Is the Earth an Organism?

The Gaia hypothesis states that our biosphere is evolving. Once sceptical, some prominent biologists are beginning to agree | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 3 years ago

Captive culture

Even when enslaved or despised, captives brought novel ideas and technologies to the societies of their captors | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 3 years ago

The sound of gravity

The imagination, ingenuity and dedication behind the century-long endeavour to detect Einstein’s gravitational waves | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 3 years ago

Is the Earth an organism?

The Gaia hypothesis states that our biosphere is evolving. Once sceptical, some prominent biologists are beginning to agree | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 3 years ago

Daily life in Egypt: ancient and modern

Echoes of the ancient past in scenes of the Nile valley in 1925, at the dawn of anthropological filmmaking | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 3 years ago

Zoom and gloom

Sitting in a videoconference is a uniformly crap experience. Instead of corroding our humanity, let’s design tools to enhance it | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 3 years ago

Empire of fantasy – How the writing of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis saved a culture

By conquering young minds, the writing of J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis worked to recapture a world that was swiftly ebbing away | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 3 years ago

Empire of fantasy

By conquering young minds, the writing of J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis worked to recapture a world that was swiftly ebbing away | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 3 years ago

Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America

Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America, embodying both its tumult and its promise | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 3 years ago

All stars

Is a great team more than the sum of its players? Complexity science reveals the role of strategy, synergy, swarming and more | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Don’t think twice

If dementia is like a pair of cutters, trimming down the brain’s tree of knowledge, then music is for John a stubborn branch | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Sociology’s race problem

Urban ethnographers do more harm than good in speaking for Black communities. They see only suffering, not diversity or joy | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The Neuroscience of Peripersonal Space

The neuroscience of peripersonal space explores how you create, defend or relax the buffer zone between you and the world | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Ping pong Sufi

‘I’m just measuring myself with myself’: how one Sufi practitioner seeks transcendence at his local ping pong table | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

How close is too close?

The neuroscience of peripersonal space explores how you create, defend or relax the buffer zone between you and the world | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Is Eric Cantona an existentialist?

The footballer Eric Cantona says he doesn’t regret kicking and punching a fan: does that make him an existentialist? | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Drunks and democrats

Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America, embodying both its tumult and its promise | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Do we send the goo?

The ability to stir new life into being, all across the Universe, compels us to ask why life matters in the first place | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Keep Science Irrational

Is hard data the only path to scientific truth? That’s an absurd, illogical and profoundly useful fiction | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

No ball games

From urban London to rural Wales, these are the games that children play when the streets are their playground | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Keep science irrational

Is hard data the only path to scientific truth? That’s an absurd, illogical and profoundly useful fiction | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The biology of dads: how raising children can change a father’s brain

The bodies and brains of fathers, not just mothers, are transformed through the love and labour of raising a child | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The trauma tracer

If trauma can be passed down from parent to child, could new therapies blunt the transgenerational epigenetic inheritance? | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The biology of dads

The bodies and brains of fathers, not just mothers, are transformed through the love and labour of raising a child | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Celui qui tombe (He who falls)

As the ground spins beneath their feet and Frank Sinatra croons ‘My Way’, Yoann Bourgeois’s dancers tumble in and out of love | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Humanity at night

A violinist plays in a concentration camp. A refugee carries a book of poetry. Art sustains us when survival is uncertain | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Fast-forward through history of human artifacts, from arrowheads to plastic toys

A week’s worth of museum trips animated into a whirlwind survey of human artefacts from the Bronze Age to the Information Age | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Life with Purpose

Biologists balk at any talk of ‘goals’ or ‘intentions’ – but a bold new research agenda has put agency back on the table | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Vulnerable yet vital: Why childhood and old age are key to our human capacities

The dance of love and lore between grandparent and grandchild is at the centre, not the fringes, of our evolutionary story | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Roger Penrose: Why did the Universe begin?

Why did the Universe begin? Nobel prizewinner Roger Penrose details an astonishing origin hypothesis of a cyclical, forgetful Universe | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Life with purpose

Biologists balk at any talk of ‘goals’ or ‘intentions’ – but a bold new research agenda has put agency back on the table | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The Wisdom of Pandemics

Viruses are active agents, existing within rich lifeworlds. A safe future depends on understanding this evolutionary story | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Franz Brentano, who taught Freud and Husserl

Franz Brentano, philosopher and psychologist, was an iconic teacher eclipsed by his students, Freud and Husserl among them | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

How to be at home

‘If the absence of people unravels you … /Lean into loneliness like it is holding you’ – a poetic reflection on life in lockdown | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

With charisma to spare

Franz Brentano, philosopher and psychologist, was an iconic teacher eclipsed by his students, Freud and Husserl among them | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Social Genomics Can Combat Inequality or Be Used to Justify It

The new field of social genomics can be used by progressives to combat racial inequality or by conservatives to excuse it | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Why childhood and old age are key to our human capacities

The dance of love and lore between grandparent and grandchild is at the centre, not the fringes, of our evolutionary story | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

My name is Anik

Bircan longs to learn her grandmother’s native Kurdish but the language is still suppressed in Turkey. Will Anik teach her? | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The genes we’re dealt

The new field of social genomics can be used by progressives to combat racial inequality or by conservatives to excuse it | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The five-minute museum

A week’s worth of museum trips animated into a whirlwind survey of human artefacts from the Bronze Age to the Information Age | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Vulnerable yet vital

The dance of love and lore between grandparent and grandchild is at the centre, not the fringes, of our evolutionary story | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The Living Mahabharata

Immorality, sexism, politics, war: the polychromatic Indian epic pulses with relevance to the present day | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

The living Mahabharata

Immorality, sexism, politics, war: the polychromatic Indian epic pulses with relevance to the present day | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Hegel and the History of Human Nature

For Hegel, human nature strives through history to unchain itself from tradition. But is such inner freedom worth the cost? | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Roger Penrose: Why did the Universe begin?

Why did the Universe begin? Nobel prizewinner Roger Penrose details an astonishing origin hypothesis of a cyclical, forgetful Universe | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Roger Penrose: Why did the Universe begin?

Why did the Universe begin? Nobel prizewinner Roger Penrose details an astonishing origin hypothesis of a cyclical, forgetful Universe | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

On the same wavelength

The urge to align our minds and emotions with those we care for, whether they are near or far, makes our species unique | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago

Ebb tide

A retired teacher, who coaxed poetry from her pupils, embarks on a mission to find out what became of a beloved student | Continue reading


@aeon.co | 4 years ago