title stringclasses 114
values | description stringlengths 71 138 | essay stringlengths 412 63.4k | authors stringlengths 7 67 | source_url stringlengths 52 104 | thumbnail_url stringlengths 113 249 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Space exploration | When self-replicating craft bring life to the far Universe, a religious cult, not science, is likely to be the driving force | Some time late this century, someone will push a button, unleashing a life force on the cosmos. Within 1,000 years, every star you can see at night will host intelligent life. In less than a million years, that life will saturate the entire Milky Way; in 20 million years – the local group of galaxies. In the fullness o... | Jay Olson | https://aeon.co//essays/cosmic-expansion-is-a-given-who-inherits-the-cosmos-is-not | |
History of science | To the detriment of the public, scientists and historians don’t engage with one another. They must begin a new dialogue | Would boycotting Russian scientists be an effective protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Where do terms like ‘altruism’ come from, and what assumptions come with them? How long should research groups be allowed to embargo their data, and why? Why is the normal curve assumed to be normal for so many disparat... | Lorraine Daston & Peter Harrison | https://aeon.co//essays/science-and-history-cannot-afford-to-be-indifferent-to-each-other | |
Religion | Once a centre of Afghan culture, Sufism seems to have disappeared in the maelstrom of war and upheaval. But still it survives | My introduction into the world of Afghanistan’s Sufism began in 2015, over lunch with my friend Rohullah, the director of a research institute in Kabul. I had been working in Afghanistan in various sectors from government to nongovernmental jobs, and had returned to explore topics for a PhD that I had embarked on, a ye... | Annika Schmeding | https://aeon.co//essays/sufi-transitions-between-mullahs-and-sufis-in-afghanistan | |
Thinkers and theories | The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why | As the foremost logician of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel is well known for his incompleteness theorems and contributions to set theory, the publications of which changed the course of mathematics, logic and computer science. When he was awarded the Albert Einstein Prize to recognise these achievements in 1951, the math... | Alexander T Englert | https://aeon.co//essays/kurt-godel-his-mother-and-the-argument-for-life-after-death | |
Thinkers and theories | For Rachel Bespaloff, philosophy was a sensual activity shaped by the rhythm of history, embodied in an instant of freedom | Shortly after Rachel Bespaloff’s suicide in 1949, her friend Jean Wahl published fragments from her final unfinished project. ‘The Instant and Freedom’ condensed themes that occupied the Ukrainian-French philosopher throughout her life: music, rhythm, corporeality, movement and time. One of Bespaloff’s key ideas, ‘the ... | Isabel Jacobs | https://aeon.co//essays/for-rachel-bespaloff-philosophy-was-a-sensual-activity | |
Architecture | Architectural drawing speaks of mathematical precision, but its roots lie in the theological exegesis of a prophetic book | Years ago, my professor would make his architectural history students prepare for seminars by pinning large sheets of paper to a noticeboard. Each had finely printed plans and elevations on them. Over the week, I’d stand in front of those sheets for at least an hour looking at the various drawings, as instructed. Back ... | Karl Kinsella | https://aeon.co//essays/the-surprising-history-of-architectural-drawing-in-the-west | |
Stories and literature | Bereft and suicidal, I lay on my sofa. Only David Foster Wallace’s novel kept me tethered to life, and still does | In the surreal aftermath of my suicide attempt and amid the haze of my own processing, my best friend visited me in the hospital with a (soft-bound and thus mental-patient-safe) copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest under his arm. It was the spring of 2021. A couple months earlier, I had slipped in a tub, suffer... | Mala Chatterjee | https://aeon.co//essays/how-infinite-jest-tethered-me-to-life-when-i-almost-let-it-go | |
History of technology | From its mythic beginnings in a Chinese garden, the story of silk is a window into how weaving has shaped human history | Some say that history begins with writing; we say that history begins with clothing. In the beginning, there was clothing made from skins that early humans removed from animals, processed, and then tailored to fit the human body; this technique is still used in the Arctic. Next came textiles. The first weavers would we... | Peter Frankopan, Marie-Louise Nosch & Feng Zhao | https://aeon.co//essays/silk-is-a-thread-that-opens-up-the-weave-of-human-history | |
Earth science and climate | Three earthquakes hit Mexico City on the same date in 1985, 2017 and 2022. The coincidence left the city stranded in time | Shortly before 7:19am on 19 September 1985, time began to shift in Mexico City. It started with a tremor, emerging from the subduction zone on the Pacific coast, about 300 km southwest of the metropolis. The magnitude 7.4 quake took less than a minute to travel through the surface of southern Mexico before arriving ben... | Lachlan Summers | https://aeon.co//essays/the-earthquakes-that-shook-mexico-citys-sense-of-time | |
Subcultures | Bending a mysterious world to your will was the goal of esoteric practices. Now it’s the unashamed aim of the tech titans | Deep in the labyrinthine tags of TikTok, a group of teenage occultists promise they have the power to help you change your life. ‘Manifesting’ influencers – as they’ve come to be known – promise their legions of viewers that, with the right amount of focus, positive thinking and desire, the universe will bend to their ... | Tara Isabella Burton | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-internet-became-the-modern-purveyor-of-ancient-magic | |
Philosophy of mind | New research is uncovering the hidden differences in how people experience the world. The consequences are unsettling | On 26 February 2015, Cates Holderness, a BuzzFeed community manager, posted a picture of a dress, captioned: ‘There’s a lot of debate on Tumblr about this right now, and we need to settle it.’ The post was accompanied by a poll that racked up millions of votes in a matter of days. About two-thirds of people saw the dre... | Gary Lupyan | https://aeon.co//essays/the-moral-imperative-to-learn-from-diverse-phenomenal-experiences | |
Psychiatry and psychotherapy | I was the victim of a carjacking. The trauma from that experience was unendurable. Then I discovered eye movement therapy | I wore leggings that Tuesday. I never wore leggings to work, but that winter three years ago the New Orleans heat was in hibernation. Ice climbed up my windows, and my sweater almost reached my knees. I whispered: ‘Be good, I love you,’ to the puppy sound asleep in his crate and the groggy cat still snuggled in bed bef... | Madison McLoughlin | https://aeon.co//essays/how-emdr-therapy-helped-me-heal-from-the-trauma-of-a-carjack | |
War and peace | The US military’s greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought? | Noam Chomsky rose to fame in the 1960s and even now, in the 21st century, he is still considered one of the greatest intellectuals of all time. His prominence as a political analyst on the one hand, and theoretical linguist on the other, simply has no parallel. What remains unclear is quite how the two sides of the gre... | Chris Knight | https://aeon.co//essays/an-anthropologist-studies-the-warring-ideas-of-noam-chomsky | |
History of science | From the Irish Giant to the Ancient One, is it ever ethical for scientists and museums to study bodies without permission? | In 1786, Joshua Reynolds painted a portrait of the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter. Reynolds depicted Hunter gazing into the distance, caught in mid-thought, quill in hand. On the table in front of him, apart from inkwell and paper, are some books, one propped open to a page comparing the skulls and arm bones of huma... | Anita Guerrini | https://aeon.co//essays/do-the-dead-have-a-right-to-keep-their-bodies-out-of-museums | |
Comparative philosophy | A 17th-century classic of Ethiopian philosophy might be a fake. Does it matter, or is that just how philosophy works? | In 2017, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy issued a rare retraction, informing their readers that one of their articles was not in fact written by a cat. The short article, a critique of David Lewis’s ‘Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision’, was published in 1981 under the name of ‘Bruce Le Catt’, a figure... | Jonathan Egid | https://aeon.co//essays/from-the-pseudo-to-the-forger-the-value-of-faked-philosophy | |
Stories and literature | Devon, 1970s: I’m a rector’s son, hanging out with Boz the biker. My life is about to open up – what does it promise for him? | ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship” means.’– Theresa May, Conservative Party conference, 2016I grew up in a small Devon village nestled in a remote, crooked valley below the wilderness of Dartmoor. My father was the local rect... | Tim Pears | https://aeon.co//essays/a-story-about-who-grows-up-and-who-goes-away-in-1970s-england | |
Anthropology | I wanted to visit Colombia’s sacred mountains. But there are some places we cannot go – and some things we cannot know | I am standing on the beach in Santa Marta, a small port city on Colombia’s humid Caribbean coast. Around me, brightly dressed families are eating ice cream and grilled meat. Venezuelan refugees beg for coins, and shredded plastic bags are snagged in the cactuses. Offshore, cargo vessels idle on blue-grey waves, perhaps... | Nick Hunt | https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-intangible-border-of-the-kogis-sacred-mountains | |
Space exploration | Space junk surrounds Earth, posing a dangerous threat. But there is a way to turn the debris into opportunity | Every human-made object sent into orbit around Earth will meet a fiery death. It will fall out of orbit, and be promptly eradicated by our atmosphere, or else be left for dead in an orbital graveyard of decommissioned spacecrafts, destined to pollute our exosphere and slowly but surely follow the same sacrificial path ... | Angelos Alfatzis | https://aeon.co//essays/space-junk-could-have-a-transcendent-purposeful-afterlife | |
Ageing and death | When loved ones are traumatically lost, bereaved families become accidental activists by turning grief into grievance | Today, I filled out our US Census form. The dead are not counted. My girl does not count. I suppose that’s why I must MAKE her count somehow. Now that I’ve failed my job of keeping her alive, of growing her up, my job is now to make her short life mean something. This is the work of the bereaved parent, I suppose. Our ... | Chris Bobel | https://aeon.co//essays/why-bereavement-turns-to-activism-in-a-grief-averse-culture | |
Race and ethnicity | Training is a cheap solution to a hard problem. It is the systems that allow for biased behaviour that need to change | On a Thursday afternoon in April 2018 in a Starbucks in downtown Philadelphia, police handcuffed two African American entrepreneurs, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson. A manager had reported them for waiting inside the coffeehouse while not having purchased anything. About a month later, on 29 May, Starbucks closed its ... | Jeffrey To | https://aeon.co//essays/the-implicit-bias-problem-wont-be-solved-by-training-alone | |
Ethics | Ethical values can be both objective and knowable – torture really is wrong – yet not need any foundation outside themselves | Many academic fields can be said to ‘study morality’. Of these, the philosophical sub-discipline of normative ethics studies morality in what is arguably the least alienated way. Rather than focusing on how people and societies think and talk about morality, normative ethicists try to figure out which things are, simpl... | Andrew Sepielli | https://aeon.co//essays/ethical-values-can-be-both-objective-and-yet-without-a-foundation | |
Economics | It’s not in the interests of the ordinary person but it’s not a conspiracy either. A cashless society is a system run amok | Four centuries ago, a woman named Else Knutsdatter was executed in Vardø, a small coastal town in Norway. She was accused of having used witchcraft to raise an ocean storm that claimed the lives of 40 men. She wasn’t the only one to fall victim to 17th-century folk who – in the absence of other explanations – could be ... | Brett Scott | https://aeon.co//essays/going-cashless-is-a-bad-idea-but-its-not-a-conspiracy | |
Metaphysics | Being a twin (as our author knows) cracks open our ideas of the perfectly bounded self and might liberate us all | In Washington state in 2002, Lydia Fairchild nearly lost custody of her three children, when a test revealed that none of them shared her DNA. It turned out that Fairchild’s body was populated with cells from a non-identical twin she’d unknowingly had before birth, making her, in effect, the biological aunt of her own ... | Helena de Bres | https://aeon.co//essays/being-a-twin-helpfully-cracks-open-our-ideas-of-individuality | |
Philosophy of mind | Consciousness science should move past a focus on complex mammalian brains to study the behaviour of ‘simpler’ animals | Twenty-five years ago, the burgeoning science of consciousness studies was rife with promise. With cutting-edge neuroimaging tools leading to new research programmes, the neuroscientist Christof Koch was so optimistic, he bet a case of wine that we’d uncover its secrets by now. The philosopher David Chalmers had seriou... | Kristin Andrews | https://aeon.co//essays/are-we-ready-to-study-consciousness-in-crabs-and-the-like | |
Psychiatry and psychotherapy | In the 1960s, psychedelic research was driven underground. Now it’s re-emerging – with lessons for the study of psychosis | ‘A sense of special significance began to invest everything in the room; objects which I would normally accept as just being there began to assume some strange importance.’‘I became interested in a wide assortment of people, events, places, and ideas which normally would make no impression on me. Not knowing that I was... | Phoebe Friesen | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-psychedelic-science-teach-psychiatry-about-psychosis | |
Metaphysics | Neither atheism nor theism adequately explains reality. That is why we must consider the middle ground between the two | If you’re interested in the themes of this essay, join us at Sophia Club London on 3 December 2023 to explore quantum cosmology and the origins of reality. If you don’t believe in the God of the Bible or the Quran, then you must think we live in a meaningless universe, right? People get stuck in dichotomies of thought.... | Philip Goff | https://aeon.co//essays/why-our-universe-can-have-cosmic-purpose-without-god | |
Logic and probability | Some have thought that logic will one day be completed and all its problems solved. Now we know it is an endless task | Maria is either at home or in the office. She’s not at home. Where is she? You might wonder why I started with such an unpuzzling puzzle. But in solving it, you already used logic. You reasoned correctly from the premises ‘Maria is either at home or in the office’ and ‘She’s not at home’ to the conclusion ‘Maria is in ... | Timothy Williamson | https://aeon.co//essays/more-than-argument-logic-is-the-very-structure-of-reality | |
Values and beliefs | The colourful Swiss sport of stone putting illuminates Aristotle’s insights into the shortcomings of conservative thought | Between my feet sits a 184 lbs boulder. The rock has a slightly oblong, albeit uneven shape. It’s made out of granite from the Bernese Alps, and has the years 1805 and 1905 engraved into it – historic dates of the Unspunnenfest, a celebration of Swiss cultural traditions. A few hundred spectators are here to watch the ... | Daniel Kranzelbinder | https://aeon.co//essays/how-swiss-stone-putting-shows-traditions-can-be-progressive | |
Cities | In Nanjing, Hong Kong and other Chinese cities, rapid urbanisation is multiplying a fear of death and belief in ghosts | On the 11th floor of a suburban Hong Kong tower, an 86-year-old woman lived alone in a tiny, decrepit apartment. Her family rarely visited. Her daughter had married a man in Macau and now lived there with him and their two children. Her son had passed away years earlier, and his only child now attended a university in ... | Andrew Kipnis | https://aeon.co//essays/rapid-urbanisation-is-stoking-paranormal-anxieties-in-china | |
Love and friendship | You might have the unconditional love of family and friends and yet feel deep loneliness. Can philosophy explain why? | Although one of the loneliest moments of my life happened more than 15 years ago, I still remember its uniquely painful sting. I had just arrived back home from a study abroad semester in Italy. During my stay in Florence, my Italian had advanced to the point where I was dreaming in the language. I had also developed i... | Kaitlyn Creasy | https://aeon.co//essays/how-is-it-possible-to-be-loved-and-yet-to-feel-deeply-lonely | |
Language and linguistics | For First Nations people, health is not a matter of mechanical fitness of the body, but of language, identity and belonging | Roughly 250 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory is a place called Utopia. Composed of a loose collection of sparsely populated clan sites in the inland desert, the area is the traditional homeland of the Alyawarr and Anmatyerr peoples, roughly 500 of whom still live in Utopia today. ... | Erica X Eisen | https://aeon.co//essays/language-is-at-the-heart-of-indigenous-community-health | |
Religion | Postcolonial intellectuals and Iran’s rulers agree that secularism is just Western imperialism in disguise. They are wrong | The latest waves of uprisings in Iran following the movement in defence of Iranian women’s freedoms are among the most significant since the Islamic Republic was established after the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. The regime’s resulting crackdown has led to mass arrests and prison sentences, as well as a ... | Patrick Hassan & Hossein Dabbagh | https://aeon.co//essays/secularism-in-iran-is-not-just-a-form-of-western-imperialism | |
Cities | My dad grew up in Robert Moses’s New York City. His story is a testament to how urban planning shapes countless lives | My father rollerskated on the Cross-Bronx Expressway before it opened to car traffic. Born in 1953, he would have been seven or eight when New York City’s massive thoroughfare reached the peak of its construction, facilitated by the destruction of many tight-knit Bronx neighbourhoods. He didn’t live in East Tremont or ... | Katie Mulkowsky | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-new-york-of-robert-moses-shaped-my-fathers-health | |
History of ideas | The discipline today finds itself precariously balanced between incomprehensible specialisation and cheap self-help | ‘As long as there has been such a subject as philosophy, there have been people who hated and despised it,’ reads the opening line of Bernard Williams’s article ‘On Hating and Despising Philosophy’ (1996). Almost 30 years later, philosophy is not hated so much as it is viewed with a mixture of uncertainty and indiffere... | Siobhan Lyons | https://aeon.co//essays/since-when-is-philosophy-a-branch-of-the-self-help-industry | |
Film and visual culture | It’s often said that a successful picture ‘captures the essence’ of a subject. But a great photograph does so much more | The preeminent Victorian portrait photographer Julia Margaret Cameron wrote that, when photographing important subjects, ‘my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards them in recording the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer [subject].’ Consider this portrait of Cameron’s niece, Julia Ja... | Daniel Star | https://aeon.co//essays/an-individual-cannot-be-captured-in-a-photograph | |
Work | Modern life subjects us to all-consuming demands. That’s why we should reflect on what it means to step away from it all | In a photographic exhibition titled ‘Removed’ (2015), Eric Pickersgill includes depictions of subjects in the company of other intimates, all of them captured in the act of staring blankly at their hands, where smartphones would normally be placed but have been withdrawn to create images of people alone together. Here ... | David J Siegel | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-must-seize-leisurely-interludes-from-works-confines | |
Nature and landscape | In an era of 20th-century suburban sprawl, the great designer Russell Page infused soulful philosophy into his gardens | Russell Page (1906-85) was a brooding, chain-smoking loner who somehow became one of the most glamorous landscape designers of the 20th century. Born in Lincolnshire, England, he spent much of his career in Paris and worked all over the world, travelling to southern Europe, the Americas, Australia and the Middle East. ... | Caleb Smith | https://aeon.co//essays/a-rebel-spirit-and-an-artists-eye-russell-pages-landscape-design | |
