In fiction, it grips us. In life, it can unravel us. How can brains hooked on certainty put its opposite to good use? | Continue reading
In fiction, it grips us. In life, it can unravel us. How can brains hooked on certainty put its opposite to good use? | Continue reading
It’s a human impulse to create in-groups and out-groups, but formal rituals can bring diverse people together as one | Continue reading
Americana has never looked as eerie as at the annual Cajun crawfish festival: video art by a Québécois filmmaking trio | Continue reading
It’s not just that Hegel and Rousseau were racists. Racism was baked into the very structure of their dialectical philosophy | Continue reading
Centuries before Columbus, Vikings came to the Western hemisphere. How far into the Americas did they travel? | Continue reading
Raw emotion, hard truths and silence as a daughter calls her mother with an update on her breast-cancer treatment | Continue reading
Centuries before Columbus, Vikings came to the Western hemisphere. How far into the Americas did they travel? | Continue reading
Slime mould seems to be intelligent despite lacking a nervous system. The artist Heather Barnett puts its smarts to the test | Continue reading
Why Søren Kierkegaard saw doubt – though disorienting and horrifying – as the cornerstone of a sound philosophical practice | Continue reading
Here’s the paradox of articulation: are you excavating existing ideas, or do your thoughts come into being as you speak? | Continue reading
Despite its confounding reputation, quantum mechanics both guides and helps explain human intuition | Continue reading
The consolidation of the ‘attention economy’ to a handful of companies is an experiment that demands our attentive resistance | Continue reading
How a generation of political thinkers has underestimated the abilities of ordinary people and undermined democracy | Continue reading
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 | Continue reading
Why Søren Kierkegaard saw doubt – though disorienting and horrifying – as the cornerstone of a sound philosophical practice | Continue reading
The heart-tug tactics of 1950s ads steered white American women away from activism into domesticity. They’re still there | Continue reading
There’s a strange, and deeply human, story behind how we taught machines to breathe for critically ill patients | Continue reading
The consolidation of the ‘attention economy’ to a handful of companies is an experiment that demands our attentive resistance | Continue reading
There’s a strange, and deeply human, story behind how we taught machines to breathe for critically ill patients | Continue reading
Jet-age glamour was more than just aesthetic: its promise of motionless movement reshaped perception of time and space | Continue reading
To understand a society’s values and history, look at its public art: a 1973 guide to Manhattan’s charms and contradictions | Continue reading
Here’s the paradox of articulation: are you excavating existing ideas, or do your thoughts come into being as you speak? | Continue reading
Perched on the cusp between biology and chemistry, the start of life on Earth is an event horizon we struggle to see beyond | Continue reading
The idea of the ‘supply chain’ shackles how we think about economic justice. What forces could new metaphors unleash? | Continue reading
Watch the perpetual motion of life and sand in eastward drift across the windswept Frisian Islands of the North Sea | Continue reading
Jet-age glamour was more than just aesthetic: its promise of motionless movement reshaped perception of time and space | Continue reading
Does a terrorist deserve a respectful burial? The question that divided a city in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing | Continue reading
Perched on the cusp between biology and chemistry, the start of life on Earth is an event horizon we struggle to see beyond | Continue reading
Every cover is a true original when it’s been crafted by hand: watch the artisanal process behind marbled book jackets | Continue reading
Far from a social luxury, tact becomes imperative when life is cheapened. We exercise it to show gentle respect for another | Continue reading
William Blake saw angels and ghosts and the Hallelujah sunrise, even on the darkest day. We need to foster his state of mind | Continue reading
How we came to represent (through inky marks) the vagaries of the mind, inflections of the voice, and intensity of feeling | Continue reading
William Blake saw angels and ghosts and the Hallelujah sunrise, even on the darkest day. We need to foster his state of mind | Continue reading
William Blake saw angels and ghosts and the Hallelujah sunrise, even on the darkest day. We need to foster his state of mind | Continue reading
Can we ever know everything about something we can’t experience? A thought experiment from the philosopher Frank Jackson | Continue reading
How we came to represent (through inky marks) the vagaries of the mind, inflections of the voice, and intensity of feeling | Continue reading
The tireless team working to clear the Zone Rouge in northeastern France from the deadly debris of the First World War | Continue reading
Reinhart Koselleck, the last great theorist of history, sought in the apparent chaos of events a science of experience | Continue reading
Extraordinary beliefs don’t arise in a vacuum. They take root in minds confronted by unusual and traumatic experiences | Continue reading
Watch as the carnivorous Cape sundew, a bog-dwelling plant of South Africa, uses electricity to capture its prey | Continue reading
Extraordinary beliefs don’t arise in a vacuum. They take root in minds confronted by unusual and traumatic experiences | Continue reading
Aeon is a magazine of ideas and culture. We publish in-depth essays, incisive articles, and a mix of original and curated videos — free to all. | Continue reading
The pandemic is an unprecedented opportunity – seeing human society as a complex system opens a better future for us all | Continue reading
The pandemic is an unprecedented opportunity – seeing human society as a complex system opens a better future for us all | Continue reading
Can you find the key that will set you free? The methodical thrills of working through a nearly impossible-to-solve puzzle | Continue reading
Can you find the key that will set you free? The methodical thrills of working through an impossible-to-solve prisoner puzzle | Continue reading
Renowned for his pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer was nonetheless a conoisseur of very distinctive kinds of happiness | Continue reading