The hermit

Disturbed loner? Gentle recluse? Opinions on an infamous Maine hermit run the gamut | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?

The death rate remains stable at one per person. With that awareness at the front of your mind, you can live a fuller life | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Keeping bees means thinking about landscape as a system

The gift of a half-wanted hive took me into the world of bees, kept and wild: a place of generosity and attentiveness | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Free improvisation

The experimental jazz genre where musicians invent the rules with every note | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

How science fails

For the émigré philosopher Imre Lakatos, science degenerates unless it is theoretically and experimentally progressive | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The accidental beekeeper

The gift of a half-wanted hive took me into the world of bees, kept and wild: a place of generosity and attentiveness | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Think of mental disorders as the mind's 'sticky tendencies'

Embodied, ecological, meaningful and sticky: what embodied enactivism reveals about the nature of mental disorders | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Leonard Susskind: Why do we search for symmetry?

‘The whole thing is a monstrosity!’ How a symmetry heretic sees the Universe | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Philosophy cannot resolve the question ‘How should we live?’

The meaning of life is not a puzzle that can be solved once and for all. Asking ‘How should we live?’ defines our humanity | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Escaping a toxic childhood

A new therapy helps survivors improve their lives by facing the psychological impoverishment that often accompanies abuse | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Three ways to smell cancer

How harnessing the power of dogs could help scientists sniff out cancer early | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

We need highly formal rituals in order to make life more democratic

It’s a human impulse to create in-groups and out-groups, but formal rituals can bring diverse people together as one | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

A shepherd

A modern shepherd tending his flock looks for spiritual resonance in age-old work | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

We are nature

Spinoza helps diagnose the bad ideas and sad passions that preclude us from a finer relationship with the natural world | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

It didn’t have to be this way

A bioethicist at the heart of the Italian coronavirus crisis asks: why won’t we talk about the trade-offs of the lockdown? | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Your love story is a narrative that gets written in tandem

Your beloved isn’t a character in your story but the co-author of a narrative that evolves from its sociocultural context | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The Hunger Mood

Hunger isn’t in your stomach or your blood-sugar levels. It’s in your mind – and that’s where we need to shape up | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Constructing the Chrysler Building (1929-30)

‘Quite a height, ah?’ A tour of the Chrysler Building by those building it | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Private gain must no longer be allowed to elbow out the public good

It’s time to assert the obvious: sacrificing the public for the private is a failure of modern economic thinking | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Indian removal

The world’s first mass deportation, bureaucractically managed and industrial in scale, took place on American soil | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Do I see what you see?

What a rare form of dementia reveals about how we construct the world outside | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Why do you believe what you do? Run some diagnostics on it

Check the temperature of your beliefs: did you just get lucky, or are other perfectly reasonable explanations at work? | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you

The belief that hard work and talent make for success is not only false, it encourages selfishness and discrimination too | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Jack Tar

He was a patriot and a prisoner, a delegate and a drunk; circling the globe when few Englishmen ever left their home counties | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Even if genes affect intelligence, we can’t engineer cleverness

Maybe genes influence intelligence, but they do so with such subtlety that we might never engineer them to boost IQ | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Zapatería

‘I makes shoes because of beauty. Not because of shoes’ – on craft as a calling | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Who was Jack Tar?

He was a patriot and a prisoner, a delegate and a drunk; circling the globe when few Englishmen ever left their home counties | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Will Brains or Algorithms Rule the Kingdom of Science?

Science today stands at a crossroads: will its progress be driven by human minds or by the machines that we’ve created? | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

At the limits of thought

Science today stands at a crossroads: will its progress be driven by human minds or by the machines that we’ve created? | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

What we can learn about respect and identity from ‘plurals’

‘Plurals’ are people who say: ‘I’m one of many people inside my head.’ What can we learn from them about respect and identity? | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Talent, you’re born with. Creativity, you can grow yourself

Some are born great. And some can achieve greatness by nurturing their creative brain with flexible and persistent thinking | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Ant societies point to radical possibilities for humans

The ant colony has often served as a metaphor for human order and hierarchy. But real ant society is radical to its core | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Test subjects

For some, animal testing is ‘just science’. For others, it’s just not right | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

At times of suffering, the greatest gift is accompaniment by another

To cope with despair, dissonance or desolation, we need a companion – not a fixer – to help us carry our own sorrows | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Unholy anorexia

Medieval mystics starved the body to feed the soul. Understanding this perfectionist mindset could help treat anorexia today | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

0107 – b moll

The Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Kondo is known for his dazzling experimental shorts, which craft otherworldly art from urban landscapes. In 0107 – b moll he uses nighttime images of Tokyo trains to explore some of the contrasts – physical togetherness and emotional solitude, natur … | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

How dystopian narratives can incite real-world radicalism

From The Hunger Games to the streets: how reading dystopian fiction can inspire radical political action in the real world | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The Bell Project

‘I don't want to overdose my work with philosophy.’The artist Hiwa K – born in Iraqi Kurdistan and now based in Germany – is celebrated and exhibited around the globe, but he rejects what he views as the more pretentious and extravagant trappings of the art world. He says that he … | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The lure of fascism

Fascism promised radical national renewal and supreme power to the people. Are we in danger of a fascist revival today? | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Is there a limit to optimism when it comes to climate change?

We know the climate is changing, and we know what we must do about it. But does optimism have its limits for spurring action? | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Intimate strangers

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 | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The dark shadow in the injunction to ‘do what you love’

Don’t blame Maslow for ‘do what you love’. How managers hijacked the hierarchy of needs for their business practices | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Unified Theory of Evolution

Darwin’s theory that natural selection drives evolution is incomplete without input from evolution’s anti-hero: Lamarck | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The Financial World and the Magical Elixir of Confidence

The financial world is a theatrical production, abundantly lubricated by that magical elixir of illusionists: confidence | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Understanding quantum entanglement

The term ‘quantum entanglement’ refers to quantum particles being interdependent even when separated, to put it in exceedingly simple terms. Because this behaviour was so at odds with his understanding of the laws of physics, Albert Einstein called the phenomenon ‘spooky action a … | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

I was homeschooled for eight years: here’s what I recommend

I was homeschooled for eight years and here’s what I recommend: take your time, be idiosyncratic, and no comparisons | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The future is nano, and it will revolutionize medical science

At the level of the tiny, biology is all about engineering. That’s why nanotechnology can rebuild medicine from within | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Engines of life

At the level of the tiny, biology is all about engineering. That’s why nanotechnology can rebuild medicine from within | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago