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Thinkers and theories | Written while awaiting execution, the Consolation of Philosophy poses questions about human reason that remain urgent today | For nearly a millennium, The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius was a bestseller throughout Europe. It was read not only by those who could understand its 6th-century Latin original but also those who studied it in any of a multiplicity of translations, into Old and Middle English, Old French, Old High German, Itali... | John Marenbon | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-should-read-boethiuss-consolation-of-philosophy-today | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | The fear of becoming a meal is a powerful evolutionary force that shapes brains, behaviour and entire ecosystems | As high tide inundates the muddy shallows of the Fraser river delta in British Columbia, what looks like a swarm of mosquitoes quivers in the air above. Upon closer inspection, the flitting mass turns out to be a flock of small shorebirds. The grey-brown wings and white chests of several thousand Pacific dunlins move i... | Lesley Evans Ogden | https://aeon.co//essays/fear-of-being-eaten-shapes-brains-behaviour-and-ecosystems | |
Stories and literature | The antics in postwar Nordic children’s books left propaganda and prudery behind. We need this madcap spirit more than ever | In February 1944, Russian bombs smashed the windows of Tove Jansson’s art studio in Helsinki. ‘I knocked slivers of glass out of the windows,’ the author wrote in her diary. She was so depressed, she had been unable to paint for a year, and despaired that war was ‘making us smaller. People don’t have the strength to be... | Richard W Orange | https://aeon.co//essays/pippi-and-the-moomins-served-as-a-social-antidote-to-fascism | |
Anthropology | The Ik – among the poorest people on Earth – have been cast as exemplars of human selfishness. The truth is much more startling | Slabs of sunlight break through the mist, illuminating the bright pastel ripples of Oribo Valley, the valley I’m named after. I’ve been given this name by the Ik people I’m living with, in the remote highlands dividing Uganda, Kenya and South Sudan. The Ik woman I’m interviewing, Nangole (a pseudonym to protect her ide... | Cathryn Townsend | https://aeon.co//essays/why-were-the-ik-people-vilified-as-selfish-and-nasty | |
Economic history | Postwar prosperity depended on a truce between capitalist growth and democratic fairness. Is it possible to get it back? | With the end of the Second World War, the economies of western Europe and North America began a period of spectacular growth. Between 1950 and 1973 GDP doubled or more. This prosperity was broadly shared, with consistent growth in living standards for rich and poor alike and the emergence of a broad middle class. The F... | Jonathan Hopkin | https://aeon.co//essays/postwar-prosperity-depended-on-a-truce-between-capitalism-and-democracy | |
Archaeology | A revolution in archaeology has exposed the extraordinary extent of human influence over our planet’s past and its future | Humanity’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most important developments in human and Earth history. Human societies, plant and animal populations, the makeup of the atmosphere, even the Earth’s surface – all were irreversibly transformed. When asked about this transition, some people m... | Lucas Stephens, Erle Ellis & Dorian Fuller | https://aeon.co//essays/revolutionary-archaeology-reveals-the-deepest-possible-anthropocene | |
Ethics | A virtuous person respects the rules. So when should the same person make a judgment call and break or bend them instead? | In a high school in Wisconsin, an African American security guard is dealing with a disruptive student, also African American. While being led away by the guard, the student repeatedly calls him a notorious racial slur. The guard tells the student several times: ‘Do not call me a [n-word],’ using the actual word. The s... | Steven Nadler | https://aeon.co//essays/judgment-is-an-exercise-in-discretion-circumstances-are-everything | |
Family life | Attachment therapy helps us recognise and heal our childhood wounds so we can be free to become good parents ourselves | In 2008, Georgia (a pseudonym) gave birth to her first child. After struggling with fertility issues, she and her husband were elated to finally become parents. But in the weeks that followed, Georgia’s maternal joy was hijacked by severe anxiety. Throughout the day, her stomach churned and her chest felt tight. At nig... | Juli Fraga | https://aeon.co//essays/learn-your-own-attachment-style-to-become-a-better-parent | |
Philosophy of mind | In fiction, it grips us. In life, it can unravel us. How can brains hooked on certainty put its opposite to good use? | I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.– from ‘The Uncertainty of Science’ (1963) by Richard P Feynman[W]e demand rigidly defined are... | Mark Miller, Kathryn Nave, George Deane & Andy Clark | https://aeon.co//essays/use-uncertainty-to-leverage-the-power-of-your-predictive-brain | |
History of ideas | It’s not just that Hegel and Rousseau were racists. Racism was baked into the very structure of their dialectical philosophy | It is by now well known that some of the greatest modern philosophers held racist views. John Locke (1632-1704), David Hume (1711-76), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), G W F Hegel (1770-1831) and many others believed that Black and Indigenous peoples the world over were savage, inferior and in need of correction by European ... | Avram Alpert | https://aeon.co//essays/racism-is-baked-into-the-structure-of-dialectical-philosophy | |
Global history | Centuries before Columbus, Vikings came to the Western hemisphere. How far into the Americas did they travel? | Who, besides the indigenous peoples from Asia who crossed the Alaskan land bridge in prehistory, arrived in the Americas before Columbus? The question has fascinated generations of scholars. Could a Chinese tribute ship, as Gavin Menzies proposed in 2002, have departed from the rest of the Ming fleet in East Africa in ... | Valerie Hansen | https://aeon.co//essays/did-indigenous-americans-and-vikings-trade-in-the-year-1000 | |
Biology | Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other | It’s uncontroversial among biologists that many species have two, distinct biological sexes. They’re distinguished by the way that they package their DNA into ‘gametes’, the sex cells that merge to make a new organism. Males produce small gametes, and females produce large gametes. Male and female gametes are very diff... | Paul Griffiths | https://aeon.co//essays/the-existence-of-biological-sex-is-no-constraint-on-human-diversity | |
Mood and emotion | In an age thick with anger and fear, we might dream of a purely rational politics but it would be a denial of our humanity | We live in bodies that feel increasingly unsafe. Pandemics, climate change, sexual assault, systemic racism, the pressures of gig-economy jobs, the crisis of liberal democracy – these phenomena create feelings of vulnerability that are, quite literally, visceral. They’re visceral in the sense that emotional experience ... | Manos Tsakiris | https://aeon.co//essays/politics-is-in-peril-if-it-ignores-how-humans-regulate-the-body | |
Gender | The heart-tug tactics of 1950s ads steered white American women away from activism into domesticity. They’re still there | Harriet Beecher Stowe is best-known as the author of the antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a book that James Baldwin later christened the ‘cornerstone of American social protest fiction’. It might also be considered the nec plus ultra of American sentimental fiction – and for that reason a ‘very bad novel’, a... | Ellen Wayland-Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/from-home-to-market-a-history-of-white-womens-power-in-the-us | |
Medicine | There’s a strange, and deeply human, story behind how we taught machines to breathe for critically ill patients | We breathe about 12 to 20 times a minute, without having to think. Inhale: and air flows through the mouth and nose, into the trachea. The bronchi stem out like a wishbone, and keep branching, dividing and dividing, and finally feeding out into the tiny air sacs of alveoli. Capillaries – blood vessels thinner than hair... | Sarah Ruth Bates | https://aeon.co//essays/the-human-story-of-how-ventilators-came-to-breathe-for-us | |
Philosophy of language | Here’s the paradox of articulation: are you excavating existing ideas, or do your thoughts come into being as you speak? | I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them – and I hardly know anymore when I look at it how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird.– From... | Eli Alshanetsky | https://aeon.co//essays/what-comes-first-ideas-or-words-the-paradox-of-articulation | |
Human rights and justice | The idea of the ‘supply chain’ shackles how we think about economic justice. What forces could new metaphors unleash? | It’s 38 degrees Celsius, even in the shaded alleys of Dubai’s gold souk. Bangles and chains adorn every window, small bars and coins are stacked neatly in glass display cases, and the air is filled with the rhythmic clicks of luggage-wheels pulled briskly over tile. I’m suffering through the heat on the trail of a meta... | Michael Gibb | https://aeon.co//essays/what-the-supply-chain-metaphor-obscures-about-global-justice | |
Travel | Jet-age glamour was more than just aesthetic: its promise of motionless movement reshaped perception of time and space | In October 1958, Pan American Airways began its first regular jet service across the Atlantic. Compared with other forms of travel, flying was already fast. In 1946, it took around 20 hours to fly from New York to Paris, as opposed to the four-and-a-half days to cross the Atlantic by ocean liner. But Pan Am’s new jet-p... | Vanessa R Schwartz | https://aeon.co//essays/digital-culture-built-on-the-seamless-speed-of-the-jet-age | |
Evolution | Perched on the cusp between biology and chemistry, the start of life on Earth is an event horizon we struggle to see beyond | How did life originate? Scientists have been studying the question for decades, and they’ve developed ingenious methods to try to find out. They’ve even enlisted biology’s most powerful theory, Darwinian evolution, in the search. But they still don’t have a complete answer. What they have hit is the world’s most theore... | Natalie Elliot | https://aeon.co//essays/physics-and-information-theory-give-a-glimpse-of-lifes-origins | |
History of ideas | Far from a social luxury, tact becomes imperative when life is cheapened. We exercise it to show gentle respect for another | ‘As far as the education of children is concerned,’ wrote Natalia Ginzburg in 1960, ‘I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones.’ Not thrift, caution, shrewdness or a desire for success, but generosity, courage, frankness and a desire to be and to know; ‘not tact [diplomazia] but love for o... | Corina Stan | https://aeon.co//essays/tact-is-most-important-when-living-with-others-gets-hard | |
Stories and literature | William Blake saw angels and ghosts and the Hallelujah sunrise, even on the darkest day. We need to foster his state of mind | William Blake’s childhood vision on Peckham Rye is well known. Sauntering along, he looks up and, according to an early biographer, ‘sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’. On another occasion, he ran indoors declaring he had seen the prophet Ezekiel under a tree. His w... | Mark Vernon | https://aeon.co//essays/what-we-can-learn-from-william-blakes-visionary-imagination | |
Language and linguistics | How we came to represent (through inky marks) the vagaries of the mind, inflections of the voice, and intensity of feeling | Punctuation is dead – or is it? If you’ve ever texted ‘im here’ or ‘its in the car’, you’re in good company. Most of us have, at some point since the dawn of texting, transgressed the boundaries of good grammar, and swallowed one apostrophe or another in the name of speed or convenience. Studies have shown that such te... | Florence Hazrat | https://aeon.co//essays/beside-the-point-punctuation-is-dead-long-live-punctuation | |
History | Reinhart Koselleck, the last great theorist of history, sought in the apparent chaos of events a science of experience | In the summer of 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm travelled to the British occupation zone of Germany to re-educate young Germans. A recent graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, where he had also joined the Communist Party, Hobsbawm was working on his PhD disse... | Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann | https://aeon.co//essays/reinhart-kosellecks-theory-of-history-for-a-world-in-crisis | |
Mental health | Extraordinary beliefs don’t arise in a vacuum. They take root in minds confronted by unusual and traumatic experiences | A woman is so certain that she’s being unfairly targeted by intelligence agents that she hurriedly crosses the road to avoid a passing police officer. A young man smashes a shop window in frustration because he’s exhausted at having his every movement filmed for a TV show. A previously loving husband rejects his wife o... | Huw Green | https://aeon.co//essays/delusions-take-root-in-minds-searching-to-explain-difficult-experiences | |
Complexity | The pandemic is an unprecedented opportunity – seeing human society as a complex system opens a better future for us all | We’re at a unique moment in the 200,000 years or so that Homo sapiens have walked the Earth. For the first time in that long history, humans are capable of coordinating on a global scale, using fine-grained data on individual behaviour, to design robust and adaptable social systems. The pandemic of 2019-20 has brought ... | Jessica Flack & Melanie Mitchell | https://aeon.co//essays/complex-systems-science-allows-us-to-see-new-paths-forward | |
