Aeon Magazine

In a changing world, nests remain a site of safety and nurture | Aeon Essays Throughout the animal kingdom, the parents of newborns must strive to create snug sanctuaries in a hazardous world

In a changing world, nests remain a site of safety and nurture. What if the nest was not a house but a landscape? What if the nest was the world?

A riveting audiovisual dive into what makes sounds harmonious, or not | Aeon Videos Dissonance and harmony might seem straightforward, but a deep dive into the physics reveals their delightful complexity

When notes are grouped together, the result can sound resolved and pleasant, tense and harsh, or anywhere between. But what exactly makes tones played in unison consonant or dissonant, or sound distinct from one another in the first place?

Let me tell you about my journey through 35 years of Zen practice | Aeon Essays Growing up in countercultural California, ‘enlightenment’ had real glamour. But decades of practice have changed my mind

Reflecting on a journey of 35 years practicing, a Zen priest uncovers many early misconceptions, exploring how the texture and quality of his life has been transformed
buff.ly/FwoyMfC

What does it mean to say goodbye to a creature that doesn’t know you’re leaving? | Aeon Videos How do you say goodbye to a beloved dog who will never understand what that means? A meditation on the limits of language

This short documentary lingers on the quiet gestures that characterise the filmmakers relationship with her brother’s dog, while asking: how do you say goodbye to a companion who will never understand what goodbye means?

How Alex Haley wrote and reframed the life of Malcolm X | Aeon Essays Alex Haley co-wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X but Haley left out some profound elements of Malcolm’s political thought

The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) is a landmark of American literature and one of the best-selling biographies of all time. How did Alex Haley play a significant role in shaping the narrative of this iconic memoir?

The prison abolitionist who dares to envision a world without ‘unfreedoms’ | Aeon Videos The systems that make people unfree are deeply intertwined. This prison abolitionist dares to envision real alternatives

In this documentary directed by Kenton Card, the US geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore discusses how capitalism and racism intertwine to constrain lives, and how abolition is about building a better world through radical care and global equality @antipodeonline.bsky.social

What if your body unravels, but no doctor can name the disease? | Aeon Essays It took months for my functional neurological disorder to finally be diagnosed. It’s a condition that must be recognised

“We are living in an age where #disease management is increasingly technical..the #human being is progressively mathematised, viewed less as a whole person than a collection of data points subject to management & control.”: buff.ly/ceEJWnB

via @aeon.co
#healthcare #humanity #ChronicIllness

A beautiful essay by cosmologist Mark Neyrinck, full of helpful real-world analogies for explaining the shape and evolution of large-scale structure in the universe 🔭

Grief, healing and laughter coexist at a unique retreat for widows and widowers | Aeon Videos People who’ve lost an intimate partner often feel completely alone in their experience – Camp Widow helps them connect

“This moving short #documentary takes viewers inside a Camp #Widow retreat, where those who’ve lost a partner are given an opportunity to connect and access resources to help them navigate this #LifeStage.": buff.ly/B3sd7Py

from @aeon.co
#grief #loss

We need a planetary system of diplomacy for the 21st century | Aeon Essays We need new forms of global diplomacy to transcend the current pathetic bargaining of national and commercial interests

‘And here lies the heart of the problem: the Earth system is in deep crisis, but we confront it with the usual solutions of the human world.’ What might a new planetary model of diplomacy look like?

In Cameroon, truth-telling spiders untangle the future | Aeon Essays Life is complicated. In Cameroon, initiated diviners read the messages of spiders to untangle possible futures

In Cameroon, people use spider divination methods to untangle the future. What might we learn if we took such practices seriously, not as curiosities, but as alternative systems of knowledge in their own right?

After independence, Mexico was in search of identity. These paintings offered a blueprint | Aeon Videos What does it mean to be Mexican? Meet the artist who forged Mexico’s identity in the brushstrokes of his landscape paintings

In this instalment of Great Art Explained, the UK curator, gallerist and video essayist James Payne explores how José María Velasco (1840-1912), a key figure in Mexican art, used landscape painting to reflect Mexico’s evolving identity, highlighting how art fosters a shared sense of belonging

How to see the ‘cosmic web’ here on Earth | Aeon Essays What is the shape of the Universe? The answer might be found in the most unassuming places here on Earth

What if the secrets of the Universe were woven into the forests, oceans, and skies around us? The same cosmic threads shaping galaxies may also shape the patterns of life on Earth and even inside us

Living with the enduring pain of postcolonial trauma | Aeon Essays The lives of North Africans in France are shaped by a harrowing struggle to belong, marked by postcolonial trauma

The lives of North Africans in France are shaped by a harrowing struggle to belong, marked by postcolonial trauma. This archive Essay explores what Frantz Fanon’s existentialist philosophy reveals about prejudice #FrantzFanon

Drinking wine from toxic cups was the 17th century’s own dubious ‘detox’ treatment | Aeon Videos It’s so toxic, curators can’t handle it without gloves – but drinking wine from this cup was once a popular wellness trend

In this video, Angus Patterson, the senior curator of metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, explores an ‘antimonial cup’ with origins in the late 17th century and a fascinating history behind it

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s birth, we’re sharing this archive Essay on the existentialist philosophies of Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir, which offer important insights into the nature of prejudice #FrantzFanon @jonathanwebber.bsky.social buff.ly/HhoUcNp

We must stop treating victims of epistemic harm as things | Aeon Essays Any legal system that fails to compensate people for epistemic harm is unjust. Their damage must be named and remedied

To be harmed epistemically is to be humiliated and degraded as a human being; it is to be treated not as a someone but as a something. That’s why legal systems must compensate for epistemic harm

Is it time to chart a new path for xenolinguistics through sci-fi? | Aeon Essays To truly explore alien languages, linguists must open themselves to the maximum conceivable degree of cosmic otherness

my essay for @aeon.co on the science of alien languages and science fiction has gone live! This thing is over a year in the making. Give it a read and let us know what you think!

#xenolinguistics #alien #language
#scifi #philosophy #solaris

When is enjoying funny animal videos not anthropomorphism? | Aeon Essays Interpreting the emotional lives of animals requires a subtler and more nuanced understanding of anthropomorphism

We all laugh at cute animal clips, but when does enjoying them become anthropomorphism? And when is it something more meaningful?

A young Rockefeller collects art on a fateful journey to New Guinea | Aeon Videos Photos and journal entrees chronicle Michael C Rockefeller’s fateful 1961 journey to New Guinea in search of local art

Featuring personal photographs and journal entries captured by Rockefeller on his expeditions, this short film by @metmuseum.org makes for an intimate and immersive look at his encounters with Asmat culture, raising enduring questions about colonialism, exploitation and ownership

Is it time to chart a new path for xenolinguistics through sci-fi? | Aeon Essays To truly explore alien languages, linguists must open themselves to the maximum conceivable degree of cosmic otherness

If there are linguistic beings on planets in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?

What can slime mould teach us about biological memory? | Aeon Essays Certain slime moulds can make decisions, solve mazes and remember things. What can we learn from the blob?

Do you need a brain to have a memory? Slime moulds suggest not. A new @aeon.co essay by @philosobio.bsky.social aeon.co/essays/what-...

How black holes are like sea monsters at the edge of our vision | Aeon Essays Like sea monsters on premodern maps, deep-space images are science’s fanciful means to chart the edges of the known world

Visualizing black holes is a thing of its own. I wrote a thing about it in @aeon.co: aeon.co/essays/how-b...

hello, this film is free to stream on our website at the link above

Folksong is the art of hard labour, not of environmentalism | Aeon Essays Don’t be swayed by the sound of environmental protest: these songs were first sung in the voice of the cutter, not the tree

Thought I'd share a few favourite recentish pieces, to help combat my FIC (Freelancer Invisibility Complex). I really enjoyed writing this one, for @aeon.co, on folk song, labour and the environment. aeon.co/essays/folks...

Moving from Tibet to Beijing, Drolma reconciles big dreams with harsh realities | Aeon Videos Can a Tibetan singer make the leap from the slow pace of life on the Tibetan plateau to the fast rhythms of urban Beijing?

This short film follows the life of Drolma, a young Tibetan singer struggling to adapt to life in Beijing

How jazz and dolphins can help explain consciousness | Aeon Essays Is consciousness like jazz, something hard to pin down? Or is it more like the biology of dolphins, odd but natural?

’Consciousness is the taste of a lemon, the blueness of the sky’ This approach to defining consciousness is intuitively compelling, but how exactly does it work? And what kind of insight into consciousness might it deliver?

What’s so golden about the golden ratio? In this short animation by @royalsociety.org and BBC Ideas, a myth-busting investigation tells the story of a misunderstood mathematical idea buff.ly/Y4W3U0q

The word ‘cancer’ leads to overtreatment and fear. Should we drop it? | Aeon Essays Saying the word ‘cancer’ changes a person’s life and can lead to overtreatment and fear. Is the word too hot to use at all?

‘We treat not because it helps – but because the alternative feels like giving up’

Is the word ‘cancer’ doing more harm than good? Physicians routinely withheld the diagnosis, fearing that merely uttering it would extinguish all hope and hasten death. What is the way to use this word?

How Nazism ended centuries of Catholic-Protestant enmity | Aeon Essays In the 1930s, the rise of Nazism brought centuries of animosity between Europe’s Catholics and Protestants to an end. Why?

For more than four centuries, the enmity between Catholics and Protestants had been one of the organising principles of European life. But, then, in the middle of the 20th century when Nazism swept across Europe, it came to an end. How did that happen?