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Death | Death rites have become private and tepid affairs. The Burning Man Temple brings a fiery edge to modern mourning | Just after sunrise, I cycled towards the Temple of Juno, a pagoda-like structure obscured in the distance by the desert haze of dust. It was a long ride from my camp at the corner of Lilac and 3:30 streets in Black Rock City. I rode by a steel dragon the size of a school bus which blasted electronica as dancers swayed ... | Sarah Pike | https://aeon.co//essays/the-burning-mans-temple-goes-up-in-a-blaze-of-grief | |
Biology | Dogs rescue their friends and elephants care for injured kin – humans have no monopoly on moral behaviour | When I became a father for the first time, at the ripe old age of 44, various historical contingencies saw to it that my nascent son would be sharing his home with two senescent canines. There was Nina, an endearing though occasionally ferocious German shepherd/Malamute cross. And there was Tess, a wolf-dog mix who, th... | Mark Rowlands | https://aeon.co//essays/if-a-lion-did-a-good-deed-would-we-understand-it | |
Architecture | Nature conservation is still obsessed with the pristine. It needs to learn to love this mongrel world | The scene could have been repeated in a thousand protected areas in Africa: a small line of visitors walking carefully in the savannah, accompanied by a local game guard with a rifle. We were approaching an old female elephant on foot, in an area set aside for wildlife in a remote corner of the Zambezi Valley. I had se... | Bill Adams | https://aeon.co//essays/the-wilderness-fetish-is-bad-for-people-and-for-the-planet | |
History | We take Pericles’ funeral oration out of context at our peril. For a true picture of war, read Thucydides to the end | When a memorial to the Royal Air Force Bomber Command opened in Green Park in London in June this year, it was greeted with a cacophony of debate. Discussions of its message and architectural merit became entangled almost immediately with a renewed dispute over the morality of Britain’s bombing campaign in Dresden duri... | Neville Morley | https://aeon.co//essays/there-is-a-sting-in-the-tale-we-use-to-remember-the-fallen | |
Wellbeing | Solitude is enlightening but if it does not lead us back to society, it can become a spiritual dead end | ‘I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.’ Henry David Thoreau’s remark about his experience of solitude expresses many of the common ideas we have about the work — and the apparent privileges — of being alone. As he put it so vividly in Walden (1854), his classic accoun... | John Burnside | https://aeon.co//essays/the-allure-and-danger-of-the-solitary-life | |
Gender and identity | Despite so many threats to their freedom, Arab women continue to stage a thousand small revolutions in their everyday lives | The face, a nod to her Egyptian mother, is pharaonic, curls freefalling all around it. The muscles packing her body betray countless hours of toil in the pool, on the bench press, on her feet — running. Her attire is as blunt in its skimpiness as Jordan, where she lives, is adamant in its conservatism. But while the lo... | Amal Ghandour | https://aeon.co//essays/inch-by-inch-what-next-for-the-women-of-the-arab-spring | |
Food and drink | An exquisite, luxurious meal is an ephemeral pleasure – but perhaps that’s the point. So is the human condition | We have taken our places. This evening’s performance, sold out months in advance, is about to begin. The programme, handwritten in a traditional script on a rolled parchment, tied with string, tells us to expect a prologue, two chapters and an epilogue, without interval. I’m nervous with anticipation but I’m somewhat e... | Julian Baggini | https://aeon.co//essays/the-most-expensive-evening-of-my-life-was-it-worth-it | |
Deep time | A chronicle of climates past and a portent of climates to come – the telling rings of the bristlecone pine | No event, however momentous, leaves an everlasting imprint on the world. Take the cosmic background radiation, the faint electromagnetic afterglow of the Big Bang. It hangs, reassuringly, in every corner of our skies, the firmest evidence we have for the giant explosion that created our universe. But it won’t be there ... | Ross Andersen | https://aeon.co//essays/trees-of-deep-time-are-a-portal-to-the-past-and-the-future | |
Biography and memoir | As a road cuts into their rainforest home, the Mayagna people consider how much modernity they really want | The road through the jungle from the gold-rush town of Bonanza to the tiny Mayagna settlement of Sunawas is dead straight. If you know Nicaragua at all this would strike you as very odd. Another striking thing about this particular highway is its colour. Here, where it rains 340 days a year and the eye is bombarded by ... | Melanie McGrath | https://aeon.co//essays/what-does-progress-mean-for-the-mayagna-of-nicaragua | |
Consciousness and altered states | What is the greatest human gift? It is metaphor, carrying a cargo of meaning across the oceans that divide us | Eros is coursing through the forest. The forest is mewing with its jaguar life. Life is spiralling into poetry. I am in the other world, I thought, at once in the actual forest and in the forests of the mind where the visible world is not denied but augmented. I had gone to the Peruvian Amazon seeking treatment from fo... | Jay Griffiths | https://aeon.co//essays/how-the-jaguar-shamans-took-the-arrows-from-my-mind | |
Demography and migration | Spanish high spirits die hard, but when a generation is moving overseas or in with parents, the party can’t last | Few occupations are as frenetic and time-consuming as job hunting. During a week in Estepa, a small hilltop town known as ‘the heart of Andalusia’, I anticipated boundless horizons of enforced idleness. Unemployment is 33 per cent in southern Spain. It seemed reasonable to assume that there would be limitless time to s... | Dan Hancox | https://aeon.co//essays/can-ailing-spain-keep-its-young-and-its-spirit | |
Ethics | Can private charity eliminate world poverty – or is it about making the givers feel better about themselves? | Place your hand on your heart, and repeat after me: ‘I recognise that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good in the developing world. Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that from today until the day I retire, I shall give at least 10 per cent of what I earn to whichever o... | Edward Marriott | https://aeon.co//essays/taking-the-pledge-tithing-makes-a-comeback | |
Architecture | Old ideas of balance and harmony need to be put aside if we are to save a natural world in constant flux | One day this summer my younger son Oisín and I strayed from a heavily wooded trail on the Muckross peninsula in Ireland’s Killarney National Park and entered a narrow limestone cave. The entrance was fringed with vegetation, a pelt of moss on the rock, tendrils of tree roots exposed, so that entering that cave felt lik... | Liam Heneghan | https://aeon.co//essays/nature-is-out-of-balance-but-it-s-still-worth-saving | |
Philosophy of science | For decades the sciences and the humanities have fought for knowledge supremacy. Both sides are wrong-headed | Whenever we try to make an inventory of humankind’s store of knowledge, we stumble into an ongoing battle between what CP Snow called ‘the two cultures’. On one side are the humanities, on the other are the sciences (natural and physical), with social science and philosophy caught somewhere in the middle. This is more ... | Massimo Pigliucci | https://aeon.co//essays/why-should-science-have-the-last-word-on-culture | |
Economics | Following decades at the heart of government thinking, there are signs that neoliberalism is giving way | Consider the following developments in UK policy. Last year, Britain’s Office for National Statistics published its first ever set of ‘national well-being’ indicators, which were based on surveys of how satisfied people felt with their lives. Next year, it will be illegal to sell a bottle of wine in Scotland for less t... | William Davies | https://aeon.co//essays/where-does-the-state-look-when-it-cant-trust-markets | |
Stories and literature | ‘An observer in armed conflict – there’s danger, yes, that’s true – but it’s managed’ | BLUE ROAN All winter, Father’s home-made caravan stands empty among Mother’s hives. Home is The School; the walls are dark rough pink like the ex-army roan gelding in the livery yard next door. Damp, most of the time for this is Carlisle, you don’t often see sun. Father is Headmaster so he’s free – he’s the favourite c... | Ruth Padel | https://aeon.co//essays/poems-blue-roan-care-of-the-voice-a-trip-to-the-moon | |
Computing and artificial intelligence | The very laws of physics imply that artificial intelligence must be possible. What’s holding us up? | It is uncontroversial that the human brain has capabilities that are, in some respects, far superior to those of all other known objects in the cosmos. It is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the... | David Deutsch | https://aeon.co//essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artificial-intelligence | |
Astronomy | Astro-tourism, air travel and nifty apps gave Venus’s 2012 transit a democratic edge over astronomy’s historic heroism | I awoke on the morning of June 5 in a bottom bunk of the ‘Monastery’ at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. This small dormitory has housed a pantheon of astronomers over the past hundred years, including Edwin Hubble, whose private library survives intact behind a locked door at one end of the building. I had ... | Dava Sobel | https://aeon.co//essays/burning-love-what-venus-tells-us-when-the-planets-align | |
Values and beliefs | High priests, holy writ and excommunications – how did Humanism end up acting like a religion? | In February this year, there was a clash of Titans. In one corner, Richard Dawkins, former Oxford professor, Darwinian biologist, brilliant science writer, scourge of the sloppy, and above all the Platonic Form of Atheist. In the other, Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, himself no intellectual slouch, ac... | Michael Ruse | https://aeon.co//essays/how-humanism-lost-its-way-in-a-charismatic-crusade | |
Consciousness and altered states | Ineffable encounters and moments of ego-transcendence can be quite matter-of-fact. What’s really going on? | There are two kinds of experience, both of which have happened to me several times, and I can’t explain either of them. In fact, I could make up any number of explanations for them on the spot: they may be mysterious but they’re not mystical, and they don’t make me suspect for a moment that anything inexplicable is goi... | Ken MacLeod | https://aeon.co//essays/an-enormous-presence-like-the-shimmer-of-heat-in-air | |
Automation and robotics | The 15-hour working week predicted by Keynes may soon be within our grasp – but are we ready for freedom from toil? | I first became an economist in the early 1970s, at a time when revolutionary change still seemed like an imminent possibility and when utopian ideas were everywhere, exemplified by the Situationist slogan of 1968: ‘Be realistic. Demand the impossible.’ Preferring to think in terms of the possible I was much influenced ... | John Quiggin | https://aeon.co//essays/the-time-is-right-to-reclaim-the-utopian-ideas-of-keynes | |
Neuroscience | Neuroscience is changing the meaning of criminal guilt. That might make us more, not less, responsible for our actions | In the summer of 2008, police arrived at a caravan in the seaside town of Aberporth, west Wales, to arrest Brian Thomas for the murder of his wife. The night before, in a vivid nightmare, Thomas believed he was fighting off an intruder in the caravan – perhaps one of the kids who had been disturbing his sleep by revvin... | Stephen M Fleming | https://aeon.co//essays/will-neuroscience-overturn-the-criminal-law-system | |
Cognition and intelligence | The ways in which jumping spiders see and map the world help to illuminate the mystery of human memory | A few years ago a message from God was found in a tomato in Yorkshire. The Arabic letters were clearly visible, for those who could see them, spelt out in two halves of mesocarp, endocarp and seeds cradled within mandalas of indigestible skin. At least two explanations come to mind. One is that the Supreme Being sees f... | Caspar Henderson | https://aeon.co//essays/an-enigmatic-spider-and-the-fragile-threads-of-human-memory | |
The environment | Wind farms are good for the world but hard on the heart. A lover of wilderness reshapes her own instinct for beauty | It is pale dawn and I am climbing steadily up through wet chilly bracken and across patches of sheep-cropped green grass. As I get higher, long views of peat moorland open around me: up and down, green and gold and beige and brown. I can see no houses (there are only 10 in the surrounding 30 square miles — a widely dis... | Sara Maitland | https://aeon.co//essays/overblown-and-under-loved-wind-farms-at-the-edge-of-beauty | |
Consciousness and altered states | How I found my way out of depression, thanks to the writings of the English priest who brought Buddhism to the West | Ever since I was a child, I have been acutely sensitive to the idea — in the way that other people seem to feel only after bereavement or some shocking unexpected event — that the human intellect is unable, finally, to make sense of the world: everything is contradiction and paradox, and no one really knows much for su... | Tim Lott | https://aeon.co//essays/alan-watts-the-western-buddhist-who-healed-my-mind | |
Knowledge | Speaking from the heart? Politicians who don’t want us questioning their facts rely on a time-honoured American trope | In response to a leaked video in which he claimed that 47 per cent of Americans are ‘dependents,’ the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney did not choose to clarify his facts. He could have said that this number came from the Tax Policy Center, which also found that most households in that 47 per cent do pay p... | Benjamin Y Fong | https://aeon.co//essays/the-heart-has-its-reasons-of-which-reason-knows-nothing | |
Fairness and equality | Back from Afghanistan, a former Marine bears witness to the estrangement of the home front | If you’re fortunate enough to visit the Kunsthaus Zürich in Switzerland, odds are you’ll saunter by Max Beckmann’s Strandpromenade Scheveningen with little more than a passing glance. I don’t blame you. The permanent collection is massive and stocked with works of far greater seductive power. But the scene of a young m... | Lyle Jeremy Rubin | https://aeon.co//essays/an-afghanistan-veteran-on-the-bubble-of-the-home-front | |
Childhood and adolescence | Schools are in the business of forming character – so what kind of people will thrive in the 21st century? | We live in a morally bashful age. Perish the thought that anyone might try to impose their values on anyone else. Trying to ‘adopt the moral high ground’ sounds, to modern ears, arrogant or hubristic. You risk becoming a figure of fun, like a Speakers’ Corner tub-thumper. Education colludes with this squeamishness by p... | Guy Claxton | https://aeon.co//essays/a-life-of-tests-is-no-preparation-for-the-tests-of-life | |
Ethics | A former vegan who now hunts deer is troubled by what it takes to put food on our plates | Once upon a time, I believed in the tidy taxonomy of the grocery store. In the meat coolers, near the back of the store, I could find Animalia: beef steaks, pork chops, chicken legs, and fish fillets. In other coolers, along a side wall, I could find gentler products from that same kingdom: eggs, milk, yogurt, and chee... | Tovar Cerulli | https://aeon.co//essays/a-plate-of-salad-is-not-as-innocent-as-it-seems | |
Future of technology | Is there anything left for the green movement to do but assuage its grief in ritual and myth? | In late August, on a hillside in England’s South Downs where the sun beat down through the trees in stunning shafts, I wandered off to find a secluded place. The other members of my group had fanned out. Every now and then I would glimpse them through the woods. I pressed on until they disappeared from view, then picke... | Ed Lake | https://aeon.co//essays/a-dispatch-from-the-wild-frontiers-of-uncivilisation | |
Architecture | We can build structures that last for centuries, but can we connect with our distant descendants? | Make a model of the world in your mind. Populate it, starting with the people you know. Build it up and furnish it. Draw in the lines that connect it all together, and the ones that divide it. Then roll it into the future. As you go forward, things disappear. Within a century or so, you and all the people around you ha... | Marek Kohn | https://aeon.co//essays/who-do-we-care-about-when-we-care-about-the-future | |
Human rights and justice | The ruling that Anders Breivik is sane leaves his ideas unchallenged. We need a new verdict for crimes of vainglory | Anders Behring Breivik has been declared sane and criminally responsible for the murder of 77 innocents. But the debate about our proper response to him and other such killers will continue, for the simple reason that they present us with a grim dilemma. This can perhaps best be seen in the terrible irony that the surv... | Stephen Cave | https://aeon.co//essays/could-the-law-make-us-forget-anders-breivik | |
Demography and migration | Despite its turmoil, ever more people are risking their lives to enter Greece. Welcome to Europe’s most porous border | It’s 9.30pm and I am in a police station in Didimoticho, a Greco-Turkish border town on the far northeastern edge of mainland Greece. The border is new, Thrace historically having been carved up between Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria. Outside in the dark the rainstorm is easing, so the night patrol might happen after all.... | Helena Drysdale | https://aeon.co//essays/greeces-other-crisis-coping-with-a-rising-tide-of-immigrants | |
Ecology and environmental sciences | We picture ancient Britain as a land of enchanted forests. That’s a fantasy: axes have been ringing for a very long time | As part of a recent walk across England, I entered the Chilterns from their western edge, above the Thames Valley. Because the beech trees were climbing with me up the side of the hill, they had to grow even higher to reach the sunlight. The effect was spectacular: the tall beeches disappearing for nigh-on 100ft up int... | Hugh Thomson | https://aeon.co//essays/who-chopped-down-britains-ancient-forests | |
Art | As the boundaries between digital and physical dissolve, can the New Aesthetic help us see things more clearly? | Shoreditch, east London, is home to a remarkable cluster of technology start-ups. Dozens of web and ‘new media’ firms, including Last.fm and TweetDeck, set up shop here and make this grimy but beguiling district their home. No one decided this would happen. It was urban alchemy — the chance intersection of multifarious... | Will Wiles | https://aeon.co//essays/what-do-we-uncover-when-we-look-through-digital-eyes |
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