Cognition and intelligence | Maybe not, but if that’s the threshold you use for creativity in your life, you are coming at the problem all wrong | I always wanted to be a creative writer. At different points in my life, I’ve tried fiction, sports writing, poetry, journalism and plays. But in my senior year in college, I decided that I wasn’t good enough. When I thought of what it meant to be ‘a writer’, I thought of long-dead legends like William Shakespeare, Jan... | James C Kaufman | https://aeon.co//essays/you-can-be-truly-creative-if-you-let-go-of-your-assumptions | |
Space exploration | Earthbound exploration was plagued with colonialism, exploitation and extraction. Can we hope to make space any different? | When he rode to the edge of space on board Jeff Bezos’s reusable New Shepard rocket, William Shatner found the experience was not quite as he’d imagined. The Canadian actor famous for his phlegmatic captaincy of the starship Enterprise said on his return to Earth that ‘when I looked … into space, there was no mystery, ... | Philip Ball | https://aeon.co//essays/as-space-gets-more-commercial-how-can-it-be-governed-ethically | |
Consciousness and altered states | Have you been here before? The eerie sensation is the shadow of your mind searching inward for clues to its own survival | Déjà vu, the eerie sense that something new has been experienced before, has confounded us for hundreds of years. Along with the public, philosophers, physicians, intellectuals and, more recently, scientists have tried to get to the bottom of the phenomenon. Potential explanations have ranged from double perception (th... | Anne Cleary | https://aeon.co//essays/deja-vu-a-window-on-the-past-and-a-key-to-human-survival | |
Ethics | Bernard Williams argued that one’s ethics is shaped by culture and history. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is right | Travel and history can both inspire a sense of moral relativism, as they did for the Greek historian and traveller Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. What should one make of the fact that what counts as adultery, for example, differs around the world? In Lust in Translation (2007), the contemporary writer Pamela Drucker... | Daniel Callcut | https://aeon.co//essays/bernard-williams-moral-relativism-and-the-culture-wars | |
Education | Keju, China’s incredibly difficult civil service test, strengthened the state at the cost of freedom and creativity | On 7 and 8 June 2023, close to 13 million high-school students in China sat for the world’s most gruelling college entrance exam. ‘Imagine,’ wrote a Singapore journalist, ‘the SAT, ACT, and all of your AP tests rolled into two days. That’s Gao Kao, or “higher education exam”.’ In 2023, almost 2.6 million applied to sit... | Yasheng Huang | https://aeon.co//essays/why-chinese-minds-still-bear-the-long-shadow-of-keju | |
Astronomy | It’s possible that frozen worlds with subterranean oceans are incubators of organic life. But then how did life get here? | Some months ago, I went through a bunch of (virtually) piled-up research papers from my computer’s ‘important s*%t’ folder. (Please, authors of those papers, do not feel offended. I tend to name my folders in specific ways, and I guess I am not alone in this habit.) I needed some free space, and we are talking about mo... | Balazs Bradak | https://aeon.co//essays/panspermia-theory-dives-under-other-worlds-ocean-ice-crust | |
Religion | The Sunni movement of Salafism was born at the beginning of the 20th century, with the goal of modelling life on the 7th | There are tens of millions of Salafis today, male and female, and their ranks stretch from the Middle East and South Asia to western Europe and the United States. Members of this Sunni Islamic movement are bound by shared principles, including a literalist theological approach regarding God’s nature and a commitment to... | Aaron Rock-Singer | https://aeon.co//essays/a-history-of-the-modern-islamic-movement-that-is-salafism | |
Mental health | Training individuals to support one another through difficult times is a profound step forward in our mental health crisis | Diksha hasn’t been feeling like herself lately. For three weeks, she’s been unable to follow her daily routine, hasn’t felt like eating or playing with her children, and no longer sits at her bangle shop in the village market. The violence she endures at home has become more frequent, and Diksha wonders if that’s the r... | Arjun Kapoor & Jasmine Kalha | https://aeon.co//essays/how-peer-support-can-help-with-the-mental-health-care-crisis | |
Thinkers and theories | Written for laymen, read by women and kings, Christian Wolff’s mathematical method made him a key Enlightenment philosopher | Writing primarily during the first half of the 18th century, Christian Wolff (1679-1754) and his philosophical system, ‘Wolffianism’, dominated the intellectual landscape to such an extent that during his own lifetime he became one of the most influential philosophers in all of Europe. He made substantial contributions... | Michael Walschots | https://aeon.co//essays/why-we-should-recover-the-philosophy-of-christian-wolff | |
Medicine | Eager for medical breakthroughs, some doctors take enormous risks experimenting on themselves. Should we celebrate them? | A century ago, invasion of a beating heart was off limits to doctors. To pass through its pulsating walls, with scalpel or otherwise, was seen as an uncharted expedition where risk of death for the patient was exponentially high. Theodor Billroth, an early innovator of modern surgery, allegedly remarked that: ‘No surge... | Tom Doyle | https://aeon.co//essays/should-we-celebrate-the-doctors-who-experiment-on-themselves | |
Economics | Finance fraud is not a deviation from an essentially rational system but a window onto the reality-distortion of markets | When the German banking giant Wirecard collapsed in June 2020 amid a roaring fraud scandal, public opinion was shocked. The company, praised as the country’s innovative answer to the fintech industry of Silicon Valley, had been widely seen as a ‘German miracle’ following recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. Its ban... | Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou | https://aeon.co//essays/finance-fraud-is-not-a-deviation-from-the-norm-but-a-reflection-of-it | |
Space exploration | The detection of alien life won’t be obvious. It’ll be partial and inconclusive: a perfect task for the scientific method | The first images beamed back from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were filled with jewels and fire. That’s what the galaxies look like, tiny and distant, resplendent in false-colour contrast: red, gold, and white-blue. Some stretched like gummy candies from gravitational lensing. Some radiated a six-point star, t... | Jaime Green | https://aeon.co//essays/alien-life-might-not-be-something-science-can-ever-discover | |
Nations and empires | Displacing and destroying peoples by colonisation is not just a historical Western evil but a global and contemporary one | In 1931, Japan invaded northeast China and established a client state called Manchukuo (Manchuria). To secure control over Manchuria, over the next 14 years, the Japanese government lured 270,000 settlers there by offering free land to ordinary Japanese households. Japanese propaganda stressed, importantly, that this c... | Lachlan McNamee | https://aeon.co//essays/settler-colonialism-is-not-distinctly-western-or-european | |
Bioethics | Infertility treatments aim to improve women’s lives. But they risk tying womanhood to the toxic expectation of motherhood | Feminist critics first met in vitro fertilisation (IVF) developments with suspicion. Gena Corea argued that assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) would reduce women to ‘Matter’ and represented a troubling medicalisation of the reproductive process that was poised to harm women. Corea made prescient predictions that... | Gulzaar Barn | https://aeon.co//essays/how-infertility-treatments-create-life-and-reproduce-harm | |
Political philosophy | How Eugene V Debs turned American republicanism against the chiefs of capitalism – and became a true crusader for freedom | A shot rang out from the jailhouse at Woodstock, Illinois on a quiet summer’s morning in 1895. One of the inmates had pulled the trigger on an old Civil War musket after thrusting it between the iron bars of a window. The gun was fired by the union leader Eugene V Debs to mark the Fourth of July: this was no prison bre... | Tom O’Shea | https://aeon.co//essays/for-socialism-and-freedom-the-life-of-eugene-debs | |
Knowledge | Academics need to think harder about the purpose of their disciplines and whether some of those should come to an end | Right now, many forms of knowledge production seem to be facing their end. The crisis of the humanities has reached a tipping point of financial and popular disinvestment, while technological advances such as new artificial intelligence programmes may outstrip human ingenuity. As news outlets disappear, extreme politic... | Rachael Scarborough King & Seth Rudy | https://aeon.co//essays/should-academic-disciplines-have-both-a-purpose-and-a-finish-date | |
Biography and memoir | Whenever I stand in a flat landscape, I feel myself becoming weightless, taken out of my childhood full of painful nothing | At the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust centre in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, children zigzagged between the duckponds like bees performing a cryptic private dance. The sound of children screaming makes my hands judder, in half-remembered horror. But today I could bear it, because there were geese to feed; they ran after m... | Noreen Masud | https://aeon.co//essays/flat-places-are-the-ground-that-my-mind-is-built-upon | |
Music | One day, my hand stopped speaking to my brain. As a doctor and flute player, I had to understand this strange affliction | ‘All movement has a direction, and that direction obeys a motivation that is accompanied by an emotion.’– from Limitless: How Your Movements Can Heal Your Brain (2016) by Joaquín FariasThe morning after performing the concert of my life, I could no longer play the flute. The pinky and ring fingers of my left hand faile... | Lynn Hallarman | https://aeon.co//essays/dystonia-plagues-musicians-and-has-no-easy-remedies | |
Economic history | In post-communist eastern and central Europe, history is intensely personal and economics is saturated with moral feeling | In central and eastern Europe, history weighs heavily on personal relationships. When Russia first attacked Ukraine in 2014, the bonds of family and friendship – of which there were so many between these two societies – came under strain. In 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale war, these tensions became unbearabl... | Till Hilmar | https://aeon.co//essays/in-post-communist-europe-economics-is-laden-with-morality | |
Nations and empires | Imperial Russia had little access to the bountiful tropics that other empires enjoyed. So it created its own in the Caucasus | In the age of empires, seeds and saplings of tropical plants were making regular voyages throughout the world. Travelling across continents and oceans via metropolitan and colonial botanical gardens, they did not only transform, but also helped to construe the very notion of the tropics. The trans- and intra-imperial c... | Oleksandr Polianichev | https://aeon.co//essays/how-tsarist-russia-sought-to-make-a-tropics-on-the-black-sea | |
Stories and literature | Long derided as mere coincidences, acrostics in ancient poetry are finally being taken seriously – with astonishing results | Ten years ago, one of the most disruptive events in my intellectual life occurred at a dinner party at my house. My friend Richard Thomas, who had just given a talk at Baylor University, mentioned that a student of his had discovered an ‘Isaiah acrostic’ in Vergil’s Georgics, a 1st-century BCE poem ostensibly about far... | Julia Hejduk | https://aeon.co//essays/why-it-pays-to-read-for-acrostics-in-the-classics | |
Illness and disease | The culture around breast cancer is full of positivity and femininity. But it comes at the expense of the marginalised | Every day when I open my eyes, my vision bobs between my bedroom and the horizon of sheets that have crept up the bed in the night. As a result of secondary breast cancer, I am paralysed from the waist down, and can’t drag myself up in the bed, so I remain slumped, inside and outside the day. When I use the remote cont... | Philippa Hetherington | https://aeon.co//essays/how-breast-cancer-rips-up-conventional-markers-of-gender | |
Work | There is always a demand for more jobs. But what makes a job good? For that, Immanuel Kant has an answer | Work is no longer working for us. Or, for most of us anyway. Citing lack of pay and promotion, more people are quitting their jobs now than at any time in the past 20 years. This is no surprise, considering that ‘real wages’ – the average hourly rate adjusted for inflation – for non-managers just three years ago was th... | Tyler Re | https://aeon.co//essays/what-kant-can-teach-us-about-work-on-the-problem-with-jobs | |
Film and visual culture | From chopsocky films to disco earworms, Asian caricatures have proliferated since the 1970s. Can Hollywood kick the habit? | What is this and who am I? is not ordinarily a question that crosses my mind when I’m ensnared in the earthly and freaky delights of Latin American wedding perreo. But as the DJ spun the last bars of a Bad Bunny single into the uncannily familiar nine-note ‘Oriental riff’, I froze. I turned to my partner. Is this a mic... | Stephanie Wong | https://aeon.co//essays/can-pop-culture-kick-the-kung-fu-asian-stereotyping-habit | |
Philosophy of language | How Borges and Heisenberg converged on the notion that language both enables and interferes with our grasp of reality | As history’s bloodiest war metastasised from Europe outward, two men – a world apart from each other, and coming from profoundly different disciplines – converged on one fundamentally similar idea. One of the men was a poet and short-fiction writer with middling success in his own country but virtually unknown outside ... | William Egginton | https://aeon.co//essays/borges-and-heisenberg-converged-on-the-slipperiness-of-language | |
