Aeon9h
What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction? The answer to this perennial question relies on how we understand reality itself
What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction? The answer to this perennial question relies on how we understand reality itself ...
Aeon9h
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
What drives us to create zoos and natural history museums – is it a curiosity about the world, or a need to dominate it?
Aeon11d
The power of prayer
Praying is a cognitive practice full of problem-solving resources. You can learn from it even if you don’t want to do it ...
Aeon10d
All of our religions, stories, languages and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange throughout history
All of our religions, stories, languages and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange throughout history ...
Aeon4d
What’s an ancient Greek brick doing in a Sumerian city? An archeological investigation
A British Museum curator explains why making sense of archeological ruins is like finding a single brick in a huge soil heap ...
Aeon5d
The migrants missing in Mexico, and the mothers who won’t stop searching for them
We share and feel the same pain’: the mothers looking for their children who disappeared in Mexico en route to the US ...
Aeon4d
How French modernists from Proust to Mallarmé were alarmed and inspired by the voracious dynamism of the newspaper world
In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire bemoaned what we might now call doomscrolling: Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, ...
Aeon3d
Diving into the ring of darkness beyond things easily answerable, asking ‘Why?’ questions is what make humans awesome
Imagine a planet on the far side of the galaxy. We will never interact with it. We will never see it. What happens there is irrelevant to us, now and for the conceivable future. What would you hope ...
Aeon6d
Despite decades of inaction we can avert the climate Hellocene and restore the atmosphere to keep our world habitable
is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University. He is also chair ...
Aeon13d
We surveyed thousands of scientists in four countries and learned just how important beauty is to them
is a sociologist living in South Bend, Indiana. She is the co-author of Religious Parenting: Transmitting Faith and Values in Contemporary America (2020).