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Gender and identity | Some critics say that terms such as ‘chestfeeding’ and ‘front hole’ erase cis women’s identities. Here’s why we disagree | Trans people have built a rich and nuanced language for discussing our bodies. A trans man – that is, a man who got the ‘it’s a girl’ treatment as a newborn – might, as a new father, find that he prefers to say he is ‘chestfeeding’ rather than ‘breastfeeding’ his baby. A recent safer sex guide for trans people adopts ‘... | Ray Briggs & B R George | https://aeon.co//essays/why-trans-inclusive-language-is-no-threat-to-cis-women | |
Economics | Market systems have made better use of more information than economic planners. What if AI and machine learning changed that? | Machine learning – a kind of sub-field of artificial intelligence (AI) – is a means of training algorithms to discern empirical relationships within immense reams of data. Run a purpose-built algorithm by a pile of images of moles that might or might not be cancerous. Then show it images of diagnosed melanoma. Using an... | Tim Rogan | https://aeon.co//essays/big-data-ai-and-the-peculiar-dignity-of-tacit-knowledge | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | Self-driving cars don’t drink and medical AIs are never overtired. Given our obvious flaws, what can humans still do best? | A five-year-old boy is helping his grandmother cook by cutting out biscuits from the dough she’s made, and he’s doing it rather badly. He instructs the family robot to take over and, even though the robot’s never done this before, it quickly learns what to do, and cuts out the biscuits perfectly. The grandmother is rat... | Paula Boddington | https://aeon.co//essays/what-are-the-values-that-drive-decision-making-by-ai | |
Stories and literature | When Walter Benjamin fled France in 1940, he took a heavy black suitcase. Did it contain a typescript? Where is it now? | The life of Walter Benjamin came to an end in late September 1940 in a small town called Portbou on the border between France and Spain. And it was Benjamin who decided to end it. It is surely strange to think that one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, and a man associated with two of the major capital... | Giorgio van Straten | https://aeon.co//essays/what-happened-to-walter-benjamins-precious-black-suitcase | |
Thinkers and theories | Despite its reputation as remote and anti-intellectual, Australia has exercised a surprisingly deep influence on philosophy | In 1988 I travelled from Sydney to San Diego, California, to start a PhD in philosophy. That trip looks like a short hop now, but back then it seemed a long way. I had just finished an undergraduate philosophy degree at the University of Sydney. After I arrived, part of my training for the PhD was to work as a teaching... | Peter Godfrey-Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/why-does-australia-have-an-outsized-influence-on-philosophy | |
Stories and literature | So many arguments are given against Shakespeare being gay – yet his sonnets contain their own message, that love is love | William Shakespeare’s sonnets are among the most disputed works in literary history. Like most sonnet cycles of the time, they follow a loose but discernible narrative about ideal love but, unlike any other known sonnet cycle, the lover and his beloved are both men. The first 126 sonnets (out of 154) are addressed to a... | Sandra Newman | https://aeon.co//essays/shakespeares-sexuality-in-question-who-was-the-fair-youth | |
History | Greco-Roman gods had no interest in the poor nor was organised charity a religious duty. How was Christianity different? | In Greco-Roman culture, the well-to-do weren’t expected to support and help the poor. The Greek and Latin verbs for ‘doing good, being beneficent’ never have ‘the poor’ as their object, nor do they mean ‘almsgiving’. The Greek word philanthrôpia doesn’t have the sense of our modern philanthropy. One is philanthrôpos to... | Pieter van der Horst | https://aeon.co//essays/the-poor-might-have-always-been-with-us-but-charity-has-not | |
Human evolution | Handprints on a cave wall, crumbs from a meal: the new science of Neanderthals radically recasts the meaning of humanity | Who were the Neanderthals? Even for archaeologists working at the trowel’s edge of contemporary science, it can be hard to see Neanderthals as anything more than intriguing abstractions, mixed up with the likes of mammoths, woolly rhinos and sabre-toothed cats. But they were certainly here: squinting against sunrises, ... | Rebecca Wragg Sykes | https://aeon.co//essays/to-know-ourselves-we-must-first-know-the-neanderthals | |
Sleep and dreams | American work culture, seeping around the globe, threatens to ruin the pleasures and benefits of public, communal sleep | A few months ago, two Americans arrived for a meeting at a sprawling, corporate campus in Sichuan Province in China. (They asked not to be named because their work is confidential.) To get to the conference room, they crossed a vast span of cubicles where hundreds of young engineers were busy at their desks, a scene re... | Todd Pitock | https://aeon.co//essays/its-time-to-celebrate-the-humanity-of-the-communal-snooze | |
Teaching and learning | A generation of schoolchildren is being exhorted to believe in their brain’s elasticity. Does it really help them learn? | Over the past century, a powerful idea has taken root in the educational landscape. The notion of intelligence as something innate and fixed has been supplanted by the idea that intelligence is instead something malleable; that we are not prisoners of immutable characteristics and that, with the right training, we can ... | Carl Hendrick | https://aeon.co//essays/schools-love-the-idea-of-a-growth-mindset-but-does-it-work | |
Human rights and justice | Victims of sexual assault are commonly judged by the consistency of their story. But consistency is not a high road to truth | When I was nine years old, on a sunny summer afternoon, I was kidnapped and sexually assaulted. I didn’t have words to describe what happened; I was too young to know the vocabulary of sex. I lacked an understanding of the event: how to name it, what its effects were likely to be. In the raw, I knew what had happened, ... | Linda Martín Alcoff | https://aeon.co//essays/consistency-shouldnt-be-the-test-of-truth-in-sexual-assault-cases | |
Political philosophy | When he shifted his attention from philosophy to politics, Richard Rorty revived liberalism’s potential for social reform | The American Pragmatist Richard Rorty (1931-2007) advocated a therapeutic approach to philosophy throughout his career. He leaned quietly towards such an approach even in the early days, when his writings blended unobtrusively with a self-confident analytic tradition that certainly did not see any need for therapy. But... | Alan Malachowski | https://aeon.co//essays/richard-rortys-hopes-for-liberalism-and-solidarity | |
