This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...more
Posts Tagged: Aeon
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Essays
Over at The Walrus, Fatima Syed looks to build space in popular culture for depictions of different types of Muslims. With a sinking feeling, Kristen Arnett looks inside herself and finds nothing but the swamp of Florida’s influence in a reflective essay for Lit Hub. Alcy Levya launches The Rumpus’s July series, #reclaimingpatriotism2017, with a powerful essay about his duties on the front lines […]
...moreThis Week in Essays
For the Passages North blog, Jennifer Maritza McCauley discovers a connection to Rosa Parks and goes to Alabama in search of answers. Can you go home again to a place you’ve never been? Enuma Okoro writes for Aeon on moving to Nigeria to escape America’s problems.
...moreThis Week in Essays
For the office drones struggling to come back after the four-day weekend, take heart in James Livingston’s essay for Aeon considering whether work is necessary in our present age. Here at The Rumpus, Helen Betya Rubinstein expresses a sense of dislocation that’s familial and personal in the face of our newly reinforced election-cycle gender binary. For Vogue, […]
...moreThe Gender of Mothering
At Aeon, Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore writes on the language of “mothering” and the trans parents and activists seeking to define the work of mothering for themselves.
...moreDazed And Confused
The network would indeed generate a lot of wealth, but it would be wealth of the Adam Smith sort—and it would be concentrated in a few hands, not widely spread. The culture that emerged on the network, and that now extends deep into our lives and psyches, is characterised by frenetic production and consumption—smartphones have […]
...moreBefore There Were Super Bowls
It’s no surprise that a lot of us are sports junkies. Over at AnOther, Kate Little gives us the lowdown on Picasso, Hemingway, and Frank Stella and their favorite sporting pastimes.
...moreThe Newest Euphemisms
John McWhorter writes for Aeon about the evolution of euphemisms, one of the functions in a language that evolves quicker than any other.
...moreAccessing the Past through Graffiti
Writing for Aeon, historian Matthew Champion delves into contemporary research on medieval graffiti. Exploring graffiti (a visual medium) allows for historians to learn more about the actual lives of the medieval world’s largely illiterate populace.
...moreThe Fine Point of Communication
At Aeon, Thom Scott-Phillips compares words and images, literature and visual art, to reveal their complementary nature in getting to the point.
...moreA Trip to Malory Towers
At Aeon, Nakul Krishna revisits Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, a series of boarding school novels, for a glimpse at the ethics that join Blyton’s novels together.
...moreThe Cost of Gay Liberation
Jim Downs writes for Aeon on the radical socialist roots of the gay liberation movement in America, as well as the role of economics in allowing individuals to shape an openly gay identity.
...moreA Rhetorical Tragedy
We enjoy tragedy because through it, we are able to purge those aspects of ourselves with which we are most uncomfortable. Our onstage avatar embodies all those thoughts and feelings, desires and fears, ambitions and delusions with which we are most unfortunately cursed. And when fate (or the playwright) punishes her for them, we are […]
...moreA Blind Eye to History
At Aeon, Robert Neer discusses the particular absence of military history from American universities. While general history courses cover the overall societal impact of some military campaigns and political science covers the effect of military action on government, Neer notes a lack of scholarship (and scrutiny) from academics on military action since the Vietnam War.
...moreRomancing the Cure
Homer understood in the 8th century BCE what modernity has yet to accept—love can be an addiction, and when it is, we need substantial outside help. Angela Chen writes for Aeon on romantic love as addiction, and the taboos around “curing” people of romantic love.
...moreOrigins of the “Fantasy North”
E.R. Truitt writes for Aeon on the long history of the “Fantasy North,” the lands, people, and culture at the top of the world that have fascinated pop culture for centuries. Truitt also marks the points in history when the rugged, independent peoples of the Fantasy North became the chosen image of white supremacy movements […]
...moreKeep Your Secrets
For Aeon, Tiffany Jenkins writes on the importance of secrets in a person’s individual development. In addition to psychological and sociological research, Jenkins traces the vital role secrets and secret-keeping plays in classical children’s literature.
...moreIn Defense of Precisely Inexact Language
Writing for Aeon, Elijah Millgram uses 1984 and George Orwell’s Newspeak/doublethink idea of language to examine why imperfect language, and expression that is sometimes inexact, contradictory, or misleading, can be better for developing the scope of human reasoning.
...moreKilling Baby Hitler
Rebecca Onion writes for Aeon about taking the “what ifs” of history very seriously: In October 2015, when asked if, given the chance, he would kill the infant Hitler, the US presidential candidate Jeb Bush retorted with an enthusiastic: ