Aeon | a world of ideas: Recent Episodes
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Aeon is a magazine of ideas and culture. We publish in-depth essays from the world's most incisive and ambitious thinkers, and a mix of original and curated videos — free to all.
This short film is part of a unique art project that explores the question of whether ants have aesthetic preferences - by Aeon Video
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A century after the trial against ‘Ulysses’, we must revisit the civil liberties arguments of its defender, Morris Ernst - by Brett Gary
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The Greeks and Romans portrayed these elusive priests as bogeymen who bathed in their victims’ blood. Who were they really? - by Miranda Aldhouse-Green
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After surviving a plane crash, a filmmaker experiences a radical shift in consciousness and a newfound acceptance of death - by Aeon Video
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The concept of the atomic void is one of the most repeated mistakes in popular science. Molecules are packed with stuff - by Mario Barbatti
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Urban dystopia or tight-knit community? Step into Kowloon Walled City, a place shaped by geopolitics and human ingenuity - by Aeon Video
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In the face of climate crisis it might seem myopic but philosophers from Spinoza to Næss argue it is the only way forward - by Helen De Cruz
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How the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland provides freedom and space for artists with disabilities to develop their craft - by Aeon Video
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Slum photography was at the heart of progressive campaigns against urban poverty. And it was a weapon against poor people - by Sadie Levy Gale
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Suffering the sudden death of a loved person leaves some survivors stuck in grief. Can they win their lives back – and how? - by Martin W Angler
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Bubbles of paint form an otherworldly visualisation of the ambient music of Brian Eno in this short film - by Aeon Video
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Is this the word we need to describe unprecedented convergences between ecological, political and economic strife? - by Ville Lähde
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Tearing down ideas is central to scientific practice, but when it bleeds into the interpersonal, science loses its humanity - by Aeon Video
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Liberal philosophy has clipped the wings of the egalitarian ideal. We should return to the bolder ideals of Iris Murdoch - by Christine Sypnowich
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In this 1969 clip, English children give answers to questions on religion with unguarded, and often quite amusing, candour - by Aeon Video
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When we think of changes in Earth’s history as changes of dynasty we miss out on understanding how life really works - by Riley Black
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The work of John Rawls shows that liberal values of equality and freedom are fundamentally incompatible with capitalism - by Colin Bradley
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A 1,000-year-old tale of love, murder and loyalty from the Icelandic sagas comes to life in the words of a modern storyteller - by Aeon Video
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The philosopher understood that learning – of a concept, of ourselves, of each other – is the undertaking of a whole life - by Calum Jacobs
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From a crescent to a W to a heart, pupil shape indicates what animals eat, what eats them, and how they see the world - by Aeon Video
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Group therapy promised to be both democratic and radical, but it failed to take hold. Has its time finally come? - by Jess Cotton
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Behind the hype of the Google engineer who claimed an AI was ‘sentient’ is a history nearly as old as computers themselves - by Aeon Video
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Amid the chaos of the First World War, a new pan-Arab empire was proclaimed. It faltered, but its historical lessons remain - by Adam Mestyan
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Passersby could wander at will into grand public libraries in imperial Rome. Could they trust what they found inside? - by Fabio Fernandes
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How economic, political and religious upheavals in the 16th century left their marks on the canvases of European painters - by Aeon Video
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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 - by Thomas M Ward
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Weaving aurora-like animations with historic footage, the artist Asinnajaq envisions a hopeful future for Inuit people - by Aeon Video
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Twin forces marginalised the women of early analytic philosophy. Correct those mistakes, and the next generation benefits - by Jeanne Peijnenburg & Sander Verhaegh
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What the sleeping minds of nonhuman animals, from cetaceans to primates, might tell us about their possible dreamworlds - by Aeon Video
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Anne Frank’s diary is one of thousands of desperate, secret and vivid journals each bearing witness to the reality of war - by Nina Siegal
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Enheduana is the first known named author. Her poems of strife and upheaval resonate in our own unstable times - by Sophus Helle
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A pensive reflection on childhood homes – from a bedroom above a pub to a castle estate – shaped by the contours of Ireland - by Aeon Video
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Ambedkar was not only a politician, but a profound thinker whose philosophy of democracy challenged the caste system - by Scott R Stroud
