family life | When feeling good about ourselves matters more than filial duty, cutting off our parents comes to seem like a valid choice | ‘We haven’t heard from our son in five years. We thought, with the pandemic and all, that he’d finally reach out with just a “Hey, wanted to make sure you’re doing okay. Let me know.” But nothing. He hasn’t answered our emails checking to see how he or our grandkids are either. We just don’t understand.’Parents of a 27... | Joshua Coleman | https://aeon.co//essays/modern-culture-blames-parents-for-forces-beyond-their-control | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | In seeking a means to heal our wounded planet, we should look to the painstaking, cautious craft of art conservation | It is our sad lot that we love perishable things: our friends, our parents, our mentors, our partners, our pets. Those of us who incline to nature draw this consolation: most lovely natural things – the forests, the lakes, the oceans, the reefs – endure at scales remote from individual human ones. One meaning of the An... | Liam Heneghan | https://aeon.co//essays/what-restoration-ecology-could-learn-from-art-conservation | |
Rituals and celebrations | From Kentucky to Wales and all across the Atlantic, the enslaved and downtrodden got married – by leaping over a broom. Why? | In the mid-1990s, a novel wedding tradition became popular among African Americans: ‘jumping the broom’. As the couple is pronounced legally wed, they turn to the crowd, clasp hands and jump over a broomstick placed on the floor. One couple explained the ritual’s attraction. ‘It’s traditional,’ they said, ‘and we need ... | Tyler D Parry | https://aeon.co//essays/broomstick-weddings-and-the-history-of-the-atlantic-world | |
Art | For Palaeolithic societies, art-making was both a tool for survival and a tactile, joyous exploration of the world | Squeezing through a small opening at the back of a rock shelter, a young hunter-gatherer finds herself in an environment far removed from the comfort of her home. Blinking as her eyes adjust to the low light cast by the flame of her torch, she observes a vast otherworldly space before her. As she explores, she notices ... | Izzy Wisher | https://aeon.co//essays/ice-age-art-making-was-a-tactile-joyous-exploration-of-the-world | |
Neurodiversity | With my pen hovering over a form, there is no easy answer: better to provoke stigma with support, or resist classification? | Do you consider yourself to be a disabled person? Yes: ☐ No: ☐ Prefer not to say: ☐Yes. Because forms like this – and questions like this – always throw me into confusion, and sometimes into complete mind-stoppage. You appear to be asking a closed question, but ‘consider’ is a word I would use to open up a question. Fo... | Joanne Limburg | https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-it-mean-to-consider-yourself-a-disabled-person | |
Evolution | From cobra to caterpillar, warning signals are a rich natural vocabulary shaped by the communicative dance of predator and prey | In a dramatic scene that some readers will recall from childhood, the mongoose Riki-tikki-tavi encounters the villainous cobra Nag for the first time. The story’s author, Rudyard Kipling, meticulously describes the false eyes that some cobras have on the back of their hoods: [I]nch by inch out of the grass rose up the ... | David Kikuchi | https://aeon.co//essays/how-communication-between-predator-and-prey-shapes-evolution | |
Thinkers and theories | The phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty entwines us, via our own beating, pulsing, living bodies, in the lives of others | Recently, I’ve noticed something strange about what my body does while I’m flicking through apps or reading on my phone. I’ve become conscious of my irregular breathing patterns, and how much tension I’m holding in my back and shoulders. The technologist Linda Stone has noted something similar, describing the way her b... | Dan Nixon | https://aeon.co//essays/the-phenomenology-of-merleau-ponty-and-embodiment-in-the-world | |
Anthropology | Even when enslaved or despised, captives brought novel ideas and technologies to the societies of their captors | ‘From my beloved homeland they are taking me away …’– From ‘La Cautiva Marcelina’, a ballad from New MexicoIn the time before the invention of writing, communication was almost always person-to-person: people met with one another to transfer ideas, designs and technologies. It is one of archaeology’s great tasks to und... | Catherine M Cameron | https://aeon.co//essays/how-captive-peoples-enriched-the-cultures-of-their-captors | |
Biology | The Gaia hypothesis states that our biosphere is evolving. Once sceptical, some prominent biologists are beginning to agree | Many of us, scientists included, harbour contradictory intuitions about Mother Nature. We can see that ecosystems often have an inherent ability to self-stabilise, and we know we wouldn’t be here if the planet hadn’t maintained conditions suitable for life for almost 4 billion years. One reaction is to claim that some ... | W Ford Doolittle | https://aeon.co//essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one-of-its-key-sceptics | |
Technology and the self | Sitting in a videoconference is a uniformly crap experience. Instead of corroding our humanity, let’s design tools to enhance it | Technology exists to expand and sustain our capabilities. Therefore, doing technology well contributes to our hopes for leading an ethically good life: developing the right capabilities in the right ways – and using them for good ends. Videoconferencing could make a significant contribution to this. However, the essent... | Robert O’Toole | https://aeon.co//essays/how-empathy-and-creativity-can-re-humanise-videoconferencing | |
