Greetings from Green Bank – the small town where modern technology is banned | Aeon Videos
For ‘wifi refugees’, a small Appalachian town built around a massive telescope has become a rare...
Ravensbrück to papal advisor, the life of Wanda Półtawska | Aeon Essays
Her closeness to Pope John Paul furnished him with anti-abortion ideals, fuelled by her survival of...
What makes John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ so enduringly powerful? | Aeon Videos
In his masterpiece, Keats contrasts the ephemerality of life with the eternal beauty of art to...
The 1970s librarians who revolutionised the challenge of search | Aeon Essays
A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed...
How the fear of being duped makes you an anxious sucker | Aeon Essays
The fear of being duped is ubiquitous, but excessive scepticism makes it harder to trust one...
Far from frivolous, cuteness is a powerful – and still mysterious – force of nature | Aeon Videos
Cuteness overload! What makes us want to touch, pinch and squeeze adorable creatures is still a...
On class and the perils of the new norms of intimacy | Aeon Essays
The sexual revolution promised new norms of intimacy based on egalitarianism. So far, only the rich...
How a Noh mask-maker summons a lifelike face from a single block of wood | Aeon Videos
Watch as a traditional artisan of Noh masks cuts, carves and paints an eerily lifelike human...
Why the Age of Revolution loved the classical world | Aeon Essays
Radicals in the Age of Revolution saw the classical world as a common inheritance that could...
On a whirlwind morning, a couple learns if they’re facing an unplanned pregnancy | Aeon Videos
Two filmmakers, awaiting the result of a pregnancy test, take turns recording their experiences in this...
Contemporary art is made out of rules that mobilise us to act | Aeon Essays
Conceptual art often confounds. The key is to understand the rules of the artwork and the...
Why Jacques Derrida was fascinated by secret Jewishness | Aeon Essays
Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the figure of the Marrano Jew, whose identity could barely be...
What wine vessels reveal about politics and luxury in ancient Athens and Persia | Aeon Videos
War and wine: how decadent Persian wine vessels were given a playful, dynamic makeover in the...
David Goldblatt captured the contradictions of apartheid in stark black and white | Aeon Videos
How the celebrated South African photographer David Goldblatt captured apartheid’s contradictions in stark black and white...
How to mourn a forest: a lesson from West Papua | Aeon Essays
The Marind people of West Papua deploy mourning not only to grieve their animal and plant...
Do we have good reasons to believe in beliefs? A radical philosophy of mind says no | Aeon Videos
Should we believe in beliefs? A radical philosophy of mind says its time to ditch such...
Time is not an illusion. It’s an object with physical size | Aeon Essays
Not a backdrop, an illusion or an emergent phenomenon, time has a physical size that can...
In the search for life, might alien ocean worlds be a better bet than Earth-like planets? | Aeon Videos
What if massive ocean worlds – ‘Hycean’ planets – are a better bet in the search...
The distinctive paradox of Swedish individualism | Aeon Essays
All countries must balance the freedom of individuals with the demands of the community. Sweden’s solution...
How a devout Catholic philosopher approaches the problem of evil | Aeon Videos
How can an all-powerful, all-loving god allow suffering in the world? A Catholic philosopher explains the...
How philosophy’s obsession with language unravelled | Aeon Essays
Analytic and continental philosophers were once united in their obsession with language. But now new questions...
When drawing your muse hundreds of times becomes an exercise in love | Aeon Videos
The intimacy that developed between an artist and his muse over hundreds of sittings is an...
Medicine or poison? When Buddhist compassion goes too far | Aeon Essays
After an abuse scandal destroyed my Buddhist community, I had to reconsider what it means to...
Sulking is a fascinating form of indirect communication | Aeon Essays
Full of implicit rules and paradoxes, sulking is a marvellous example of intense communication without clear...
Is simulation theory a way to shirk responsibility for the world we’ve created? | Aeon Videos
Amid ecological catastrophe, is the rise of simulation theory just a way to find ‘solace in...
Science is not the only form of knowledge but it is the best | Aeon Essays
Science is not the only form of knowledge but it is the best, being the most...
A dazzling slice-by-slice exploration of wood exposes hidden patterns and hues | Aeon Videos
A mesmerising music video uses innovative stop-motion animation to reveal, slice-by-slice, the patterns and hues in...
Should we abandon the idea that cancer is something to ‘fight’? | Aeon Essays
Is it time to abandon the century-old idea that cancer is best met with a ‘fight’...
In Rwanda, Sébastien finds traces of personal history in the wake of national tragedy | Aeon Videos
When Sébastien finally meets his father and travels to his native Rwanda, he finds the answers...
Why is it possible to feel a presence without sensory cues? | Aeon Essays
The spooky sensation that someone or something else is right there haunts us all. But what...
Leaf through Shakespeare’s First Folio for a riveting journey into theatre history | Aeon Videos
The 400-year-old book that first collected Shakespeare’s plays will take you on a riveting journey through...
Dogs on India’s streets can be freer and happier than many pets | Aeon Essays
These canines have independent, peaceful, happy lives without a pet’s constraints. Why are they being persecuted...
A decade after his wife was swept away in a tsunami, Yasuo still searches the sea | Aeon Videos
In a poignant portrait of grief and the strength it can inspire, Yasuo searches the sea...
From the Cynics’ self-sufficiency to an ecology of wanking | Aeon Essays
The ancient Cynics taught that masturbation is about more than pleasure: it suggests how to live...
Modern architecture should embrace – not ignore or repel – the nonhuman world | Aeon Videos
Why architects should take inspiration from the sustainable ways that animals build, and integrate wildlife into...
Why we need a new expression of the sacred: a pagan theology | Aeon Essays
Now is the time to revitalise our relationship with nature and immerse ourselves in the little...
Monist philosophy and quantum physics agree that all is One | Aeon Essays
The ancient philosophy of monism and the physics of quantum entanglement agree: all that exists is...
The strange tale of how mangoes became hallowed objects in Maoist China | Aeon Videos
Why did Maoist mango mania grip China in the 1960s? Animating the history of the Cultural...
The swing has a universal history of transgression | Aeon Essays
Now associated with childhood fun, the swing has a near-universal history of ritual transgression and transformation...
We may never settle the ‘free will’ debate, but tapping into it is still worthwhile | Aeon Videos
Investigating where the ‘free will’ debate currently stands, from the vantage of neuroscience, physics and moral...
A meditation on irritation, a feeling in search of causes | Aeon Essays
Unlike anger, irritation has neither glamour nor radicalism on its side. Yet it might just be...
In an ancient English rainforest, John creates charcoal and cultivates growth | Aeon Videos
With a deep view of time, a regenerative forester extracts resources to cultivate growth in an...
Discretion is hard to live with, even harder to live without | Aeon Essays
When the rules break down, you must judge what to do on your own. Discretion is...
Mapping data visualisation’s meteoric rise from Victorian London to today | Aeon Videos
Once considered fanciful, today data visualisation charts, and changes, our world. But it can misinform as...
Can the liquid motion of the octopus radicalise our ideas about time? | Aeon Essays
We humans are forward-facing, gravity-bound plodders. Can the liquid motion of the octopus radicalise our ideas...
An enigmatic ‘story of consciousness’ told through 19th-century engravings | Aeon Videos
From flowers to teapots to amphibians, hundreds of 19th-century engravings form a dizzying contemplation of consciousness...
The scorched-earth iconoclasm of the historian Paul Veyne | Aeon Essays
The iconoclastic French historian Paul Veyne illuminated the past by showing how deeply alien it is...
Join the spirited debate at a women’s hair salon before a pivotal election in Tunisia | Aeon Videos
On the eve of a pivotal presidential election in Tunisia, women at a hair salon debate...
Why poetry is a variety of mathematical experience | Aeon Essays
Machine learning theory is shedding new light on how to think about the mysterious and ineffable...
Why we must abandon the ‘vegetative state’ diagnosis | Aeon Essays
Cruel and unscientific, the ‘vegetative state’ diagnosis stems from a hierarchical and bigoted view of all...