Archaeology | Whether collecting, storing or hoarding, we’ve always had our issues with stuff – not least deciding what’s worth having | How much grain is enough to make it to the next harvest? How much for a lord to appease his subjects? How much is enough to survive, to grow, to flourish? Anthropologists and archaeologists have approached these questions under the banner of surplus. ‘Surplus’ denotes that extra bit that allows some people to be releas... | Astrid Van Oyen | https://aeon.co//essays/a-history-of-why-we-hoard-when-we-store-and-who-collects | |
Thinkers and theories | Renowned for his pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer was nonetheless a conoisseur of very distinctive kinds of happiness | On 13 December 1807, in fashionable Weimar, Johanna Schopenhauer picked up her pen and wrote to her 19-year-old son Arthur: ‘It is necessary for my happiness to know that you are happy, but not to be a witness to it.’ Two years earlier, in Hamburg, Johanna’s husband Heinrich Floris had been discovered dead in the canal... | David Bather Woods | https://aeon.co//essays/for-schopenhauer-happiness-is-a-state-of-semi-satisfaction | |
Illness and disease | In the 19th century, the rest cure tested women’s sanity. Today, it challenges cherished myths about work and productivity | In 1877, the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia published a therapeutic guidebook called Fat and Blood. In its pages, he laid out a comprehensive treatment programme for patients of a class well known to every physician, – nervous women, who, as a rule, are thin, and lack blood. Most of them have … passed ... | Alicia Puglionesi | https://aeon.co//essays/the-rest-cure-challenges-cherished-myths-about-a-working-body | |
Love and friendship | Hurts – your own or those done to you – keep you stuck. Forgiveness therapy can help you gain perspective and move on | When I was 26, my world fell apart. I had just started graduate school and was travelling back and forth between Richmond, Virginia and Washington, DC because my wife was finishing graduate school in a different city. On one of those trips, I was doing laundry and found a note crumpled in the bottom of the dryer. It wa... | Nathaniel Wade | https://aeon.co//essays/forgiveness-therapy-can-free-you-from-the-hurts-of-the-past | |
Evolution | Evolution is extraordinarily creative in the wake of a cataclysm. How does life keep steadily ticking over in between? | In certain places around the world – in the Badlands near Drumheller in Alberta, Canada, in the Geulhemmergroeve tunnels in the Netherlands, or in the Hell Creek formation in eastern Montana – you can touch a thin line of rock, and know you are touching the most famous mass extinction event on Earth. This Cretaceous-Pa... | Renée A Duckworth | https://aeon.co//essays/catastrophe-drives-evolution-but-life-resides-in-the-pauses | |
Design and fashion | Partly of the earth, partly of our body, the shoe sits on the edge of an ontological threshold. Where can it transport us? | I am at the beach, enjoying that elemental pleasure – walking barefoot outside, when the texture of sand slipping through my toes and crunching against the tender flesh of my sole turns walking into a kind of communion or commingling with the physical world. I am reminded of the Neil Simon play Barefoot in the Park (19... | Randy Laist | https://aeon.co//essays/why-shoes-act-as-a-symbolic-foundation-for-human-identity | |
Global history | For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices | I gripped the steering wheel as the car started to slide. Slowly, slowly I manoeuvred the tyres back into the sandy tracks of what they called the road. I had set out from the tiny desert town of Cuba in northwestern New Mexico and had left the highway behind me where the sign pointed toward Chaco Canyon. The owner of ... | Camilla Townsend | https://aeon.co//essays/for-the-wanderers-who-became-the-aztecs-history-was-a-chorus-of-voices | |
Knowledge | The ignorant pundit is absolutely certain; the true expert understands their own limits and how to ask the right questions | Does imposing the death penalty lower rates of violent crime? What economic policies will lead to broad prosperity? Which medical treatments should we allow and encourage to treat novel diseases? These questions have a few things in common. They bear important consequences for us all, and so policymakers and the public... | Andrew Little & Matthew Backus | https://aeon.co//essays/real-experts-know-what-they-dont-know-and-we-should-value-it | |
Archaeology | Before death became a source of disgust and denial, Europeans cheerfully painted with – and ingested – human remains | The pharaoh was dead. Now the embalmers and the priests went to work: over the next several weeks, they prepared the body at length. They removed the internal organs, and inserted plant resins and spices into the body. The body was dried out with natron, a natural salt compound; it was washed; covered with oil and spic... | Michael Press | https://aeon.co//essays/when-we-lived-with-death-mummies-were-medicine-and-paint | |
Language and linguistics | Brain-to-brain interfaces promise to bypass language. But do we really want access to one another’s unmediated thoughts? | In a nondescript building in Seattle, a man sits strapped to a chair with his right hand resting on a touchpad. Pressed against his skull is a large magnetic coil that can induce an electrical current in the brain, a technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation. The coil is positioned in such a way that a pulse... | Mark Dingemanse | https://aeon.co//essays/why-language-remains-the-most-flexible-brain-to-brain-interface | |
Work | Being an employee is a threat to your liberty. But while firms exist, compulsory unions are a basic safeguard of freedom | For some time now, union membership has been steadily declining. In the United States, after reaching a peak in 1954 of 34.8 per cent for salaried workers (28.3 per cent for all employed workers), unionisation fell to 10.3 per cent for salaried workers in 2019 (and slightly less for all employed workers) – its lowest l... | Mark R Reiff | https://aeon.co//essays/how-compulsory-unionisation-makes-us-more-free | |
Cosmology | Our planet is a tiny porthole, looking over a cosmic sea. Can we learn what lies beyond our own horizons of perception? | Space, as they say, is big. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), Douglas Adams elaborates: ‘You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.’ It’s hard to convey in everyday terms the enormity of the cosmos when most of us have trouble even visualising the size of... | Katie Mack | https://aeon.co//essays/our-cosmic-horizon-is-both-unreachable-and-closer-than-ever | |
Cities | From Ancient Egypt’s deltas to Edinburgh’s crags and peaks, the city pushes back against the dream of human separateness | The ancient city of Alexandria lies on a narrow strip of Mediterranean coast to the west of the Nile delta. To the south is Lake Mariout, which once hemmed in the city rather closely, but has been reduced over the past century as land has been reclaimed for agriculture and for Alexandria International Airport. In 1921,... | Sam Grinsell | https://aeon.co//essays/cities-are-a-borderland-where-the-wild-and-built-worlds-meet | |