Human rights and justice | A century after the trial against ‘Ulysses’, we must revisit the civil liberties arguments of its defender, Morris Ernst | Upon its publication in 1922, critics agreed that James Joyce’s Ulysses was the masterpiece of the age. No work of literature more fully embodied the experiments in literary form essential to modernism. But even its most ardent advocates had to admit to its many Rabelaisian moments. Joyce revelled in what Edmund Wilson... | Brett Gary | https://aeon.co//essays/the-story-of-morris-ernst-who-defeated-americas-obscenity-laws | |
Archaeology | The Greeks and Romans portrayed these elusive priests as bogeymen who bathed in their victims’ blood. Who were they really? | Gaius Verius Sedatus was a respectable citizen of the community of Chartres in the early 2nd century CE. He was a member of his local town council (a sort of mini-senate), where he and his colleagues presided over its laws and management, under the aegis of Roman law. Gaul had been conquered by Julius Caesar two centur... | Miranda Aldhouse-Green | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-archaeology-tell-us-about-the-druids-dark-arts | |
Quantum theory | The concept of the atomic void is one of the most repeated mistakes in popular science. Molecules are packed with stuff | The camera zooms in on the person’s arm to reveal the cells, then a cell nucleus. A DNA strand grows on the screen. The camera focuses on a single atom within the strand, dives into a frenetic cloud of rocketing particles, crosses it, and leaves us in oppressive darkness. An initially imperceptible tiny dot grows smoot... | Mario Barbatti | https://aeon.co//essays/why-the-empty-atom-picture-misunderstands-quantum-theory | |
Thinkers and theories | In the face of climate crisis it might seem myopic but philosophers from Spinoza to Næss argue it is the only way forward | Each of us experiences the climate crisis. We try to adapt to it: buying face masks to brave smoke-filled air outdoors or air purifiers to clean it indoors, turning up the air conditioning to insulate ourselves from excessive heat, preparing to evacuate our homes, if need be, when another hurricane hits the coast. We w... | Helen De Cruz | https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-face-the-climate-crisis-with-spinoza-and-self-knowledge | |
Film and visual culture | Slum photography was at the heart of progressive campaigns against urban poverty. And it was a weapon against poor people | A photograph taken in 1880 by Bedford Lemere, a renowned architectural photography firm of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, shows a dimly lit courtyard, narrow and surrounded on three sides by worn brick buildings. Uneven paving stones lead to a passageway, through which, barely visible, a man and a child watch ... | Sadie Levy Gale | https://aeon.co//essays/slum-photos-were-weaponised-against-the-people-they-depict | |
Mood and emotion | Suffering the sudden death of a loved person leaves some survivors stuck in grief. Can they win their lives back – and how? | On a January evening in 1992, I was sitting in our kitchen, reading a comic book. My older sister Claudia went out to run an errand at a nearby minimart, just before it closed. Her keys jingled as she said goodbye and pulled the door shut. Her footsteps rushed down the stairs. A minute later, I heard her slam the garag... | Martin W Angler | https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-ease-the-seemingly-endless-pain-of-prolonged-grief | |
Global history | Is this the word we need to describe unprecedented convergences between ecological, political and economic strife? | Sometimes words explode. It is a safe bet that, before 2022, you had never even heard the term ‘polycrisis’. Now, there is a very good chance you have run into it; and, if you are engaged in environmental, economic or security issues, you most likely have – you might even have become frustrated with it. First virtually... | Ville Lähde | https://aeon.co//essays/the-case-for-polycrisis-as-a-keyword-of-our-interconnected-times | |
History of ideas | Liberal philosophy has clipped the wings of the egalitarian ideal. We should return to the bolder ideals of Iris Murdoch | The ideal of equality has broad appeal – most people in liberal democratic societies claim to endorse the principle that we should be equal before the law and that people should be treated with equal respect. Even defenders of the free market often put their case in terms of equal property rights. Yet we live in a worl... | Christine Sypnowich | https://aeon.co//essays/we-should-return-to-the-bold-egalitarianism-of-iris-murdoch | |
Palaeontology | When we think of changes in Earth’s history as changes of dynasty we miss out on understanding how life really works | The worst day in the entire history of life on Earth happened in the northern springtime. On that day, the last of the Age of Dinosaurs, a roughly seven-mile-wide chunk of rock that had been hurtling towards our orbit for millions of years slammed into Earth’s midsection and immediately brought the Cretaceous to a clos... | Riley Black | https://aeon.co//essays/earths-story-is-not-about-dynasties-but-communities | |
Political philosophy | The work of John Rawls shows that liberal values of equality and freedom are fundamentally incompatible with capitalism | Completed in 1910, the renaissance revivalist Mahoning County Courthouse in Youngstown, Ohio would make any city proud. Its Honduran mahogany, terracotta, 12 marble columns and 40-foot diameter stained-glass dome stand testament to the region’s turn-of-the-century success as a moderate industrial power. Across Market S... | Colin Bradley | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-we-learn-from-john-rawlss-critique-of-capitalism | |
Thinkers and theories | The philosopher understood that learning – of a concept, of ourselves, of each other – is the undertaking of a whole life | When I first read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, I was a student struggling to make sense of it. Now as I read it on the 70th anniversary of its posthumous publication, I am a teacher struggling to make sense of it. In my job, I teach adults who speak English – or at least have a good grasp of it a... | Calum Jacobs | https://aeon.co//essays/learning-for-wittgenstein-is-a-whole-life-undertaking | |
Psychiatry and psychotherapy | Group therapy promised to be both democratic and radical, but it failed to take hold. Has its time finally come? | The Austrian-born psychoanalyst Marie Langer began to think about how psychoanalysis might work in a more collective form in the mid-1950s. She had grown up in the politicised culture of ‘Red Vienna’ and – though trained in Freudian and Kleinian orthodoxies – her communist politics increasingly drew her to an emerging ... | Jess Cotton | https://aeon.co//essays/why-didnt-group-therapy-become-a-psychoanalysis-for-the-people | |
Nations and empires | Amid the chaos of the First World War, a new pan-Arab empire was proclaimed. It faltered, but its historical lessons remain | In December 2022, Abdullah II, the king of Jordan, gave an interview to the CNN anchor Becky Anderson. Sitting close to the Jordan River, not far from where Jesus is believed to have been baptised, this Muslim ruler expressed his concerns about the status of Jerusalem and the Christians under pressure from the new, ext... | Adam Mestyan | https://aeon.co//essays/sharif-hussein-and-the-campaign-for-a-modern-arab-empire | |