Mental health | Depression is a very complex disorder and we simply have no good evidence that antidepressants help sufferers to improve | Your grief and guilt overwhelm you. You are so tired you cannot think straight. Your simple joys are lost in an invisible agony. You have pain in your head and back and stomach, real pain. The swamp of your soul suffocates you with despair. All this is your fault, you are worthless, and you might as well die. This is h... | Jacob Stegenga | https://aeon.co//essays/the-evidence-in-favour-of-antidepressants-is-terribly-flawed | |
The environment | The imperious monsoon rains have ruled India for centuries. Already unstable, what happens if they shift fundamentally? | These fat konrai [cassia] treesare gullible:the season of rainsthat he spoke ofwhen he went through the stonesof the desertis not yet herethough these treesmistaking the untimely rainshave put outtheir long arrangements of flowerson the twigsas if for a proper monsoon.The long wait for the rains suffuses many works of ... | Sunil Amrith | https://aeon.co//essays/the-life-and-possible-death-of-the-great-asian-monsoon | |
Thinkers and theories | How Friedrich Nietzsche used ideas from the Ancient Cynics to explore the death of God and the nature of morality | Ancient Cynicism was an eccentric model for practising a philosophical life. Diogenes of Sinope (c404-323 BCE) and his followers claimed independence from conventional material desires and the normal turmoil of emotional life. They were notoriously without shame – pissing and satisfying their sexual needs in public, li... | Helen Small | https://aeon.co//essays/what-nietzsche-learnt-from-diogenes-the-cynic | |
Ethics | Why we should understand jealousy as nothing more than a vice that ought to be replaced by the new virtue of compersion | Who hasn’t been jealous at some point? On the standard view, jealousy is the emotion of being pained by a perceived threat from a third party to the attention of someone we care about and to which we feel entitled. The involvement of a rival distinguishes jealousy from mere fear of loss; the sense of entitlement over t... | Luke Brunning | https://aeon.co//essays/love-without-jealousy-consider-the-benefits-of-compersion | |
Politics and government | Individualism is not a sufficient foundation for social life: the image of the body politic reminds us that we are all one | After escaping an assassination attempt earlier that morning, Cicero entered the senate under armed guard. It was 7 November 63 BCE, and the Roman Republic hovered on the brink of revolution. Catiline, the aristocrat behind the assassination plot, stood opposite. Faced with the man who had tried to kill him, Cicero gav... | Nick Romeo & Ian Tewksbury | https://aeon.co//essays/individualism-is-not-a-sufficient-foundation-for-social-life | |
Wellbeing | From first cry to last sigh, we do it without a thought. Yet the benefits of conscious breathing are truly remarkable | In my 20s, like many others who find that their mind is poisoning their life, I discovered meditation. Though for a long time I found it impossible, I liked all the encouragements to stop paying attention to my thoughts, because I feared and loathed many of my thoughts. I was less impressed by the suggestion that – to ... | M M Owen | https://aeon.co//essays/do-hold-your-breath-on-the-benefits-of-conscious-breathing | |
Stories and literature | The Satanic Verses would not be written or published today. What’s changed since Salman Rushdie’s notorious novel? | ‘Nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses, let alone publish it,’ the writer Hanif Kureishi told a journalist in 2009. Salman Rushdie’s notorious novel, like Kureishi’s figure of speech, is indeed looking like a relic of a bygone time. When it was published 31 years ago, the global furore was unpre... | Bruce Fudge | https://aeon.co//essays/can-there-ever-be-another-novel-like-the-satanic-verses | |
History of ideas | Philosophy need not be arcane, argued Aristotle, as he led by example, writing treatises for peers and public alike | In a democratic society, where, in theory, every citizen contributes to the process of deliberation – or at least to the choice of representatives who will deliberate on her behalf – it is hard to argue against improving the public understanding of philosophy. That is why Aristotle, the philosopher who in the 4th centu... | Edith Hall | https://aeon.co//essays/how-aristotles-example-can-help-public-philosophy-today | |
Genetics | The hormone system works like a democracy: every tissue in the body is an endocrine organ asserting its needs and demands | A little over 20 years ago, the physician and geneticist Gerard Karsenty thought that he knew the secret of bone mineralisation, the vital process by which calcium, phosphate and other minerals are bound to a matrix of proteins to make bone hard. There was a small protein, called osteocalcin, which bone cells made and ... | Liam Drew | https://aeon.co//essays/the-revolutionary-idea-revealing-the-bodys-hormonal-democracy | |
History of science | In living memory, geologists believed that the Earth was slowly shrivelling, little guessing how vibrantly alive it truly is | When a New York Times reporter asked George Mallory in 1923 why he’d want to scale Mount Everest, the British mountaineer is said to have replied: ‘Because it is there.’ A year later, Mallory perished in a fall within sight of Everest’s summit, but his quip lives on as the hackneyed rationale for mountain-climbing. The... | Marcia Bjornerud | https://aeon.co//essays/when-geology-left-solid-ground-how-mountains-came-to-be | |
Childhood and adolescence | When a parent dies by suicide, how the children are told casts a permanent shadow on their understanding of life and loss | A frayed leather wallet. A broken watch. Some coins. A ballpoint pen missing a screw. For 11-year-old Maddy Reid, this was all that remained of her soft-spoken accountant father … an assortment of 59-year-old George Reid’s meagre belongings emptied onto the kitchen table. ‘It’s gruesome, I know, but I think they still ... | Jesse Bering | https://aeon.co//essays/when-a-parent-dies-by-suicide-how-are-the-children-told | |
Education | Society will be much improved by loosening the stranglehold of top universities on the education of elites. But how? | Education is crucial to a democratic society because it is how we ensure that future citizens will have the knowledge and skills our societies need. In countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and France, some educational institutions play a further role – they educate the elite. All of the current Supre... | Jennifer M Morton | https://aeon.co//essays/how-elite-education-promotes-diversity-without-difference | |
Religion | Out of the many gods of ancient Egypt an inspired Pharaoh created a monotheistic faith. What was Atenism and why did it fail? | More than 3,000 years ago, ancient Egypt, with its myriad gods and goddesses, saw the founding of two monotheistic religions within a century of each other. One is associated with Moses, the Bible and ancient Israel’s faith, which is the foundation of Judaism and Christianity. The other burst on to the scene around 135... | James K Hoffmeier | https://aeon.co//essays/why-did-an-ancient-egyptian-king-erase-all-gods-but-aten | |
Anthropology | A psychological relief valve and a guard against despotism, laughter is a uniquely human – and collective – activity | ‘All the acts of the drama of world history were performed before a chorus of the laughing people.’ From Rabelais and his World (1965) by Mikhail BakhtinThe central question that anthropologists ask can be stated simply: ‘What does it mean to be human?’ In search of answers, we learn from people around the world – from... | Chris Knight | https://aeon.co//essays/does-laughter-hold-the-key-to-human-consciousness | |
Knowledge | What makes a dinosaur real, but a unicorn unreal? Does philosophy even pretend to know how to answer a child’s questions? | The easy question came first, a few months after my son turned four: ‘Are we real?’ It was abrupt, but not quite out of nowhere, and I was able to answer quickly. Yes, we’re real – but Elsa and Anna, two characters from Frozen, are not. Done. Then there was a follow-up a few weeks later that came just as abruptly, whil... | Nathanael Stein | https://aeon.co//essays/can-a-philosopher-explain-reality-and-make-believe-to-a-child | |
Language and linguistics | A special class of vivid, textural words defies linguistic theory: could ‘ideophones’ unlock the secrets of humans’ first utterances? | If you don’t speak Japanese but would like, momentarily, to feel like a linguistic genius, take a look at the following words. Try to guess their meaning from the two available options: 1. nurunuru (a) dry or (b) slimy?2. pikapika (a) bright or (b) dark?3. wakuwaku (a) excited or (b) bored?4. iraira (a) happy or (b) an... | David Robson | https://aeon.co//essays/in-the-beginning-was-the-word-and-the-word-was-embodied | |
Poverty and development | Few things tell us more about the nature of state sovereignty, and the threats to it, than the politics of disaster relief | ‘Once-in-a-century’ storms, tsunamis and earthquakes now threaten life and resources around the world on a regular basis. Disasters upend civic life and threaten the public order, but disaster-relief operations often double as contests over the authority of the state to govern. Recent histories of disaster relief in de... | Saptarishi Bandopadhyay | https://aeon.co//essays/disaster-relief-as-a-threat-to-state-sovereignty | |
Philosophy of language | The language of sexual negotiation must go far beyond ‘consent’ and ‘refusal’ if we are to foster ethical, autonomous sex | Communication is essential to ethical sex. Typically, our public discussions focus on only one narrow kind of communication: requests for sex followed by consent or refusal. But notice that we use language and communication in a wide variety of ways in negotiating sex. We flirt and rebuff, express curiosity and repulsi... | Rebecca Kukla | https://aeon.co//essays/consent-and-refusal-are-not-the-only-talking-points-in-sex | |
Rituals and celebrations | Everyday rituals are ephemeral prayers, a hint to the gods for protection, encircling life like a fragrant garland | Any tiddly doorway might have an offering; a one-pump petrol station, a shrine. At a waterfall, the spray is incense-scented, and a banyan tree is garlanded with flowers. The Balinese year is drunk with feast-days (more than 60 in a year), yet every morning women also make up to 50 small offerings. Each is made of a ba... | Jay Griffiths | https://aeon.co//essays/how-rituals-can-protect-life-with-a-petal-and-a-prayer | |
Human rights and justice | It is difficult to catch and straightforward to treat. So why does society still shame and punish people infected with HIV? | You know what an HIV criminal looks like. It is Zdeněk Pfeifer, the Czech ‘HIV spreader’ who infected his homosexual partners apparently deliberately. It is Daryll Rowe, the British hairdresser who said he was ‘riddled’ with HIV and infected five men. Rowe also sabotaged condoms during sex with five others, and told on... | Rose George | https://aeon.co//essays/why-is-there-still-stigma-attached-to-a-virus-we-can-control | |
History of ideas | The existentialist philosophies of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon offer important insights into the nature of prejudice | Boarding a train in France a few years after the Second World War, a medical student specialising in psychiatry at a prestigious university, a man who had previously volunteered and fought for the Free French forces against the Nazis, found himself being pointed out by a small child: ‘Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!’ Fo... | Jonathan Webber | https://aeon.co//essays/what-existentialist-philosophy-reveals-about-prejudices | |
Philosophy of science | Truth is neither absolute nor timeless. But the pursuit of truth remains at the heart of the scientific endeavour | Think of the number of scenarios in which truth matters in science. We care to know whether increased CO2 emission levels cause climate change, and how fast. We care to know whether smoking tobacco increases the risk of lung cancer. We care to know whether poor diet exposes children to the risk of developing obesity, o... | Michela Massimi | https://aeon.co//essays/its-time-for-a-robust-philosophical-defence-of-truth-in-science | |
Philosophy of mind | How can I logically manage to deceive myself? Buddhist thought offers a way out of the philosophical paradox | Self-deception seems inescapably paradoxical. For the self to be both the subject and the object of deceit, one and the same individual must devise the deceptive strategy by which they are hoodwinked. This seems impossible. For a trick to work effectively as a trick, one cannot know how it works. Equally, it is hard to... | Katie Javanaud | https://aeon.co//essays/how-buddhism-resolves-the-paradox-of-self-deception | |
Thinkers and theories | For Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, much of philosophy was mere nonsense. Then came Frank Ramsey’s pragmatic alternative | Vienna in the 1920s was an exciting place. Politically, it was the time of Red Vienna, when the municipal government experimented with radical democratic reforms in housing, healthcare, education and worker’s rights. There was optimism in the air, despite postwar hyperinflation and rising conservatism. It was also an e... | Cheryl Misak | https://aeon.co//essays/what-is-truth-on-ramsey-wittgenstein-and-the-vienna-circle | |
Self-improvement | Don’t throw in the day job to follow your dream. Join the bifurcators who juggle work-for-pay and their work-for-love | I’m not doing a very good job of following my dreams. When I was 16, I wanted to be a writer. I really, really wanted it. It felt tantalisingly, exhilaratingly possible that I might just connect the means – for me, the English language – to some ultimate end: the urgent, as-yet-inarticulate truths I heard whispering to... | Thomas Maloney | https://aeon.co//essays/dont-quit-your-day-job-the-benefits-of-being-a-bifurcator | |
Consciousness and altered states | The writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton embodied a paradox, chasing both the purity of silence and the need to break it | The 20th-century Trappist monk and poet Thomas Merton, upon witnessing one of his first services at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, which would later become his home, wrote: ‘The silence with people moving in it was 10 times more gripping than it had been in my own empty room.’ The silence and solemnity of the mas... | Jane Brox | https://aeon.co//essays/can-a-vow-of-silence-last-forever-the-paradox-of-thomas-merton | |