Gender and identity | The charge of ‘feminist bias’ is used to besmirch anyone who questions sexist assumptions at work in neuroscience | A few years ago, a friend heard a speaker at an academic conference make a disparaging reference to a new book that, supposedly, denied that there were any sex differences between men’s and women’s brains and behaviour. The author of the dreadful tome – ‘this woman from Melbourne’ – turned out to be me. Afterwards, my ... | Cordelia Fine | https://aeon.co//essays/trumped-up-charges-of-feminist-bias-are-bad-for-science | |
Poverty and development | Philanthropy is vital – but its mechanisms are as intricate and troubling as the baroque structures of high finance | The world’s largest charitable foundations include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the Wellcome Trust, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation. The size, global reach and impact of these foundations grows annually, with endowments of the top three assessed at well... | Katharyne Mitchell | https://aeon.co//essays/the-enterprise-of-philanthropy-does-well-out-of-doing-good | |
Language and linguistics | If language began with gestures around a campfire and secret signals on hunts, why did speech come to dominate communication? | Some say language evolved by firelight, with our ancestors sharing stories deep into the night. Others suggest it began as baby talk, or as imitations of animal calls, or as gasps of surprise. Charles Darwin proposed that language started with snippets of song; Noam Chomsky thought it was just an accident, the result o... | Kensy Cooperrider | https://aeon.co//essays/if-language-began-in-the-hands-why-did-it-ever-leave | |
Economic history | By rejecting sampling in favour of exhaustive enumeration, communist China’s dream of total information became a nightmare | Sometime in the fall of 1955, a Chinese statistical worker by the name of Feng Jixi penned what might well be the most romantic sentence ever written about statistical work. ‘Every time I complete a statistical table,’ Feng wrote: my happiness is like that of a peasant on his field catching sight of a golden ear of whe... | Arunabh Ghosh | https://aeon.co//essays/the-dream-of-total-information-became-a-nightmare-in-postwar-china | |
Work | Breaking free of the 9-to-5 was originally a feminist project. So how did it become part of oppressive 24/7 work culture? | Adrienne Boyle, one of Britain’s most important flexible-work activists of the past century, gazed out the window of her houseboat in Dublin’s historic docklands district. She had a clear view of Google’s 14-storey European headquarters. ‘There’s not much flexible working in that one! Lights on all night, 11pm Saturday... | Sarah Stoller | https://aeon.co//essays/how-did-flexible-work-turn-from-a-feminist-ideal-to-a-trap | |
Neuroscience | Neuroscience is finding what propaganda has long known: nostalgia doesn’t need real memories – an imagined past works too | He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship and saw the white promontory of the colonial district again, the motionless buzzards on the roofs, t... | Felipe De Brigard | https://aeon.co//essays/nostalgia-doesnt-need-real-memories-an-imagined-past-works-as-well | |
Illness and disease | An operation to remove a brain cyst changed Matthew’s identity. Who will he become after the next round of surgery? | 25th June 2015‘Why do different cultures respond differently to depression?’ The question is typical of Matthew. The assumption embedded in it creates rhetorical tension, pulling you on to his intellectual territory, forcing you to take a position. At the same time, it sounds like the beginning of a joke. ‘Go on,’ I sa... | Ben Platts-Mills | https://aeon.co//essays/matthew-had-a-brain-injury-who-is-he-after-brain-surgery | |
Stories and literature | In Hermann Hesse’s novels, as in his life, self-discovery walked a tightrope between deep insights and profound solipsism | In 1963, Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD, anointed a German author, Hermann Hesse, the ‘poet of the interior journey’. Hesse had died a year earlier, at the age of 85. But the novels he left behind, Leary declared in The Psychedelic Review, were a ‘priceless manual’ for navigating the acid trip. Literature is ful... | M M Owen | https://aeon.co//essays/hermann-hesse-and-the-double-edged-sword-of-dwelling-on-ones-self | |
Nations and empires | How a utopian vision of Black freedom and self-government was undone in a world still in thrall to slavery and racism | After declaring independence from France on 1 January 1804, Haiti became the first state anywhere to permanently outlaw slavery and ban imperial rule. By establishing a land of freedom in a world of slavery, Haiti’s founders – the generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henry Christophe and Alexandre Pétion – challenged the ... | Marlene L Daut | https://aeon.co//essays/the-king-of-haiti-and-the-dilemmas-of-freedom-in-a-colonised-world | |
Astronomy | Like sea monsters on premodern maps, deep-space images are science’s fanciful means to chart the edges of the known world | There it floated, a luminous orange doughnut, glowing and fuzzy-edged, against a sea of darkness (Figure 1, below). Had it arrived without headline or caption, the world’s first ever image of a black hole might not have been recognised. Relayed across global news media, in April 2019, with appropriate fanfare and expla... | Surekha Davies | https://aeon.co//essays/how-black-holes-are-like-sea-monsters-at-the-edge-of-our-vision | |
Philosophy of science | In awe we hold fast to nature’s strangeness and open up to the unknown. No wonder it’s central to the scientific imagination | When a scientific paradigm breaks down, scientists need to make a leap into the unknown. These are moments of revolution, as identified by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, when the scientists’ worldview becomes untenable and the agreed-upon and accepted truths of a particular discipline are radically called into question. Bel... | Helen De Cruz | https://aeon.co//essays/how-awe-drives-scientists-to-make-a-leap-into-the-unknown | |
Global history | European empires were addicted to opium smoking. Then their own agents launched a moral crusade to prohibit it | Consuming opium was once a tolerated vice in Southeast Asia. Nowhere was it universally accepted, but it was also not an absolute evil. Sovereigns banned opium, yet royal troops could receive supplies deemed necessary for morale. Religious authorities proscribed the drug, yet a Buddhist monk in Burma could legitimately... | Diana S Kim | https://aeon.co//essays/how-european-empires-broke-the-habit-of-opium-consumption | |