The ancient world | Passersby could wander at will into grand public libraries in imperial Rome. Could they trust what they found inside? | It’s around 200 CE, in Ephesus, an Aegean city of Greek roots, now a major hub of the Roman Empire. Meandering down marble-paved Curetes Street, a dweller is lost in the bustle of the town, procuring produce and wares in shops tucked beneath the colonnades, attending the public baths – even a conveniently placed brothe... | Fabio Fernandes | https://aeon.co//essays/romes-libraries-were-shrines-to-knowledge-and-imperial-power | |
Philosophy of religion | His name is now the byword for a fool, yet his proof for the existence of God was the most rigorous of the medieval period | I am not nearly old enough to remember dunce caps, but I do remember a pedagogical illustration of a sad little boy sitting in the corner of a classroom wearing a pointy hat while his peers gaze joyfully at their teacher. My teacher explained that the pointy hat was called a dunce cap, and was used in olden times to hu... | Thomas M Ward | https://aeon.co//essays/duns-scotus-was-no-fool-but-a-brilliant-enigmatic-thinker | |
Thinkers and theories | Twin forces marginalised the women of early analytic philosophy. Correct those mistakes, and the next generation benefits | A couple of years ago, the library of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands was subject to a massive reclassification. Hundreds of books were provisionally placed higgledy-piggledy on the shelves, atlases leaning against poetry collections, folios of sheet music wedged between a tome on malaria treatments and ... | Jeanne Peijnenburg & Sander Verhaegh | https://aeon.co//essays/the-lost-women-of-early-analytic-philosophy | |
War and peace | Anne Frank’s diary is one of thousands of desperate, secret and vivid journals each bearing witness to the reality of war | ‘I have the feeling that I am an unofficial reporter covering a shipwreck,’ wrote the Dutch Jewish journalist Philip Mechanicus on 29 May 1943, from the Westerbork transit camp on the sodden soil of Drenthe in the northeastern Netherlands. He’d been a prisoner at the camp since the previous November, after he was arres... | Nina Siegal | https://aeon.co//essays/thousands-of-desperate-vivid-diaries-remain-from-occupied-europe | |
Stories and literature | Enheduana is the first known named author. Her poems of strife and upheaval resonate in our own unstable times | About 4,200 years ago, the area we now call southern Iraq was rocked by revolts. The once-independent Sumerian city states had been brought under one rule by the legendary king Sargon of Akkad. Over the course of what modern historians call the Old Akkadian period, the reign of Sargon and his successors reshaped the ne... | Sophus Helle | https://aeon.co//essays/ancient-sumerian-poetry-turns-instability-into-cosmic-insight | |
Thinkers and theories | Ambedkar was not only a politician, but a profound thinker whose philosophy of democracy challenged the caste system | When one thinks of American pragmatism, one often puts too much emphasis on the American part. It might even stunt our enquiry, irrevocably fixating on thinkers such as John Dewey, William James, and Jane Addams. But there is more to the story of pragmatism than what happened in the United States around the turn of the... | Scott R Stroud | https://aeon.co//essays/what-ambedkar-learned-from-dewey-and-brought-to-india | |
Art | When it comes to our complicated, undecipherable feelings, art prompts a self-understanding far beyond the wellness industry | He is standing in front of an old, intricately decorated urn in a museum, looking at the images etched into its surface, when he begins to wonder: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shapeOf deities or mortals, or of both,In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?What mad pursu... | Aparna Chivukula | https://aeon.co//essays/it-is-art-not-apps-that-helps-us-with-our-complex-feelings | |
Human rights and justice | Thousands of Indigenous children suffered and died in residential ‘schools’ around the world. Their stories must be heard | Between 1890 and 1978, at Kamloops Indian Residential School in the Canadian province of British Columbia, thousands of Indigenous children were taught to ‘forget’. Separated from their families, these children were compelled to forget their languages, their identities and their cultures. Through separation and forgett... | Steve Minton | https://aeon.co//essays/we-must-not-forget-what-happened-to-the-worlds-indigenous-children | |
Religion | It took a tremendous effort to distinguish early Christianity from the finely tuned world of pagan beliefs and rituals | Christianity developed in a world with a well-articulated understanding of a multilayered and hierarchical universe that was, above all, animated. Most inhabitants of the ancient world envisioned cosmic energy as alive, meaning that the essence of physicality, spirituality and ethics rested in a host of supernatural se... | Martha Rampton | https://aeon.co//essays/early-christians-struggled-to-distinguish-themselves-from-pagans | |
Art | Noticing first one then many parrots, peacocks, owls and more birds in Old Master paintings taught me to truly see the world | I am an accidental birder. While I never used to pay much attention to the birds outside my window, even being a bit afraid of them when I was a child, I have always loved making lists. Ranking operas and opera houses, categorising favourite books and beautiful libraries – not to mention decades of creating ‘Top Ten’ l... | Leanne Ogasawara | https://aeon.co//essays/noticing-the-birds-in-great-paintings-taught-me-to-see-the-world | |
Stories and literature | In the face of an inscrutable, indifferent universe, Pessoa suggests we cultivate a certain longing for the elusive horizon | An elusive point sits on the horizon. A deep yearning stirs within to move closer to this point, perhaps in search of the unknown, perhaps in search of questions without answers. It is a yearning that will never be fulfilled. It is a point never reached. This yearning is the all-too-human inclination for our lives to s... | Jonardon Ganeri & Sarah Seymour | https://aeon.co//essays/how-to-find-a-strange-solace-in-the-indifference-of-the-universe | |
Environmental history | How the trees of China – fir, camphor, ironwood and nanmu – were used to build an empire that lasted for centuries | In 1676, the Qing navy engaged a fleet of the Zheng kingdom, a trading empire based in Taiwan that controlled sea lanes from Japan to Southeast Asia. Despite regarding the Zheng state as little more than a pirate organisation, a Qing captain had to respect the size of its fleet, describing its ships as ‘uncountable, we... | Ian M Miller | https://aeon.co//essays/the-tree-as-foot-soldier-of-chinese-merchants-and-empires | |