Family life | Among our close animal relatives, only humans have involved and empathic fathers. Why did evolution favour the devoted dad? | What separates us from our fellow apes is a question that, rightly or wrongly, distracts anthropologists periodically. Their discussions generally focus on language, tool use, creativity or our remarkable abilities to innovate, and it is certainly the case that two decades ago these answers would have been top of the ‘... | Anna Machin | https://aeon.co//essays/the-devotion-of-the-human-dad-separates-us-from-other-apes | |
Technology and the self | From elevators to iPhones, the rise of pushbuttons has provoked a century of worries about losing the human touch | The act of pushing a button is central to how we work, play and communicate, but opposition to buttons and what they represent has a long history. In 1903, a French nobleman, the Marquis de Castellane, lamented in a newspaper editorial: It is no longer necessary to speak to be served. You step into a hotel, press the b... | Rachel Plotnick | https://aeon.co//essays/what-would-a-world-without-pushbuttons-look-like | |
Beauty and aesthetics | Experimental psychology is providing concrete answers to some of the great philosophical debates about art and its meaning | Many philosophical questions about the arts would benefit from some serious empirical research. One thinker who welcomed empirical findings was the art historian E H Gombrich (1909-2001), who was influenced by findings in experimental psychology showing that perception is a matter of inference rather than direct seeing... | Ellen Winner | https://aeon.co//essays/how-experimental-psychology-can-help-us-understand-art | |
Work | Far from making them obsolete, the flatter business organisations of today need managers more than ever but in new ways | Management thinking is notoriously faddish. One week, the gurus, star CEOs, pundits and professors are talking about downsizing as the solution to corporate bureaucracy and inefficiency. The next week, the bandwagon has moved on to knowledge-management. Then to empowerment. And so on – sometimes in cycles, such that ol... | Nicolai Foss & Peter Klein | https://aeon.co//essays/no-boss-no-thanks-why-managers-are-more-important-than-ever | |
Stories and literature | Brilliant leader, kind horseman and friend of Socrates: Xenophon’s writings inspire a humane, practical approach to life | The band of mercenary soldiers had been on the move through hostile territory for several months when they were told they had enlisted under a lie. They weren’t marching to put down a rebellion; they were instead marching in rebellion. Offers of special duty pay from their leader, Cyrus the Younger, however, calmed the... | Eve Browning | https://aeon.co//essays/the-ancient-greek-rebel-leader-who-saw-socrates-solo-dancing | |
Economic history | The development sector set out to summon the magic of capitalism from the ashes of communism. How is it going? | Think of human development as a long journey. At the beginning, we live at the mercy of nature. Dependent on its bounty, we pray for rains and freedom from natural disasters and plagues. At the end of the journey, nature lives at our mercy. We use science and technology to release new wealth and remake the planet. Toda... | John Rapley | https://aeon.co//essays/development-as-a-chapter-in-the-moral-tale-of-economics | |
Philosophy of science | It’s tempting to think science gives a God’s-eye view of reality. But we forget the place of human experience at our peril | The problem of time is one of the greatest puzzles of modern physics. The first bit of the conundrum is cosmological. To understand time, scientists talk about finding a ‘First Cause’ or ‘initial condition’ – a description of the Universe at the very beginning (or at ‘time equals zero’). But to determine a system’s ini... | Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser & Evan Thompson | https://aeon.co//essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience | |
Biography and memoir | The adults who joined Bhagwan’s ashram sought freedom, love and light. Many of their children found darkness instead | We had no idea when our father was coming home, and so my brother and I told ourselves that Dad was dead. He hadn’t left kindly, with hushed words and reassurances, a slow progression from bedroom to spare room. He’d got up one morning, packed his bags and disappeared. Bought a single ticket to India with his new, Ital... | Lily Dunn | https://aeon.co//essays/lost-innocence-the-children-whose-parents-joined-an-ashram | |
Gender and identity | The pickup industry mates market logic with the arts of seduction – turning human intimacy into hard labour | Striding from the back of the conference room, the trainer calls for our attention. He asks everyone to explain why they’re here. The first student stands up: ‘I’ve come to get hands-on experience.’ After a pause, he adds: ‘Obviously, if I get laid that’s a big bonus.’ Another says he has no problem meeting women, but ... | Rachel O’Neill | https://aeon.co//essays/pickuptm-turns-romance-into-a-commodity-for-male-consumption | |
History of ideas | In the case atheists vs religious belief, Ludwig Wittgenstein is called to the stand. Whose side does his testimony serve? | When contemporary atheists criticise religious beliefs, they usually criticise beliefs that only crude religious thinkers embrace. Or so some people claim. The beliefs of the sophisticated religious believer, it’s suggested, are immune to such assaults. Those making this kind of response often appeal to the later work ... | Stephen Law | https://aeon.co//essays/atheists-vs-religious-belief-with-wittgenstein-on-the-stand | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | Synthetics created in the 20th century have become an evolutionary force, altering human biology and the web of life | In September 1938, the fall before the New York World’s Fair opened, a 5,000-year time capsule was planted 50 feet beneath the Flushing Meadows fairgrounds. The capsule was 7.5 feet long, made of Pyrex glass and alloyed copper (called Cupaloy), and shaped like a torpedo – a long, thin metal shaft with a cone-shaped nos... | Rebecca Altman | https://aeon.co//essays/how-20th-century-synthetics-altered-the-very-fabric-of-us-all | |
Rituals and celebrations | Frankincense and myrrh have long links to the sacred. Why has Christianity viewed them with both fascination and suspicion? | In the traditional Christmas narrative, wise men from the East brought gifts of frankincense, myrrh and gold for the infant Christ. Many explanations exist for the choice of these three items. Most centre on the idea that frankincense was for the birth of a divinity, myrrh was for his embalmment after death, and gold w... | Timothy Carroll | https://aeon.co//essays/frankincense-and-myrrh-were-not-only-holy-but-heretical-too | |
Religion | Shinto is uniquely Japanese, yet embodies a once-universal animistic religion of wind and fire, gods and animal spirits | To connect Shinto to any form of ‘universal religion’ would appear to be a fool’s errand. After all, as any guidebook to Japan will tell you, Shinto is the traditional religion of Japan and only Japan, apart from a scattering of Shinto shrines in countries with large Japanese immigrant or expatriate populations. At the... | Brian Victoria | https://aeon.co//essays/shinto-shows-the-debt-to-animism-of-organised-religions-today | |
Film and visual culture | Space exploration in film is overwhelmingly male, metallic and hard-edged. Could we get further with more women on board? | This year marks the 50th anniversary of two legendary space epics, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barbarella. Both hit cinema screens in 1968, with Stanley Kubrick’s vision of the cosmic-industrial sublime in April and Roger Vadim’s psychedelic sex-fuelled dreamscape in October. 2001 is often hailed as one of the greatest f... | Margaret Wertheim | https://aeon.co//essays/what-would-space-exploration-look-like-if-it-starred-more-women | |
Education | Academic research in the US is unplanned, exploitative and driven by a lust for glory. The result is the envy of the world | The higher education system is a unique type of organisation with its own way of motivating productivity in its scholarly workforce. It doesn’t need to compel professors to produce scholarship because they choose to do it on their own. This is in contrast to the standard structure for motivating employees in bureaucrat... | David Labaree | https://aeon.co//essays/higher-education-in-the-us-is-driven-by-a-lust-for-glory | |
History | Chinese psychiatry remains committed to the political ideal of mental hygiene, long after its discrediting in the West | In English, the term ‘mental hygiene’ likely sounds a bit stale. Having gained a brief but widespread ascendancy in the first half of the 20th century, the phrase gradually faded from popular memory and was replaced by the expression ‘mental health’ in the 1950s. In Chinese, however, mental hygiene is still alive and w... | Emily Baum | https://aeon.co//essays/why-china-held-on-to-the-political-ideal-of-mental-hygiene | |
History | The casualties of the First World War brought a new understanding of human fragility and wholeness | Centenary celebrations remind us that the First World War, the War to End All Wars, ended 100 years ago. But it did not. It staggered on in much of Europe, it lingered in the broken psyches of soldiers returning home. For some historians, the Great War and the Second World War together form an ‘age of catastrophe’ or e... | Stefanos Geroulanos & Todd Meyers | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-first-world-war-gave-medicine-a-new-body-of-evidence | |
Virtues and vices | As philosopher Susan Wolf argues, life is far more meaningful and rich if we do not aim at being morally perfect | ‘I am glad,’ wrote the acclaimed American philosopher Susan Wolf, ‘that neither I nor those about whom I care most’ are ‘moral saints’. This declaration is one of the opening remarks of a landmark essay in which Wolf imagines what it would be like to be morally perfect. If you engage with Wolf’s thought experiment, and... | Daniel Callcut | https://aeon.co//essays/why-it-is-better-not-to-aim-at-being-morally-perfect | |
War and peace | Partition in Iraq rests on Orientalist ideas – and overlooks what many Iraqis, minorities included, say they want | The reporting for this project was supported by the Pulitzer Center.The entrance to Karemlash, a small village in northern Iraq, is marked by a sign featuring Jesus Christ, hands beckoning, next to the words ‘Wellcome Back’ [sic]. His beaming smile has taken on an ironic cast for the residents of this minority enclave.... | Alice Su | https://aeon.co//essays/why-ethnic-separatism-doesnt-work-as-a-solution-to-civil-war | |
Home | A household is a miniature ecosystem with inputs, outputs and flows: thinking like this can make life a whole lot better | Early in our relationship 17 years ago, we began talking about getting a dog. ‘It would be great to have a dog around,’ the discussion often went, ‘but we don’t have time to take care of a dog.’ Let’s try it anyway, we thought. When we added that dog, it turned out there was considerable slack – in terms of time, money... | Misty McLaughlin & Michael Erard | https://aeon.co//essays/households-are-mini-economies-that-need-slack-to-be-productive | |
Language and linguistics | Bound by rules, yet constantly changing, language might be the ultimate self-regulating system, with nobody in charge | Decades before the rise of social media, polarisation plagued discussions about language. By and large, it still does. Everyone who cares about the topic is officially required to take one of two stances. Either you smugly preen about the mistakes you find abhorrent – this makes you a so-called prescriptivist – or you ... | Lane Greene | https://aeon.co//essays/why-language-might-be-the-optimal-self-regulating-system | |
Gender | The women’s suffrage movement was saturated with metaphors of ‘shackles’, ‘bonds’ and ‘slavery’. Was it justifiable? | We are in the midst of a global commemorative epoch. The Great War ended a century ago, an anniversary that has been widely celebrated. The centenaries of the Easter Rising and the Russian Revolution were observed in 2016 and 2017 respectively, while 2018 saw South Africa hail the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s ... | Ana Stevenson | https://aeon.co//essays/was-the-suffragettes-description-of-women-as-slaves-justifiable | |
Space exploration | If we don’t invent a legal framework for space colonisation the consequences could be catastrophic: the time to act is now | The year is 2087. Thanks to a series of serendipitous technological breakthroughs a few decades earlier, the creation of large-scale, self-sustainable human habitats beyond Earth has become feasible. There are already close to half a million people living on Mars, many of them native Martians. The Mars colony consists ... | Marko Kovic | https://aeon.co//essays/we-urgently-need-a-legal-framework-for-space-colonisation | |
Cognition and intelligence | Aptitude and IQ tests are used to distinguish those young people who deserve a chance from those who do not. Do they work? | For the American psychologist Lewis Terman, who devised the Stanford-Binet IQ test, the birth of a gifted child was like the birth of a star. In the name of illuminating what he saw as a void, Terman sought out the stars that burned brightest. ‘The school has no more important task than to foster the development of the... | Elizabeth Svoboda | https://aeon.co//essays/are-aptitude-tests-an-accurate-measure-of-human-potential | |
Anthropology | Is a home made of bricks and mortar or hopes and dreams? Dispatches from among the rough sleepers on the streets of Paris | The park wardens woke up François almost every morning. They found him sleeping under the roof of the little shed in the playground, below the Church Saint-Vincent-de-Paul and about five minutes’ walk from the Gare du Nord railway station in Paris. ‘They leave me alone but I have to get up,’ he told me. I met François ... | Johannes Lenhard | https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-home-mean-if-your-bed-is-on-the-pavements-of-paris | |
Making | The chasm between producers and consumers leaves many of us estranged from beauty and a vital part of an ethical life | Are you sitting comfortably? If so, how much do you know about the chair that’s holding you off the ground – what it’s made from, and what its production process looked like? Where it was made, and by whom? Or go deeper: how were the materials used to make the chair extracted from the planet? Most people will find it d... | Glenn Adamson | https://aeon.co//essays/do-you-know-your-stuff-the-ethics-of-the-material-world | |
Biology | Are insects ‘philosophical zombies’ with no inner life? Close attention to their behaviours and moods suggests otherwise | René Descartes’s dog, Monsieur Grat (‘Mister Scratch’), used to accompany the 17th-century French philosopher on his ruminative walks, and was the object of his fond attention. Yet, for the most part, Descartes did not think very highly of the inner life of nonhuman animals. ‘[T]he reason why animals do not speak as we... | Lars Chittka & Catherine Wilson | https://aeon.co//essays/inside-the-mind-of-a-bee-is-a-hive-of-sensory-activity | |
Stories and literature | The uncanny realism of Orson Welles’s radio play crystallised a fear of communication technology that haunts us today | Just past 8pm on 30 October 1938, a 20-year-old college student named Robbins turned on his car radio. He was driving a friend towards their campus in New Jersey after a visit to a women’s college. Ramón Raquello and his Orchestra were beaming in from the Meridian Room in New York via CBS. Suddenly, the music broke off... | Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey | https://aeon.co//essays/a-radio-play-about-radio-that-became-the-first-fake-news-story | |
Comparative philosophy | Philosophy was once a woman’s world, ranging across Asia, Africa and Latin America. It’s time to reclaim that lost realm | ‘I rise to challenge you, Yajnavalkya, with two questions, much as a fierce warrior … stringing his unstrung bow and taking two deadly arrows in his hand, would rise to challenge an enemy. Give me answers to them!’ With these daring words, Gargi Vachaknavi, a Vedic female sage, launched into philosophical debate with Y... | Dag Herbjørnsrud | https://aeon.co//essays/before-the-canon-the-non-european-women-who-founded-philosophy | |
Social psychology | A pair of cognitive scientists, married for half a century, explain why two argumentative heads can be better than one | Our neighbours recently celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary. Sixty years of marriage – how do you manage that? Albert and Lillian claim to have the perfect recipe. In his after-dinner speech, Albert explained: ‘When we got married, we agreed that minor, everyday decisions would be taken by Lillian, while major... | Uta Frith & Chris Frith | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-make-better-decisions-together-than-we-do-on-our-own | |
Childhood and adolescence | Once parents felt children needed a little fear to grow up well. Today they are desperately protective. What went wrong? | How much fear, anxiety and risk can children handle? Until the late 19th century, most people thought that the answer was quite a lot. Aristotle himself said that education might be defined as teaching us to fear aright. It was widely believed that a sense of fear made a positive contribution to the formation of a chil... | Frank Furedi | https://aeon.co//essays/from-spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child-to-helicopter-parenting | |
History | His name has become synonymous with egotistic political scheming, yet Machiavelli’s work is effectively democratic at heart | Niccolò Machiavelli has a bad reputation. Ever since the 16th century, when manuscript copies of his great work The Prince began to circulate in Europe, his family name has been used to describe a particularly nasty form of politics: calculating, cutthroat and self-interested. There are, to be sure, reasons for this. M... | Catherine Zuckert | https://aeon.co//essays/the-prince-of-the-people-machiavelli-was-no-machiavellian | |
Gender and identity | The conversation about trans identities has been riven by bitter divisions. Two philosophers offer radically different perspectives | Sophie-Grace Chappell Twenty-five years ago, the very term ‘trans woman’ was unknown to most people. Me included, and I am one. Then the internet was born, and suddenly everyone and their pet stick-insect had an authoritative view about trans women. Usually a negative view. From what you hear, trans women are ... | Sophie-Grace Chappell & Holly Lawford-Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/transgender-identities-a-conversation-between-two-philosophers | |
Future of technology | When we pit ourselves against machines, the game can only end in tears. It is in our gift to imagine another way | The game of Go, which has a 3,000-year history in China, is played by two people on a board with counters, or stones, in black and white. The aim is to defeat one’s opponent by surrounding his territory. Metaphorically, the loser is choked into submission by the winner. At a match held in Seoul in South Korea, on 12 Ma... | John Cornwell | https://aeon.co//essays/imagine-if-we-didnt-fear-the-machines-of-our-own-making | |
Thinkers and theories | In an age when so many people are at a loss to give life meaning and direction, Giacomo Leopardi is essential reading | Imagine you spend your childhood almost entirely in a library, your father’s library. There are thousands upon thousands of volumes, most of them old, many in foreign languages. Your native language is Italian, but by age 10 you are reading in Latin, Greek, German and French. English and Hebrew are next on the list. Wh... | Tim Parks | https://aeon.co//essays/why-read-the-nihilistic-work-of-giacomo-leopardi-today | |
Human rights and justice | Copyrights, patents and trademarks are all important, but the term ‘intellectual property’ is nonsensical and pernicious | The grand term ‘intellectual property’ covers a lot of ground: the software that runs our lives, the movies we watch, the songs we listen to. But also the credit-scoring algorithms that determine the contours of our futures, the chemical structure and manufacturing processes for life-saving pharmaceutical drugs, even t... | Samir Chopra | https://aeon.co//essays/the-idea-of-intellectual-property-is-nonsensical-and-pernicious | |
Human evolution | We still live in the long shadow of Man-the-Hunter: a midcentury theory of human origins soaked in strife and violence | The Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz embodied the ideal of a white-maned sage. Acclaimed by readers in German and English alike for his books King Solomon’s Ring (1949) and Man Meets Dog (1949), he enjoyed worldwide renown as an expert on the behaviour of fowl, fish and beast. These delightful popular introductions to ... | Erika Lorraine Milam | https://aeon.co//essays/we-still-live-in-the-long-shadow-cast-by-the-idea-of-man-the-hunter | |