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A Dutch filmmaker’s quest to document and explain the fleeting ‘green flashes’ known to illuminate his native horizons - by Aeon Video
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When it comes to our complicated, undecipherable feelings, art prompts a self-understanding far beyond the wellness industry - by Aparna Chivukula
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A rare portrait of tree-sitters reveals the survival skills and quiet determination it takes to protect redwoods from loggers - by Aeon Video
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Thousands of Indigenous children suffered and died in residential ‘schools’ around the world. Their stories must be heard - by Steve Minton
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Can an argument for democracy be based on a mathematical theorem? From Plato’s tyrants to Condorcet’s ‘jury theorem’ - by Aeon Video
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It took a tremendous effort to distinguish early Christianity from the finely tuned world of pagan beliefs and rituals - by Martha Rampton
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The teenage busboy who comforted a potential US president – how Juan Romero’s life changed the day Robert F Kennedy was killed - by Aeon Video
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Noticing first one then many parrots, peacocks, owls and more birds in Old Master paintings taught me to truly see the world - by Leanne Ogasawara
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A ‘realistic utopia’ is within reach – look to the philosophy of John Rawls to help build a more equal and just society - by Aeon Video
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In the face of an inscrutable, indifferent universe, Pessoa suggests we cultivate a certain longing for the elusive horizon - by Jonardon Ganeri & Sarah Seymour
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How the trees of China – fir, camphor, ironwood and nanmu – were used to build an empire that lasted for centuries - by Ian M Miller
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What questions does the wild horse that came back from extinction raise about the role of captive breeding in conservation? - by Aeon Video
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A good conversation bridges the distances between people and imbues life with pleasure and a sense of discovery - by Paula Marantz Cohen
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On a whirlwind ride through New York City, the philosopher Cornel West navigates our search for meaning - by Aeon Video
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Coming of age without his late mother, a young autistic man writes her a heartfelt letter, full of poignance and persistence - by Aeon Video
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Our childhood is preposterously long compared to other animals. Is it the secret to our evolutionary success? - by Brenna Hassett
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How French cuisine became beloved among status-hungry diners in the United States, from Thomas Jefferson to Kanye West - by Kelly Alexander & Claire Bunschoten
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An ode to the timeless beauty of Istanbul, pulsing with 2,900 images of Islamic, Ottoman, Greek and Byzantine designs - by Aeon Video
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Despite advances in molecular genetics, too many biologists think that natural selection is driven by random mutations - by James A Shapiro
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A discovery with potentially mind-boggling implications about the behaviour of matter at the quantum and astronomical scales - by Aeon Video
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The name ‘Eutychis’ was etched into a wall 2,000 years ago. Finding out who she was illuminates the dark side of Rome - by Guy D Middleton
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The daughter of a Black freedom fighter and Holocaust survivor shares her father’s deeply poignant, improbable life story - by Aeon Video
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Demonised by the political establishment for his radical, dissenting views, this 18th-century Welsh polymath deserves better - by Huw Williams
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The French idea of the good life doesn’t always make rational economic sense. So much the worse for traditional economics - by Charly Coleman
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Enter MIT’s Voxel Lab where students build strange instruments, make novel sounds – maybe even find music’s next big thing - by Aeon Video
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Why does the quantum world behave in that strange, spooky way? Here’s our simple, four-step explanation (no magic needed) - by Huw Price & Ken Wharton
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What being a body means in the world: a philosophical stroll through San Francisco with Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor - by Aeon Video
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What do the lives of twins tell us about heritability, selfhood and the age-old debate between nature and nurture? - by Gavin Evans
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Meet the forest that a community brought back to life on the slopes of a volcano in a hopeful story of ecological restoration - by Aeon Video
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In the face of global challenges, Augustine offers a way between the despair of pessimism and the presumption of optimism - by Michael Lamb
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The daggers that knights carried to the crusades help us understand why they thought of holy war as an act of love - by William Chester Jordan
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The perilous journey of one ‘freedom swimmer’ – along a route traversed by 2 million others – from China to Hong Kong - by Aeon Video
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A master sculptor ‘nibbles away’ at a block of marble to recreate dazzling scenes of light and shadow from a Donatello relief - by Aeon Video
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Why my Runa Indigenous family and friends found my child-centred, ‘natural’ parenting practices so strange and troubling - by Francesca Mezzenzana
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An original and poignant meditation on loss and the unknowable inner lives of the sheep that roam a Shropshire gravesite - by Aeon Video
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With care for the social and ecological consequences, foods from the ocean should provide sustainable protein to billions - by Madhura Rao
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For the ‘sworn virgins’ of Albania, dressing and acting like men offered a degree of autonomy in a deeply patriarchal society - by Aeon Video
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Long a matter of philosophical speculation, the idea of multiple realities has been given new artistic licence by physics - by Timothy Andersen
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A postcard from Mars on the logistical, genetic and ethical implications of raising children beyond our home planet - by Aeon Video
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Asian sailors came to the west coast of America in 1587. Within a century they were settled in colonies from Mexico to Peru - by Diego Javier Luis
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Some of the earliest known photographs of Athens, Jerusalem, Rome and more illuminate life on the Mediterranean in the 1840s - by Aeon Video
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This radical movement makes space for people with mental health and other challenges to study (and celebrate) themselves - by Satsuki Ayaya & Junko Kitanaka
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Men in ancient Greek art exercise, fight battles, pursue lovers and mourn lost friends, all without their pants on. Why? - by Sarah Murray
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How an atomic interaction – not sticky feet – makes geckos world-class climbers, and is inspiring new human technologies - by Aeon Video
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Even if we ‘solve’ global warming, we face an older, slower problem. Waste heat could radically alter Earth’s future - by Mark Buchanan
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For ‘wifi refugees’, a small Appalachian town built around a massive telescope has become a rare safe haven from modernity - by Aeon Video
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By day an insurance official, by night Franz Kafka was an insomniac scribe of the liminal space between waking and dreaming - by Ross Benjamin
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For hundreds of years, Christians knew exactly where heaven was: above us and above the stars. Then came the new cosmologists - by Stephen Case
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‘You cried and I didn’t know how to soothe you’ – the raw poetry of a new mother’s struggle to breastfeed her baby - by Aeon Video
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The concept of geopolitics comes from German and Russian attempts to explain defeat and reverse loss of influence - by Harold James
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What did the Rosetta Stone actually intend to say, and what can it tell us about the ancient Egyptians who inscribed it? - by Aeon Video
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Often vilified as a weapon of male supremacy, pornography in fact has much to tell us about ourselves and our culture - by Kathleen Lubey
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How the advent of consciousness 500 million years ago gave way to an evolutionary ‘arms race’ in sophisticated thinking - by Aeon Video
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Subjecting the problems of ethics to the cool quantifications of logic and probability can help us to be better people - by Elad Uzan
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A dragon needs the clouds and the wind in order to fly. What happens when we too relinquish individualistic reasoning? - by Mercedes Valmisa
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How Descartes took the world apart to reconstitute it anew, laying the foundations for modern philosophy and science - by Aeon Video
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The Roman Empire enabled an early version of globalisation that offered travellers adventure, novelty and opportunity - by Fabio Fernandes
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Welcome to Block Island: holiday hotspot for wealthy tourists, and seasonal home for the workers who keep the place running - by Aeon Video
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For thousands of fans, he made philosophy thrillingly relevant. Yet there is a deep unsavoury undercurrent to his worldview - by Jules Evans
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A filmmaker turns his lens on the beauty of family life as he tries to make sense of his parents’ decision to die together - by Aeon Video
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Darwin was the first to see that all lifeforms, from worms to corals, transform the planet. What does that mean for us? - by Olivia Judson
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An unsparing animation depicts the hell of the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath, as told by one of its survivors - by Aeon Video
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Alethic nihilism is the theory that nothing is true. There is much to gain by taking this radical idea seriously - by David Liggins
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From tasting feet to electric navigation: the wild world of animal senses lies beyond the limits of human sensory experience - by Aeon Video
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The Universe cannot always be understood through observation. Instead, physicists explore by devising thought experiments - by Michael Dine
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It all begins with the sheep who wears the fleece: a seafaring ode to the sweater that’s warmed Cornish sailors for centuries - by Aeon Video
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Evidence is growing that mental illness is more than dysfunction, with enormous implications for treatment - by Justin Garson
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Disturbing and inhaling radioactive dust, in their haste Russian soldiers unburied the wrecked, undead Earth itself - by Michael Marder