Stories and literature | By conquering young minds, the writing of J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis worked to recapture a world that was swiftly ebbing away | Much has changed in the fantasy genre in recent decades, but the word ‘fantasy’ still conjures images of dragons, castles, sword-wielding heroes and premodern wildernesses brimming with magic. Major media phenomena such as Harry Potter and Game of Thrones have helped to make medievalist fantasy mainstream, and if you l... | Maria Sachiko Cecire | https://aeon.co//essays/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-oxford-school-of-fantasy-literature | |
Complexity | Is a great team more than the sum of its players? Complexity science reveals the role of strategy, synergy, swarming and more | ‘We know,’ Runciter said to GG, ‘that as individuals they perform well. It’s all down here on paper.’ He rattled the documents on his desk. ‘But how about together? How great a polyencephalic counter-field will they generate together? Ask yourself that, GG. That is the question to ask.’– From Ubik (1969) by Philip K Di... | Jessica Flack & Cade Massey | https://aeon.co//essays/what-complexity-science-says-about-what-makes-a-winning-team | |
Race and ethnicity | Urban ethnographers do more harm than good in speaking for Black communities. They see only suffering, not diversity or joy | With Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests spreading across the globe this year, this ought to be a moment when sociologists cast valuable light on how racist thinking affects everyday life. Sociology is, after all, deeply invested in its Others; racial others, gendered others, economic others, indeed every other other, is... | Robyn Autry | https://aeon.co//essays/urban-ethnographers-do-harm-in-speaking-for-black-communities | |
Neuroscience | The neuroscience of peripersonal space explores how you create, defend or relax the buffer zone between you and the world | Heini Hediger, a noted 20th-century Swiss biologist and zoo director, knew that animals ran away when they felt unsafe. But when he set about designing and building zoos himself, he realised he needed a more precise understanding of how animals behaved when put in proximity to one another. Hediger decided to investigat... | Frédérique de Vignemont & Colin Klein | https://aeon.co//essays/where-is-the-dividing-line-between-you-and-the-world | |
Food and drink | Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America, embodying both its tumult and its promise | Upon arriving at a Maryland tavern in 1744, Dr Alexander Hamilton (not to be confused with the more famous secretary of the treasury) found himself seated amid a ‘drunken club’ of lower-class men. He was revolted by the ‘Bacchanalians’ who were so intoxicated that ‘the only thing intelligible in [their conversation] wa... | Vaughn Scribner | https://aeon.co//essays/taverns-and-the-complicated-birth-of-early-american-civil-society | |
Space exploration | The ability to stir new life into being, all across the Universe, compels us to ask why life matters in the first place | The discovery of thousands of new planets outside our solar system (and the implication that there are likely billions of such planets and probably hundreds of billions more moons in our galaxy alone) has made the search for life infinitely more complicated. On the one hand, we developed better tools, which makes the s... | Betül Kaçar | https://aeon.co//essays/if-were-alone-in-the-universe-should-we-do-anything-about-it | |
Philosophy of science | Is hard data the only path to scientific truth? That’s an absurd, illogical and profoundly useful fiction | Modern science has a whole lot going for it that Ancient Greek or Chinese science did not: advanced technologies for observation and measurement, fast and efficient communication, and well-funded and dedicated institutions for research. It also has, many thinkers have supposed, a superior (if not always flawlessly implem... | Michael Strevens | https://aeon.co//essays/an-irrational-constraint-is-the-motivating-force-in-modern-science | |
Family life | The bodies and brains of fathers, not just mothers, are transformed through the love and labour of raising a child | On a hot summer morning in Atlanta a few years ago, I took my then five-year-old son to his swimming lesson. As we walked toward his pool, we passed a smaller, shallower pool where an infant swim class was underway. I was still trying to wake up, but the class was already in full gear and my attention was drawn to a ch... | James K Rilling | https://aeon.co//essays/how-raising-children-can-change-a-fathers-brain | |
Meaning and the good life | A violinist plays in a concentration camp. A refugee carries a book of poetry. Art sustains us when survival is uncertain | It might come as a surprise to learn that there was ‘any semblance of art’ in Nazi concentration camps, as Viktor E Frankl writes in Man’s Search For Meaning (1946). But there was. Frankl describes the improvised ‘cabaret’ that took place in his camp: A hut was cleared temporarily, a few wooden benches were pushed or n... | Sarah Fine | https://aeon.co//essays/in-times-of-crisis-the-arts-are-weapons-for-the-soul | |
Biology | Biologists balk at any talk of ‘goals’ or ‘intentions’ – but a bold new research agenda has put agency back on the table | Animal immune systems depend on white blood cells called macrophages that devour and engulf invaders. The cells pursue with determination and gusto: under a microscope you can watch a blob-like macrophage chase a bacterium across the slide, switching course this way and that as its prey tries to escape through an obsta... | Philip Ball | https://aeon.co//essays/the-biological-research-putting-purpose-back-into-life | |
Thinkers and theories | Franz Brentano, philosopher and psychologist, was an iconic teacher eclipsed by his students, Freud and Husserl among them | In every discipline that I’ve looked at, there is a striking generalisation that emerges, which I call the Law of Dynasties: in case after case, the movers and shakers of the fields had themselves been the students of an earlier mover and shaker. Aristotle was the student of Plato, Martin Heidegger was the student of E... | John A Goldsmith | https://aeon.co//essays/brentano-who-taught-freud-and-husserl-is-a-lesson-to-us-all | |
Genetics | The new field of social genomics can be used by progressives to combat racial inequality or by conservatives to excuse it | Over the past decade, economists, sociologists and psychologists have begun collaborating with geneticists to investigate how genomic differences among human beings are linked to differences in their behaviours and social outcomes. The insights sought are wide-ranging: why do some of us have a greater sense of subjecti... | Erik Parens | https://aeon.co//essays/social-genomics-can-combat-inequality-or-be-used-to-justify-it | |
Human evolution | The dance of love and lore between grandparent and grandchild is at the centre, not the fringes, of our evolutionary story | Human beings need special care while we are young and when we become old. The 2020 pandemic has made this vivid: millions of people across the world have taken care of children at home, and millions more have tried to care for grandparents, even when they couldn’t be physically close to them. COVID-19 has reminded us h... | Alison Gopnik | https://aeon.co//essays/why-childhood-and-old-age-are-key-to-our-human-capacities | |
Stories and literature | Immorality, sexism, politics, war: the polychromatic Indian epic pulses with relevance to the present day | The Mahabharata is a tale for our times. The plot of the ancient Indian epic centres around corrupt politics, ill-behaved men and warfare. In this dark tale, things get worse and worse, until an era of unprecedented depravity, the Kali Yuga, dawns. According to the Mahabharata, we’re still living in the horrific Kali e... | Audrey Truschke | https://aeon.co//essays/the-indian-epic-mahabharata-imparts-a-dark-nuanced-moral-vision | |
Cognition and intelligence | The urge to align our minds and emotions with those we care for, whether they are near or far, makes our species unique | In his memoir Wind, Sand, and Stars (1939), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – author of the novella The Little Prince (1943) – relates the tale of his friend and fellow pilot Henri Guillaumet. The two men flew for the French airmail service in its early days. One winter, while on duty in South America, Guillaumet was en route... | Hayden Kee | https://aeon.co//essays/emotional-synchrony-is-at-the-core-of-what-it-means-to-be-human | |
Illness and disease | Viruses are active agents, existing within rich lifeworlds. A safe future depends on understanding this evolutionary story | Wisdom is the ability to discern inner qualities and subtle relationships, then translate them into what others recognise as good judgment. If it comes to us at all, wisdom is the product of reflection, time and experience. A person might achieve wisdom after decades; a community after centuries; a culture after millen... | David Waltner-Toews | https://aeon.co//essays/viruses-are-not-just-threats-but-actors-in-evolutions-long-story | |
History of ideas | For Hegel, human nature strives through history to unchain itself from tradition. But is such inner freedom worth the cost? | What is the human being? Traditionally, it was thought that human nature was something fixed, given either by nature or by God, once and for all. Humans occupy a unique place in creation by virtue of a specific combination of faculties that they alone possess, and this is what makes us who we are. This view comes from ... | Jon Stewart | https://aeon.co//essays/hegel-and-the-history-of-human-nature | |
Political philosophy | Security is one thing to a Black mother in a favela, another to a politician keen on law and order. They should be the same | … nationwide projects, prison-industry complex,Working-class poor, better keep your alarm setStreets too loud to ever hear freedom ringSay evacuate your sleep, it’s dangerous to dreamFor cha-ching, cats get the cha-POW – you dead nowKilling fields need blood to graze the cash cowIt’s a numbers game, but shit don’t add ... | Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò | https://aeon.co//essays/on-liberty-security-and-our-system-of-racial-capitalism | |
Art | The Harrisons’ eco-art told stories about the apocalypse, pointing to a future where we’d all have to be survival artists | In 1969, when the design guru, futurist and consummate bullshit artist Buckminster Fuller’s new book about the future prospects for humanity came out, he’d called it Utopia or Oblivion. It appeared on bookshelves and in college students’ backpacks just as three decades of unparalleled growth, prosperity and modernisati... | W Patrick McCray | https://aeon.co//essays/art-lessons-from-the-1970s-for-survival-in-an-ecologically-blighted-world | |