Thinkers and theories | For philosopher Henri Bergson, laughter solves a serious human conundrum: how to keep our minds and social lives elastic | In a Monty Python sketch from 1970, a cheesy game show host (John Cleese) asks an ill-tempered, racist, uncooperative old lady contestant (Terry Jones) a ludicrously challenging question. The exchange unfolds as follows: Cleese: What great opponent of Cartesian dualism resists the reduction of psychological phenomena t... | Emily Herring | https://aeon.co//essays/for-henri-bergson-laughter-is-what-keeps-us-elastic-and-free | |
Mental health | Our system for diagnosing mental disorders doesn’t work. The transdiagnostic model offers a humane, clinically sound alternative | Social anxiety disorder. Obsessive compulsive disorder. Major depressive disorder. Borderline personality disorder. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Generalised anxiety disorder. There are numerous labels that describe mental health problems. You might have experienced some of these difficulties yourself or know someone... | Melissa Black | https://aeon.co//essays/common-mental-processes-often-underlie-different-diagnoses | |
Biology | They’re not cuddly, they don’t behave at all like us – yet they are sentient. Why fish belong in the moral community | Do fish have faces? In one sense, the question is trivial. A 10-year-old would likely answer yes: after all, a fish has eyes, a mouth and what can pass as a snout. It seems to have all the essentials of a face. But there are far-reaching consequences to this answer, and it needs to be considered carefully. Whether we p... | Michael Woodruff | https://aeon.co//essays/fish-are-nothing-like-us-except-that-they-are-sentient-beings | |
The ancient world | Being good is hard. How an ancient Indian emperor, horrified by the cruelty of war, created an infrastructure of goodness | In the Khyber valley of Northern Pakistan, three large boulders sit atop a hill commanding a beautiful prospect of the city of Mansehra. A low brick wall surrounds these boulders; a simple roof, mounted on four brick pillars, protects the rock faces from wind and rain. This structure preserves for posterity the words i... | Sonam Kachru | https://aeon.co//essays/ashokas-ethical-infrastructure-is-carved-into-indias-rocks | |
Illness and disease | From the Black Death to polio, the most dangerous pathogens have moved silently, transmitted by apparently healthy people | By his own admission, Mickey Steinberg was a tough kid, often getting into scrapes. When he arrived at camp in the hills of Maryland in the summer of 1944, aged 11, he came with a broken arm in a cast and sling. His parents sent him out of the city of Augusta, Georgia, every summer, to keep him away from the yearly out... | Wendy Orent | https://aeon.co//essays/the-most-dangerous-pathogens-in-human-history-have-moved-by-stealth | |
Music | How did the city of elegant classicism give birth to an explosive modernism, threatening to destroy its very traditions? | Vienna, 1912. It is autumn, and the city’s fin-de-siècle extravagance is approaching its peak. On the stage of the city’s pre-eminent concert house, the Musikverein, the mute and melancholy clown Pierrot, the star of Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal melodrama Pierrot Lunaire, is drinking moonlight – the stuff of intoxicating... | Alexander Carpenter | https://aeon.co//essays/vienna-schoenberg-and-the-advent-of-musical-modernism | |
Pleasure and pain | Women’s pain is often medically overlooked and undertreated. But the answer is not as simple as ‘believing all women’ | Pain is your body’s alarm system. It’s a sensation designed to tell you that something’s gone wrong. But being in pain, says Colin Klein, a philosopher at the Australian National University, is a bit like having your house guarded by a hyperactive terrier. Sometimes it barks at trespassers, but other times it gets upse... | Elizabeth Barnes | https://aeon.co//essays/womens-pain-it-seems-is-hysterical-until-proven-otherwise | |
Astronomy | Dark matter is the most ubiquitous thing physicists have never found: it’s time to consider alternative explanations | In 1969, the American astronomer Vera Rubin puzzled over her observations of the sprawling Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way’s biggest neighbour. As she mapped out the rotating spiral arms of stars through spectra carefully measured at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Lowell Observatory, both in Arizona, she no... | Ramin Skibba | https://aeon.co//essays/why-its-time-to-take-alternatives-to-dark-matter-seriously | |
Thinkers and theories | Does philosophy reside in the unsayable or should it care only for precision? Carnap, Heidegger and the great divergence | On 30 March 1929, the German philosophers Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger took a stroll together around the chilly heights of Davos in Switzerland. Heidegger was 39 and ascending to the peak of his fame. Two years earlier, he’d published Being and Time, a book that tried to say something about what it means for some... | Sam Dresser | https://aeon.co//essays/heidegger-v-carnap-how-logic-took-issue-with-metaphysics | |
Human rights and justice | Putting public services in private hands is bad economics. Worse, it undermines our bonds as a political community | Barbara and Mary are happily married. Barbara wants to buy Mary a new ring for her birthday. The problem is that Barbara knows nothing about jewellery. Fortunately, their neighbour John is an expert. Barbara can ask John to select the ring, or she could invest the time and energy to learn about gemstones and alloys her... | Alon Harel | https://aeon.co//essays/privatisation-is-bad-economics-and-worse-politics | |
Education | Rousseau’s child-centred ideals are now commonplace but his truly radical vision of educational freedom still eludes us | Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile; or On Education (1762) is perhaps the most influential work on education written in the modern world. Rousseau’s advocacy of learning via direct experience and creative play inspired the Swiss educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi, the German educator Friedrich Fröbel and the kindergarte... | James Brooke-Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/its-time-we-revived-rousseaus-radical-spirit-in-schooling | |
Human evolution | Art, adornment and sophisticated hunting technologies flourished not only in prehistoric Europe but across the globe | In 1868, workmen near the hamlet of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil in southwestern France opened up a rock shelter and found animal bones, flints and, most intriguingly, human skulls. Work on the road was paused while a geologist, Louis Lartet, was called to excavate the site. What he discovered would transform our unders... | Gaia Vince | https://aeon.co//essays/the-modern-human-mind-evolved-further-and-farther-back | |
Mood and emotion | It is a guilty pleasure and undergirds nationalist bombast, yet nostalgia for the past can help propel us into the future | Somewhere in the recesses of my online presence, I keep a virtual pinboard called ‘Nostalgia’. Its images are like stills from a jaggedy film of my childhood: a Rainbow Brite doll, her yarn hair pulled into a fat ponytail. An A4 Trapper Keeper binder with an acid-trip cover. Models in moon boots marching across a magaz... | Elizabeth Svoboda | https://aeon.co//essays/nostalgia-is-the-rocket-fuel-that-powers-hope-and-change | |
Politics and government | The end of the liberal order would unleash chaos; its continuance means unconstrained economic suffering. What to do? | In the aftermath of the Second World War, the administrations of presidents Franklin D Roosevelt and then Harry S Truman in the United States led in the construction of the liberal order – a set of international institutions agreed upon by nation-states. The goal was to sustain peace and prosperity in the decades after... | Benjamin Studebaker | https://aeon.co//essays/can-the-liberal-order-be-transformed-by-global-government | |
Political philosophy | Demagogues do not rise on popular feeling alone but on the constitutional ideas of Weimar and Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt | Donald Trump’s presidency has made the dominance of strongmen elsewhere only more vivid: in Russia, Thailand, Hungary, Brazil, Nicaragua, the Philippines and many other countries. Since around 2016, the question of where the strongman phenomenon comes from has been a constant issue for political theorists. What allows ... | David Dyzenhaus | https://aeon.co//essays/carl-schmitts-legal-theory-legitimises-the-rule-of-the-strongman | |
Self-improvement | De Bono’s popular theory is textbook pseudoscience: unsound, untested and derivative of real (unacknowledged) research | At the very end of the 19th century, Hugo Münsterberg, a psychologist at Harvard University, warned the American public not to expect too much from his laboratory colleagues in the way of life lessons. The message fell on deaf ears. From lessons in personality types to new strategies for effective thinking, the promise... | Antonio Melechi | https://aeon.co//essays/lateral-thinking-is-classic-pseudoscience-derivative-and-untested | |
Physics | A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so | The French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) believed that the Universe was a piece of machinery, and that physics determines everything. Napoleon, who had read up on Laplace’s work, confronted him about the conspicuous absence of a creator in his theory. ‘I had no need of that hypothesis,’ came the reply.... | George Ellis | https://aeon.co//essays/heres-why-so-many-physicists-are-wrong-about-free-will | |
Human rights and justice | The insanity defence offends the conscience, has no basis in modern psychiatry, and penalises poor and black defendants | Since the dawn of recorded law, Western societies have recognised that some people shouldn’t be held liable for their acts because they are non compos mentis – not in their right mind. This exemption from criminal sanctions was seen as an act of mercy required by basic morality: it was immoral to exact vengeance agains... | Susan Vinocour | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-be-done-to-rehabilitate-the-insanity-defence | |
Consciousness and altered states | After years of deep therapeutic pessimism, emerging therapies offer hope for patients trapped between coma and wakefulness | The first time I saw Valerie (not her real name) she was lying on a hospital bed completely still, staring at the ceiling. She didn’t react as we entered her room. I looked at her parents standing next to her, their eyes full of hope and despair. She was so young; her life was supposed to be ahead of her, but a dramati... | Aurore Thibaut | https://aeon.co//essays/new-therapies-offer-hope-for-people-trapped-by-disorders-of-consciousness | |
The future | Superlative things were done in the past century by marshalling thousands of people in the service of a vision of the future | In 1978, the science-fiction author Michael Moorcock wrote the celebrated essay ‘Epic Pooh’ that lambasted J R R Tolkien and his ilk for constructing fantasy universes in which – whatever the ‘there and back again’ meanderings of the plot – nothing ever really changes. Moorcock felt that his own ‘new worlds’ science fi... | Martin Parker | https://aeon.co//essays/superlative-projects-are-made-possible-by-great-collective-efforts | |
Medicine | Why do so many see vaccines and other medical interventions as tools of social control rather than boons to health? | In 1793, a yellow fever epidemic hit Philadelphia, where the founding father and physician Benjamin Rush advocated aggressive bleeding – the removal of large quantities of blood from either an artery or vein, often with leeches. At the time, bloodletting was a common medical practice: it was thought to balance the body... | Bernice L Hausman | https://aeon.co//essays/what-explains-the-enduring-grip-of-medical-skepticism | |
History of ideas | What if we see the history of philosophy not as a grand system of sustained critique but as a series of brilliant fragments? | A typical university course in the history of philosophy surveys the great thinkers of Western civilisation as a stately procession from Plato to Aristotle to Descartes to Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche. These magnificent intellects offer their ideas in weighty philosophical tomes, stuffed with chiselled definitions, well-... | Andrew Hui | https://aeon.co//essays/aphorisms-tell-philosophys-history-as-fragments-not-systems | |
Archaeology | Racists use it to bolster their ethnohistorical myths, but historians and archaeologists should not abandon the term | Since September 2019, medieval scholars have heatedly debated the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’. The dispute began in relation to claims of racism and sexism within the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, which is an academic organisation dedicated to the study of the history, archaeology, literature, language, religion, so... | Howard Williams | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-should-keep-the-term-anglo-saxon-in-archaeology | |
Ethics | Are thought experiments experiments at all? Or something else? And do they help us think clearly about ethics or not? | Much recent work in analytic philosophy pins its hopes on learning from imaginary cases. Starting from seminal contributions by philosophers such as Robert Nozick and Derek Parfit, this work champions the use of thought experiments – short hypothetical scenarios designed to probe or persuade on a point of ethical princ... | James Wilson | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-the-problem-with-ethical-trolley-problems | |
Philosophy of science | Science is the one culture that all humans share. What would it mean to create a scientifically literate future together? | The Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s academy of sciences, was founded in 1660. At its earliest meetings, scientists shared travellers’ tales, peered through newly invented microscopes, and experimented with airpumps, explosions and poisons. Its earliest fellows included the polymaths Christopher Wren and Robert Hook... | Martin Rees | https://aeon.co//essays/how-can-scientists-best-address-the-problems-of-today-and-the-future | |
Cities | Sociologist Georg Simmel diagnosed the character of modern city life: finance, fashion and becoming strangers to one another | Georg Simmel was born in the heart of Berlin in 1858. That city epitomised the tensions of Germany’s special path to modernity. Rapid urbanisation and financial speculation propelled Berlin to the world stage. An avant-garde cultural elite flourished uneasily alongside central Europe’s aristocracy while a young proleta... | Daniel Lopez | https://aeon.co//essays/how-georg-simmel-diagnosed-what-makes-city-life-distinctly-modern | |
Virtues and vices | Cruelty and morality seem like polar opposites – until they join forces. Beware those who persecute in the name of principle | The corruption of the best things begets the worst.– From The Natural History of Religion (1757) by David HumeFollowing in the steps of Michel de Montaigne, the distinguished political philosopher Judith Shklar has argued that cruelty should be considered the supreme evil and that we should put it first among the vices... | Paul Russell | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-cruel-moraliser-uses-a-halo-to-disguise-his-horns | |
Language and linguistics | Babies babble, medieval rustics sing ‘trolly-lolly’, and jazz exults in bebop. What does all this wordplay mean for language? | Lexicographers are persistent creatures. Never content, they scour each newly published edition of a hitherto unprinted text for antedatings, or a sighting of a word in the wild that predates the current first citation in the dictionary. Last year, their diligence provided a new entry in the Middle English Dictionary f... | Jenni Nuttall | https://aeon.co//essays/what-the-trolly-lolly-of-gibberish-means-for-language | |
Economic history | The China tea trade was a paradox: a global, intensified industry without the usual spectacle of factories and technology | Dutch merchants were the first to import tea leaves into Europe in 1609, but by the late 1700s it was the English East India Company, backed by state monopoly, that came to dominate what became known as the ‘Canton Trade’. During its 18th-century golden age, tea symbolised Chinese civilisation’s preeminent standing in ... | Andrew Liu | https://aeon.co//essays/the-china-tea-trade-was-a-paradox-of-global-capitalism | |
Neuroscience | Can electrical impulses in the brain explain the stuff that dreams are made on? What a new consciousness-detector reveals | In 2014, a month-long bout of dizziness and vomiting brought a 24-year-old woman in China to the hospital. She was no stranger to these symptoms: she’d never been able to walk steadily and suffered from dizziness nearly her whole life. These were serious, debilitating symptoms. And yet, they might have seemed almost mi... | Joel Frohlich | https://aeon.co//essays/to-say-what-consciousness-is-science-explores-where-it-isnt | |
Family life | In most cultures, kids tag along with grownups or mooch with friends but American life is heavy with ‘kid-friendly’ artifice | At the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, kids clamber over one another in an enormous anthill maze. Carpeted, encaged in wire mesh, consisting of layers of looping and overlapping low tunnels, the Limb Bender, as it is called, spans a storey and a half, and usually contains anywhere from two to four wailing toddlers stu... | Sarah Menkedick | https://aeon.co//essays/why-are-american-kids-treated-as-a-different-species-from-adults | |
History | Historians believe that the past is irreducibly complex and the future wildly unpredictable. Scientists disagree. Who’s right? | It’s a truism that those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. But it’s much rarer to see an explanation of exactly how history might help us build a better future. This doesn’t stop historians such as Yuval Noah Harari advising world leaders at Davos, or scientists such as Jared Diamond writing bes... | Amanda Rees | https://aeon.co//essays/if-history-was-more-like-science-would-it-predict-the-future | |
Mood and emotion | To those who say anger is destructive or pointless: Not so! Getting angry spurs and sustains us to take action for justice | You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!– Gret... | Brian Wong | https://aeon.co//essays/anger-is-a-valuable-emotion-driving-private-and-public-good | |
History | Far from being a recent or 21st-century phenomenon, people have chosen, courageously, to trans gender throughout history | One summer night in 1836, police found George Wilson drunk on the street in the Lower East Side in New York City. An officer took Wilson to the station. The officer believed that Wilson was a sailor, and also suspected that Wilson might not have been a man. Wilson had been legally married to a woman for 15 years, and l... | Jen Manion | https://aeon.co//essays/may-we-all-be-so-brave-as-19th-century-female-husbands | |
Philosophy of science | For the émigré philosopher Imre Lakatos, science degenerates unless it is theoretically and experimentally progressive | If you ask a scientist a question about the philosophy of science, there’s a good chance the answer will feature just one or two philosophers. The name of the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper (1902-94) will likely arise in the context of his principle of falsifiability, the ‘demarcation criterion’ that man... | Jim Baggott | https://aeon.co//essays/imre-lakatos-and-the-philosophy-of-bad-science | |
Animals and humans | The gift of a half-wanted hive took me into the world of bees, kept and wild: a place of generosity and attentiveness | ‘When I’m manning an information stall,’ my beekeeper friend Paul told me recently, ‘there’s one question I’m always asked: “Bees are in trouble, aren’t they?” I tell them: “Honeybees in the UK, not really; honeybees in the US, yes; wild bee species globally, yes.” Then I cram in as much detail as I can about the biodi... | Helen Jukes | https://aeon.co//essays/why-keeping-bees-means-thinking-about-landscape-as-a-system | |
Psychiatry and psychotherapy | A new therapy helps survivors improve their lives by facing the psychological impoverishment that often accompanies abuse | As a psychologist in private practice during the early 1980s, I began to establish a specialty in treating survivors of longterm child abuse. One regular source of clients was an agency that helped individuals with a work history hampered by medical or psychological impairments. Some of these people were later authoris... | Steven N Gold | https://aeon.co//essays/contextual-trauma-therapy-can-limit-the-impact-of-a-toxic-childhood | |
The environment | Spinoza helps diagnose the bad ideas and sad passions that preclude us from a finer relationship with the natural world | In his book Novacene (2019), James Lovelock writes: ‘We must abandon the politically and psychologically loaded idea that the Anthropocene is a great crime against nature … The Anthropocene is a consequence of life on Earth; … an expression of nature.’ This insight resonates with the 17th-century philosophy of Baruch S... | Beth Lord | https://aeon.co//essays/even-the-anthropocene-is-nature-at-work-transforming-itself | |