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How Emory Douglas, the revolutionary artist behind the Black Panthers, created an iconography of resistance and defiance - by Aeon Video
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The gifts we exchange are both generous and yet fraught with social rules and obligations. Marcel Mauss explained why - by Gili Kliger
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Travel by snowmobile through a pristine white landscape in north Quebec in search of the dozens of Inuit words for snow - by Aeon Video
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Percy Shelley thought romantic love freed men and women from the strictures of monogamy, but did it free them equally? - by Neil McArthur
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‘Emancipation is curiously coupled with risk’ – one woman’s exploration of the beauty, solitude and perils of the US West - by Aeon Video
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As corporations struggle to survive in a more uncertain world, they should look to the success of the Society of Jesus - by Paolo Quattrone
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A manual produced for emperors to decode the stars, the Astronomicum Caesareum is also an extraordinarily beautiful book - by Aeon Video
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When a young street vendor found her name in a guidebook to the sex workers of Paris, she couldn’t live with the shame - by Amanda E Herbert & David N Woodworth
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Sappho was a priestess of love, whose homoerotic poetry was revered in ancient Greece – and burned centuries later - by Aeon Video
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The ultimate value of the world can be discovered if you are sensitive to what is beautiful - by Tom Cochrane
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Nature is full of symmetries, from spiral galaxies to florets of broccoli. So why do complex creatures break the pattern? - by Aeon Video
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The Buddha taught not to kill, yet his followers have at times disobeyed him. Can murderers still be Buddhists? - by Martin Kovan
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Bruno Latour showed us how to think with the things of the world, respecting their right to exist and act on their own terms - by Stephen Muecke
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From the camera-shy to the natural-born performers, close-up, slow-motion footage reveals the varied wonders of insect flight - by Aeon Video
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Good art, laced with irony, ambiguity and suspense, is not obviously political. That’s what makes it politically interesting - by Vid Simoniti
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Binary legal verdicts give rise to injustices. Could an alternative system reflecting degrees of uncertainty be more just? - by Aeon Video
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It’s shocking that histories of medieval philosophy celebrate only Christian thinkers, ignoring Islamic and Jewish thought - by Yitzhak Y Melamed
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A bustling day at the farmers market prompts reflections on the journey of fresh produce from field to kitchen and beyond - by Aeon Video
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As Brontosaurus tells us, in science as in fiction, the stories we tell to understand the world are always being revised - by Nathaniel Goldberg & Chris Gavaler
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Sewn, cut, burnt – for ballet dancers, preparing their shoes is a meditative process that reveals the grit beneath their grace - by Aeon Video
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James Lovelock was a visionary whose greatest ideas were made possible by his unshakeable independence - by Roger Highfield
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Superhero visuals animate the identity quest of Timothée, born after a hook-up between an Iraqi refugee and a Jewish Parisian - by Aeon Video
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The mystery of why Judas forsook Jesus goes to the heart of Christianity. A newly translated gospel offers a new view - by David Brakke
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The heartbreaks and boredom of life on the ‘coal highway’, where truck drivers eke out a living in industrialising Mongolia - by Aeon Video
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A warming planet and acid oceans will radically transform marine ecosystems. How will our beloved reefs survive? - by Klaus M Stiefel & James D Reimer
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Our future in space relies on settling the Moon and using it as a base to probe the deepest questions in the cosmos - by Joseph Silk
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The philosopher A C Grayling explains why the question ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’ isn’t even worth asking - by Aeon Video
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Authoritarian leaders who play the religious card are not mere hypocrites. There’s something far more troubling going on - by Suzanne Schneider
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Parenting advice from D H Lawrence: don’t smother your children with love. They are more sagacious than you think - by Lara Feigel
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Are you a person in a universe or brain in a void? How logicians, cosmologists and philosophers tackle Boltzmann’s paradox - by Aeon Video
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Centuries of capitalism saw the global countryside ruthlessly converted into cheap commodities. But at what cost? - by Sven Beckert & Ulbe Bosma
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‘I’m noticed for that hour’: for an ageing art model, the careful attention of others prompts a frank evaluation of her body - by Aeon Video
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The story of a working-class radical from Ireland who became a celebrated monk and challenged the British Empire in Asia - by Laurence Cox
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Unfiltered footage of solar flares is a reminder of the processing behind most space images – and the raw power of the Sun - by Aeon Video