The ancient world | A generation of pagan bureaucrats amassed wealth and status while Roman emperors Christianised the world around them | Late in 386 CE, Libanius, a 72-year-old teacher of rhetoric from the Syrian metropolis of Antioch, penned an oration addressed to the Roman emperor Theodosius I. It offered one of the most powerful criticisms of the process by which Rome became a Christian empire. Libanius described Cynegius – the Roman prefect who gov... | Edward Watts | https://aeon.co//essays/pagan-complacency-and-the-birth-of-the-christian-roman-empire | |
Neuroscience | The language of touch binds our minds and bodies to the broader social world. What happens when touch becomes taboo? | Touch is the first sense by which we encounter the world, and the final one to leave us as we approach death’s edge. ‘Touch comes before sight, before speech,’ writes Margaret Atwood in her novel The Blind Assassin (2000). ‘It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.’ Our biology bears this ou... | Laura Crucianelli | https://aeon.co//essays/touch-is-a-language-we-cannot-afford-to-forget | |
Biography and memoir | Vanessa and Virginia – intimates in art, adversaries in love. Can we ever transcend the primal envy of the sisterly bond? | Before me are two portraits of famous sisters as children. They have that fixed quality of 19th-century photography. In one, a girl, sullen and serious, challenges the camera with passive resistance, hair as dark as her eyes; in the other, the girl glances upwards towards the light, her face set in a halo of ivy. The f... | Lily Dunn | https://aeon.co//essays/the-deep-envy-of-sisters-can-be-a-spur-for-love-and-creativity | |
Economic history | Against the capitalist creeds of scarcity and self-interest, a plan for humanity’s shared flourishing is finally coming into view | I’ve witnessed massive swarms of fireflies grace my garden like never before, drawn to the air cleansed of our arrogant greed, their glow a flashback to the time before us, omen of Earth without us, a reminder we’re never immune to nature. I say this might be the end we’ve always needed to begin again …– From the poem ... | Dirk Philipsen | https://aeon.co//essays/the-challenge-of-reclaiming-the-commons-from-capitalism | |
Illness and disease | Cancer is part of multicellular life. Now the riotous growth of crested cacti show how humans might adapt to live with it | In March 2019, we planted a garden full of monsters outside the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University (ASU). Their limbs rise out of the ground, reaching in every direction, doubling back on themselves as they expand and grow. These beautiful creatures are crested cacti – plants with mutations that lead them ... | Athena Aktipis | https://aeon.co//essays/crested-cacti-show-medicine-the-possibility-of-adapting-to-cancer | |
Subcultures | The Western canon has no shortage of fascists. But can the far-Right make ‘literature’ worthy of the name? | The public outrage following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbury earlier this year flooded bookstores in the United States with orders for recent publications such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, as well as for classic novels by Toni Morrison an... | Andrew Marzoni | https://aeon.co//essays/is-there-such-a-thing-as-far-right-literature | |
Thinkers and theories | Hannah Arendt enjoyed her solitude, but she believed that loneliness could make people susceptible to totalitarianism | What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience …– From The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt‘Please write regular... | Samantha Rose Hill | https://aeon.co//essays/for-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-is-rooted-in-loneliness | |
Cognition and intelligence | Psychological science can now measure and nurture wisdom, superseding the speculations of philosophy and religion | Wisdom is full of paradoxes. It is one of the oldest topics in the intellectual history of humanity, and yet talking about wisdom can feel odd and disingenuous. People seem to have intuitions about who is and isn’t wise, but if you press them to define wisdom, they will hesitate. Wisdom, with its mystical qualities, si... | Igor Grossmann | https://aeon.co//essays/how-psychological-scientists-found-the-empirical-path-to-wisdom | |
Philosophy of science | Biology’s next great horizon is to understand cells, tissues and organisms as agents with agendas (even if unthinking ones) | Biologists like to think of themselves as properly scientific behaviourists, explaining and predicting the ways that proteins, organelles, cells, plants, animals and whole biota behave under various conditions, thanks to the smaller parts of which they are composed. They identify causal mechanisms that reliably execute... | Michael Levin & Daniel C Dennett | https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-organisms-as-agents-with-agendas | |
History of ideas | Once seen as the work of genius, how did creativity become an engine of economic growth and a corporate imperative? | Creativity doesn’t have a deep history. The Oxford English Dictionary records just a single usage of the word in the 17th century, and it’s religious: ‘In Creation, we have God and his Creativity.’ Then, scarcely anything until the 1920s – quasi-religious invocations by the philosopher A N Whitehead. So creativity, con... | Steven Shapin | https://aeon.co//essays/how-did-creativity-become-an-engine-of-economic-growth |
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