Public health | A bioethicist at the heart of the Italian coronavirus crisis asks: why won’t we talk about the tradeoffs of the lockdown? | What ‘home’ means isn’t an abstract question in a pandemic. It becomes a concrete matter of where, and with whom, you wish to be confined – if you’re lucky enough to have the choice, that is. I flew from London to my hometown of Forlì in northern Italy in mid-December. I was 35 weeks pregnant at the time. Despite livin... | Silvia Camporesi | https://aeon.co//essays/a-bioethicist-on-the-hidden-costs-of-lockdown-in-italy | |
Nations and empires | One of the first mass deportations in the modern world, administered by state bureaucrats, took place on American soil | Several years ago, I inherited a cache of papers from my grandfather, Zoltán. He escaped from Sátoraljaújhely, a small town in northeastern Hungary, in December 1937. After arriving in Cleveland, Ohio, he began corresponding with his parents, sister, brother and friends who had remained behind. The letters run through ... | Claudio Saunt | https://aeon.co//essays/the-worlds-first-mass-deportation-took-place-on-american-soil | |
Oceans and water | He was a patriot and a prisoner, a delegate and a drunk; circling the globe when few Englishmen ever left their home counties | Britain’s maritime past is now most commonly recalled in images of gold-epauletted admirals and wooden ships surging the waves or locked in blazing battle. Yet maritime history is not simply Nelson and Trafalgar. Nor, to widen the compass, is it over with James Cook and the Endeavour. Naval supremacy and mapping the gl... | Stephen Taylor | https://aeon.co//essays/meet-jack-tar-the-sailor-with-a-nation-in-his-calloused-hands | |
The future | Science today stands at a crossroads: will its progress be driven by human minds or by the machines that we’ve created? | A schism is emerging in the scientific enterprise. On the one side is the human mind, the source of every story, theory and explanation that our species holds dear. On the other stand the machines, whose algorithms possess astonishing predictive power but whose inner workings remain radically opaque to human observers.... | David C Krakauer | https://aeon.co//essays/will-brains-or-algorithms-rule-the-kingdom-of-science | |
Illness and disease | Medieval mystics starved the body to feed the soul. Understanding this perfectionist mindset could help treat anorexia today | Every human being has a relationship with food, some of it positive, some of it negative, but ultimately it’s all about emotion and feeling.– From Heston Blumenthal’s foreword to Gastrophysics: The New World of Eating (2017) by Charles SpenceA few years ago, I found myself giving a lecture in the sumptuous 17th-century... | Paul Broks | https://aeon.co//essays/anorexia-nervosa-is-a-battle-site-between-body-and-soul | |
Politics and government | Fascism promised radical national renewal and supreme power to the people. Are we in danger of a fascist revival today? | Ours is the age of the rule by ‘strong men’: leaders who believe that they have been elected to deliver the will of the people. Woe betide anything that stands in the way, be it the political opposition, the courts, the media or brave individuals. While these demonised guardians of freedom are belittled, brushed aside ... | Jonathan Wolff | https://aeon.co//essays/what-1930s-political-ideologies-can-teach-us-about-the-2020s | |
Psychiatry and psychotherapy | By chance, I grew up without a father. As an adult, I chose to meet him. Through the prism of this event, life slowly made sense | I see humanity as a family that has hardly met.– From An Intimate History of Humanity (1998) by Theodore ZeldinI. Strangers No More In 1994, I went on a voyage with my son Carlo to São Paulo to meet my father for the first time. Along with my father, Giuseppe, we met his Brazilian wife, Mira, and their children and gra... | Vincenzo Di Nicola | https://aeon.co//essays/there-is-no-dark-fate-or-bright-destiny-only-things-that-happen | |
Future of technology | At the level of the tiny, biology is all about engineering. That’s why nanotechnology can rebuild medicine from within | In the mid-1980s, evidence started to emerge from labs across the world confirming that scientists were finally able to reach the nano level in experimental conditions and not just with their theories. Working at scales defined in millionths of a millimetre, Richard Smalley, Robert Curl and Harold Kroto reported the di... | Sonia Contera | https://aeon.co//essays/the-future-is-nano-and-it-will-revolutionise-medical-science | |
Education | A century ago, Weber both diagnosed the ills of the corporatised, modern university, and pointed out the path beyond it | In 1908, the first study of Germany’s ‘next generation of academics’ was published, written by the German economist Franz Eulenburg. After 200 pages of line graphs and tables, he concluded that they were neither young nor going anywhere. Although some who taught in Germany’s world-renowned universities enjoyed the free... | Chad Wellmon | https://aeon.co//essays/weber-diagnosed-the-ills-of-the-modern-university-and-prescribed-the-cure | |
Anthropology | Navigation and spatial awareness sustained humans for tens of thousands of years. Have we lost the trail in modern times? | On Dartmoor, in southwest England, search and rescue volunteers are regularly called out to look for people who have lost their way in the boundless wilderness. A significant proportion are Alzheimer’s patients who have wandered away from one of the many care homes on the fringes of the moor. The volunteers have notice... | Michael Bond | https://aeon.co//essays/why-are-we-losing-the-wayfinding-skills-of-our-ancestors | |
Race and ethnicity | For Albert Einstein, being Jewish and German were not questions of identity but rather mutable matters of identification | Germanness and Jewishness have each been impossible for centuries of European history. In a time when political legitimacy meant a nation-state, the Germans were long too big to be contained within a single one, and the Jews long too despised and dispersed to have their own. In the mid-20th century, the murderous atroc... | Michael D Gordin | https://aeon.co//essays/einstein-on-the-practical-matters-of-being-german-and-jewish | |
Love and friendship | Marriage is practised in every society yet is in steep decline globally. Is this it for longterm intimate relationships? | At 17, John Humphrey Noyes thought a lot about women. An awkward teenager with a gangly neck and slouching shoulders, he fretted over how good looks were the key to success, especially when pursuing women. And he was shy. ‘So unreasonable and excessive is my bashfulness,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘that I fully believe ... | Manvir Singh | https://aeon.co//essays/marriage-is-dead-long-live-marriage-how-will-we-couple-up |
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