Self-improvement | Forget memory. Kill desire. Open up in the moment to unleash creativity, intuition, and even political transformation | Pablo Picasso was in his late 20s when he learned to paint like the Old Masters, but it took 30 years more to learn to paint like a child. His journey towards childlikeness, which he said he achieved through a process of self-forgetfulness, was fruitful but arduous, a lifelong fight against social influences. Finding a... | Paul Tritschler | https://aeon.co//essays/deny-and-become-the-radical-ethos-of-negative-capability | |
The ancient world | How a widowed queen became a rebel warrior, defying Roman patriarchy, and leading her people to glory even in defeat | In the 1st century CE, Boudica, warrior queen of the Iceni people, led an army of 100,000 to victory against the mighty Roman Empire. So complete were Boudica’s triumphs that Rome was in danger of losing control of her province. Riding high on a war chariot, daughters behind her, she led her Britons in a vengeful fight... | Caitlin C Gillespie | https://aeon.co//essays/boudica-how-a-widowed-queen-became-a-rebellious-woman-warrior | |
Social psychology | The trances and healing powers of shamans are so widespread that they can be counted a human universal. Why did they evolve? | Shamanism is as varied as those who practise it. Its practitioners range from indigenous lineages who have passed down their craft over thousands of years to the modern ‘plastic shamans’, who represent no specific culture but have adapted shamanism to meet the demands of metropolitan markets. However, there is a common... | Thomas T Hills | https://aeon.co//essays/why-did-shamanism-evolve-in-societies-all-around-the-globe | |
History of science | Monsters once inhabited the mysterious fringes of the known world. In our human-dominated present, can they still be found? | In 2003, a team of scientists in China managed to create embryos containing a mix of rabbit and human DNA. Most of the biological matter was human, while the rabbit DNA was present only in the mitochondria, the energy-generators of the cells. The aim was to try to find new ways of growing and harvesting the stem cells ... | Natalie Lawrence | https://aeon.co//essays/there-be-monsters-from-cabinets-of-curiosity-to-demons-within | |
Gender and identity | A world segregated into male and female categories feels suffocating. Nonbinary identity is a radical escape hatch | Recently, I found myself at London Stansted Airport, travelling back to the United States. I’m a frequent flyer, so I’m familiar with the airport ritual: shoes, laptop, body scanner. But for myself and many others, the final instalment of this liturgy tends to become a social test. As usual, I braced myself and stepped... | Robin Dembroff | https://aeon.co//essays/nonbinary-identity-is-a-radical-stance-against-gender-segregation | |
Nations and empires | The British honours system has outlived the Empire it was designed to foster. Does it have a role in the world today? | In 1919, Sir Rabindranath Tagore wrote to Lord Chelmsford, the viceroy of India, to return the knighthood that the British Crown had bestowed upon him four years earlier. Tagore’s attempt to renounce his knighthood came in response to the Amritsar massacre, in which British imperial forces killed hundreds of peacefully... | Tobias Harper | https://aeon.co//essays/the-shame-of-sir-british-honours-and-decolonisation | |
Thinkers and theories | Estranged but not alienated, devout but not obedient, philosophical but not a systematiser, Simone Weil defies conventions | Simone Weil (1909-43) belonged to a species so rare, it had only one member. This peculiar French philosopher and mystic diagnosed the maladies and maledictions of her own age and place – Europe in the first war-torn half of the 20th century – and offered recommendations for how to forestall the repetition of its iniqu... | Christy Wampole | https://aeon.co//essays/why-simone-weil-is-the-patron-saint-of-anomalous-persons | |
Cognition and intelligence | Elephants might have the necessary capacities for personhood – we just need to help them acquire the cognitive scaffolding | Have you ever stood in a field full of cows? It’s obvious that they’re aware of one another, but in a minimal kind of way. They tend to stay loosely clumped together as they graze, and they don’t deliberately knock into other members of the herd. Shouting gets their attention, but it tends to elicit a flickering inspec... | Don Ross | https://aeon.co//essays/if-elephants-arent-persons-yet-could-they-be-one-day | |
History | What the archives of mental-health asylums reveal about the history of human heredity and the evolution of genetics | People speak of genes and DNA nowadays as if they were as tangible as English peas and Ferris wheels, and as if the personal traits that matter to us correspond to impalpable entities identified by modern genetics and genomics. The human concern with heredity is, of course, much older. Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis G... | Theodore M Porter | https://aeon.co//essays/the-archives-of-madness-tell-their-own-story-of-genetics | |
Stories and literature | Confused, inferior and philosophically unsound: the Greco-Roman critique of the Old Testament could have been written today | In the early 3rd century BCE, the biblical book of Genesis was translated from Hebrew into Greek in order to be read by the Jewish communities of the diaspora who no longer understood Hebrew. Though the book could now be read by non-Jewish Greeks, it did not incite much commentary or hostility because Judaism was not a... | Pieter van der Horst | https://aeon.co//essays/why-would-apollo-make-positive-statements-about-judaism | |
Physics | The question of whether time moves in a loop or a line has occupied human minds for millennia. Has physics found the answer? | Imprisoned in the fortress of Taureau, a tiny thumb of rock off the windswept coast of Brittany, the French revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui gazed toward the stars. He had been locked up for his role in the socialist movement that would lead to the Paris Commune of 1871. As Blanqui looked up at the night sky, he fou... | Paul Halpern | https://aeon.co//essays/is-time-a-linear-arrow-or-a-loopy-repeating-circle | |
Ethics | Quarrels over honour in duelling cultures can enlighten us today and demonstrate why some insults are intolerable | In 1717, Voltaire was arrested, some might say, for giving offence. He had published a ‘satirical’ verse that opens by calling the Duc d’Orleans, the then Regent of France, ‘an inhuman tyrant, famous for poison, atheism, and incest’. This pungent personal attack became so popular it was sung on the streets of Paris. In... | Clifton Mark | https://aeon.co//essays/what-duelling-can-teach-us-about-taking-offence | |
Future of technology | Artistic success takes a mysterious mix of talent, luck and timing. But could algorithms now predict and produce the hits? | Justin was in a reflective mood. On 4 February 2018, in the living room of his home in Memphis, Tennessee, he sat watching the Super Bowl, eating M&Ms. Earlier that week, he’d celebrated his 37th birthday, and now – as had become an annual tradition – he was brooding over what his life had become. He knew he sh... | Hannah Fry | https://aeon.co//essays/can-algorithms-create-true-art-or-do-they-only-imitate | |
Anthropology | From the foreskin of Jesus to the scarf of Elvis: why humans cannot resist the magical potency of charismatic objects | Following his death in 1614, Camillus de Lellis, the founder of the Camillian order, had his heart removed before his body was buried in the altar of St Mary Magdalen’s Church in Rome. The heart is still a cherished relic, encased in a glass sacellum and brought out on special occasions, such as when it undertook a hig... | Jesper Sørensen | https://aeon.co//essays/on-mana-why-we-bestow-certain-objects-with-unearthly-powers | |
History of science | Mathematical ideas are some of the most transformative and beautiful in history. So why do they get so little attention? | ‘These foundations [of mathematics] are, moreover, a perpetual source of reflection and discovery for the masters of the science. Even in number system you will find material for long reflection. Remember that Leibniz did not disdain to occupy himself with it.’ – Paul Valéry, letter to Pierre Honnorat, 1942There are al... | Mordechai Levy-Eichel | https://aeon.co//essays/the-secret-intellectual-history-of-mathematics | |
Technology and the self | From scoreboards to trackers, games have infiltrated work, serving as spies, overseers and agents of social control | Deep under the Disneyland Resort Hotel in California, far from the throngs of happy tourists, laundry workers clean thousands of sheets, blankets, towels and comforters every day. Workers feed the heavy linens into hot, automated presses to iron out wrinkles, and load dirty laundry into washers and dryers large enough ... | Vincent Gabrielle | https://aeon.co//essays/how-employers-have-gamified-work-for-maximum-profit | |
Stories and literature | What is the task of the translator – to be a servant to the source or to create a new work of illuminated meaning? | Some 40 years ago, like many of my fellow undergraduates, I read One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez. While plenty of my recollections of the novel have sadly faded since then, one remains indelible: the feeling of disorientation, of complete immersion in the book’s atmosphere, that lasted fo... | Mark Polizzotti | https://aeon.co//essays/is-the-translator-a-servant-of-the-text-or-an-original-artist | |
Political philosophy | How the Marxist ideas of a British historian ended up on the bookshelves of Indian civil servants and Brazilian housewives | Almost all Marxists have imagined themselves to be part of a global community. More than perhaps any other modern ideology, Marxism has given its adherents a sense of being connected across regions, countries and continents. The activists, thinkers, politicians, students, workers, guerrilla fighters and party apparatch... | Emile Chabal | https://aeon.co//essays/how-eric-hobsbawm-helped-shape-the-global-marxist-imagination | |
Virtues and vices | Can we be held morally responsible for our actions? Yes, says Daniel Dennett. No, says Gregg Caruso. Reader, you decide | Caruso: [Dan,] you have famously argued that freedom evolves and that humans, alone among the animals, have evolved minds that give us free will and moral responsibility. I, on the other hand, have argued that what we do and the way we are is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, and that because of this... | Daniel C Dennett & Gregg D Caruso | https://aeon.co//essays/on-free-will-daniel-dennett-and-gregg-caruso-go-head-to-head | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | Mary Shelley foresaw that artificial intelligence would be made monstrous, not by human hubris but by human cruelty | Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 200-year-old creature is more alive than ever. In his new role as the bogeyman of artificial intelligence (AI), ‘the monster’ made by Victor Frankenstein is all over the internet. The British literary critic Frances Wilson even called him ‘the world’s most rewarding metaphor’. Though issue... | Eileen Hunt Botting | https://aeon.co//essays/what-frankensteins-creature-can-really-tell-us-about-ai | |
Physics | How a sunbeam split in two became physics’ most elegant experiment, shedding light on the underlying nature of reality | Imagine throwing a baseball and not being able to tell exactly where it’ll go, despite your ability to throw accurately. Say that you are able to predict only that it will end up, with equal probability, in the mitt of one of five catchers. The baseball randomly materialises in one catcher’s mitt, while the others come... | Anil Ananthaswamy | https://aeon.co//essays/the-elegant-physics-experiment-to-decode-the-nature-of-reality | |
Thinkers and theories | The pragmatist philosopher William James had a crisp and consistent response when asked if life was worth living: maybe | ‘The greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.’ – William James, The Thought and Character of William James (1935) A year ago, on a late afternoon in November, I decided to walk the seven miles from my hotel in Manhattan to Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore. It was a cool day, on the cusp of ... | John Kaag | https://aeon.co//essays/is-life-worth-living-the-pragmatic-maybe-of-william-james | |
History of ideas | ‘Consolation philosophy’ understands the human being as a unity of feeling and reason, in a cosmos rich with primal emotion | The ambitious African philosopher finds herself between the devil and the deep blue sea. She has to convince the West that she has something interesting to say about philosophy. She has to insist that African philosophy is not the same as ‘philosophy in Africa’. And by insisting on African philosophy, she stamps her fo... | Ada Agada | https://aeon.co//essays/consolation-philosophy-and-the-struggle-of-reason-in-africa | |
Religion | It’s one of the most successful, and in some ways unlikely, interfaith movements in the modern world | On 23 June 1969, at the Midtown Manhattan headquarters of the American Jewish Committee, the evangelist Billy Graham met with two dozen rabbis and Jewish leaders. According to one rabbi, the meeting was to allow Graham to convey ‘the need for dialogue and communication’ between American evangelicals and American Jews, ... | Dan Hummel | https://aeon.co//essays/christian-zionism-the-interfaith-movement-hiding-in-plain-sight | |
Language and linguistics | Is language produced by the mind? Romantic theory has it otherwise: words emerge from the cosmos, expressing its soul | In conversation at the Hay Festival in Wales this May, the English poet Simon Armitage made an arresting observation. Discussing the nature of language and why it is so good at capturing the experience of being alive, he said: ‘My feeling is that a lot of the language that we use, and the best language for poetry, come... | Mark Vernon | https://aeon.co//essays/words-have-soul-on-the-romantic-theory-of-language-origin |
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