Information and communication | A good conversation bridges the distances between people and imbues life with pleasure and a sense of discovery | Good conversation mixes opinions, feelings, facts and ideas in an improvisational exchange with one or more individuals in an atmosphere of goodwill. It inspires mutual insight, respect and, most of all, joy. It is a way of relaxing the mind, opening the heart and connecting, authentically, with others. To converse wel... | Paula Marantz Cohen | https://aeon.co//essays/a-good-conversation-relaxes-the-mind-and-opens-the-heart | |
Human evolution | Our childhood is preposterously long compared to other animals. Is it the secret to our evolutionary success? | The average human spends at least one quarter of their life growing up. In the careful calculus of the animal kingdom, this is patently ridiculous. Even most whales, the longest of the long-lived mammals, spend a mere 10 per cent or so of their time growing into leviathans. In no other primate has the mathematics gone ... | Brenna Hassett | https://aeon.co//essays/why-have-humans-evolved-to-have-a-long-journey-to-adulthood | |
Food and drink | How French cuisine became beloved among status-hungry diners in the United States, from Thomas Jefferson to Kanye West | Fresh off a public breakdown after making antisemitic Tweets and threats, divorcing a Kardashian, and earning 60,000 votes standing for the US presidency, Ye (né Kanye West) is an intriguing figure in global pop culture. Nothing if not complex, he has won 21 Grammy awards for his music performances and productions whil... | Kelly Alexander & Claire Bunschoten | https://aeon.co//essays/on-the-united-states-enduring-love-affair-with-french-food | |
Genetics | Despite advances in molecular genetics, too many biologists think that natural selection is driven by random mutations | Since 1859, when Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was first published, the theory of natural selection has dominated our conceptions of evolution. As Darwin understood it, natural selection is a slow and gradual process that takes place across multiple generations through successive random hereditary variation... | James A Shapiro | https://aeon.co//essays/why-did-darwins-20th-century-followers-get-evolution-so-wrong | |
The ancient world | The name ‘Eutychis’ was etched into a wall 2,000 years ago. Finding out who she was illuminates the dark side of Rome | ‘Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways, 2 asses.’ This pithy graffito advertising sex for sale comes from the walls of Pompeii. The ancient Roman city was already an old town when it was destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in August 79 CE – and thus preserved for posterity. Located on the Bay of Naples, near t... | Guy D Middleton | https://aeon.co//essays/what-pompeiis-ruins-say-about-its-enslaved-prostituted-women | |
Thinkers and theories | Demonised by the political establishment for his radical, dissenting views, this 18th-century Welsh polymath deserves better | The year 2023 marks the tercentenary of the birth of the Welsh polymath Richard Price – dissenting minister, mathematician, moral philosopher, and author of influential tracts on the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. Yet he is all but forgotten. This cultural amnesia is all the more striking when ... | Huw Williams | https://aeon.co//essays/remembering-the-18th-century-radical-dissenter-richard-price | |
Economic history | The French idea of the good life doesn’t always make rational economic sense. So much the worse for traditional economics | Apparently, the Carthusian monks who distil the herbal liqueur Chartreuse have been struggling to maintain a work-life balance. Sales of the drink, which totalled $30 million in 2022, continue to bankroll the order. The brothers’ vows of solitude and silence have not prevented the company that hawks their wares, Chartr... | Charly Coleman | https://aeon.co//essays/chartreuse-economic-theology-and-the-french-spirit-of-capitalism | |
Quantum theory | Why does the quantum world behave in that strange, spooky way? Here’s our simple, four-step explanation (no magic needed) | Almost a century ago, physics produced a problem child, astonishingly successful yet profoundly puzzling. Now, just in time for its 100th birthday, we think we’ve found a simple diagnosis of its central eccentricity. This weird wunderkind was ‘quantum mechanics’ (QM), a new theory of how matter and light behave at the ... | Huw Price & Ken Wharton | https://aeon.co//essays/our-simple-magic-free-recipe-for-quantum-entanglement | |
Personality | What do the lives of twins tell us about heritability, selfhood and the age-old debate between nature and nurture? | Thirteen days before the start of the Second World War, a 35-year-old unmarried immigrant woman gave birth slightly prematurely to identical twins at the Memorial Hospital in Piqua, Ohio and immediately put them up for adoption. The boys spent their first month together in a children’s home before Ernest and Sarah Spri... | Gavin Evans | https://aeon.co//essays/what-do-twin-studies-really-say-about-identity-and-genetics | |
Virtues and vices | In the face of global challenges, Augustine offers a way between the despair of pessimism and the presumption of optimism | Russia’s war on Ukraine has left many thousands dead and millions displaced, and the threat of nuclear war has only exacerbated fear. Climate change is already wreaking havoc on ecosystems and communities, and it threatens to inflict more substantial devastation if urgent action is not taken. Racial, ethnic and gender ... | Michael Lamb | https://aeon.co//essays/what-can-augustine-of-hippos-philosophy-teach-us-about-hope | |
History | The daggers that knights carried to the crusades help us understand why they thought of holy war as an act of love | From 1096 until 1271, Christians from western Europe waged eight major wars and many smaller military operations in the Near East and North Africa that scholars now call the crusades. The spiritual leaders of the Catholic population, from the popes on down, regarded these expeditions as just and holy wars, in part beca... | William Chester Jordan | https://aeon.co//essays/what-crusaders-daggers-reveal-about-medieval-love-and-violence | |
Family life | In the eyes of the Runa people, Western kids grow up indulged, over-mothered and incapable of facing outward to the world | Imata raun paiga? (‘What is she doing?’) – my husband’s grandmother, Digna, asks him. The ‘she’ Digna is referring to is me. What I am doing is rather simple: I am wrapping my four-month-old son in a baby sling, his face toward my chest, in a calm, reassuring embrace. But my husband’s grandmother, who has raised 12 chi... | Francesca Mezzenzana | https://aeon.co//essays/why-runa-indigenous-people-find-natural-parenting-so-strange | |
Oceans and water | With care for the social and ecological consequences, foods from the ocean should provide sustainable protein to billions | Having lived nowhere other than the western coast of India for the first 21 years of my life, seafood was an indispensable part of my diet growing up. When the family business was prospering, we’d feast on plump pomfrets and juicy tiger prawns. When it wasn’t, there’d be smaller, bonier fish like anchovies and sardines... | Madhura Rao | https://aeon.co//essays/will-the-sustainable-food-of-the-future-come-from-the-blue |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.