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An evolutionary approach to consciousness can resolve the ‘hard problem’ – with radical implications for animal sentience - by Nicholas Humphrey
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Attaining and maintaining power lies at the heart of almost all animal societies. And it’s as devious as human politicking - by Lee Alan Dugatkin
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Metamorphosis or ruin? A poetic, up-close look at the hidden work of rot asks us to reconsider our relationship with decay - by Aeon Video
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For children like me, growing up in an utopian community, life was a bewildering chaos of freedom and indoctrination - by Susanna Crossman
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An animator’s ethical conundrum: how does he depict an Autistic person without reducing him to a caricature? - by Aeon Video
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Thousands of victims of political executions lie in anonymous graves. Forensics offers hope for the ‘forgotten’ ones - by Nicole Iturriaga
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‘It was a very spiritual thing to do.’ How Black Londoners built a community – and their houses – from the ground up - by Aeon Video
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Naturists believed nudity was profoundly beneficial to society. In order to spread the message, they took to photography - by Annebella Pollen
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Running images through an AI feedback loop generates a trippy wave of visuals unbound from the world of human aesthetics - by Aeon Video
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The neuroscientific picture of addiction overlooks the psychological and social factors that make cravings so hard to resist - by Zoey Lavallee
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Two 90-year-old women remember the clothes, manners and copious mud of Victorian London when they were teenagers - by Aeon Video
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Eric Voegelin and Hans Kelsen fled the Nazis. In the US, they clashed over the nature of modernity and government - by David Dyzenhaus
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‘It’s a celebration of gender’: when a couple sets out to raise their baby gender-neutral, there are joys and complications - by Aeon Video
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For over a century telemedicine has promised healthcare for all. But will it ever replace seeing a human being in person? - by Jeremy A Greene
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‘If you got pregnant, that was a crime’: uncovering the Catholic zealotry and cruelty of Ireland’s ‘mother and baby homes’ - by Aeon Video
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Ken Burns’s account of prohibition tells a popular story of booze in America. The historical record is far more sobering - by Mark Lawrence Schrad
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How Hegel’s ‘notoriously obscure’ philosophy of history revolutionised the world via Marx, as explained by Peter Singer - by Aeon Video
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Science and mathematics may never fully capture the physical universe. Are there hard limits to human intelligence? - by David H Wolpert
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Is history a matter of individual agency and action, or of finding and quantifying underpinning structures and patterns? - by Claire Lemercier & Claire Zalc
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‘You are all children of the atomic age’: an award-winning 1982 documentary shows the horrors of full-scale nuclear war - by Aeon Video
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Unkempt, beguiling and lacking conventional geometry, wetlands bring a roguish, raffish wildness to the city - by Tom Blass
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Trek light years into deep space to explore time dilation and the ‘twin paradox’ at the centre of special relativity - by Aeon Video
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The more we understand how cells produce shape and form, the more inadequate the idea of a genomic blueprint looks - by Philip Ball
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How a journeyman boxer gave up on the dream of a heavyweight title, and found contentment in being a professional loser - by Aeon Video
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People with multiple chemical sensitivity seem to be allergic to the world. What, if anything, can medicine do for them? - by Xi Chen
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After a breakup, Gill moved to an an off-the-grid community on the Scottish island of Erraid. Six months on, can she stay? - by Aeon Video
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His communism brought the great American singer Paul Robeson trouble in the US, but helped make him a hero in China - by Gao Yunxiang
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Pauline Kael was a legendary film critic. But first, she wrote programme notes for a beloved arthouse cinema in California - by Aeon Video
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Could primordial black holes from the beginning of time explain ‘dark matter’, the mysterious missing mass in the Universe? - by Briley Lewis
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‘You can smile at the past but longing is for the memory you don’t have yet’ – a rabbi and poet on two years of isolation - by Aeon Video
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It is unjust, cruel and profoundly wasteful to consign a person to prison for life. A decent society must not do it - by Judith Lichtenberg
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The Philippine eagle is the world’s largest and rarest. Can incredible close-up images save this masterpiece of nature? - by Aeon Video
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Buddhist monks have mostly escaped the label of proselytisers, but they’ll still spread the word to those who seek them out - by Brooke Schedneck
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When AIs visit a modern art museum, their reactions are both funny and revealing of the imperfect humans who trained them - by Aeon Video
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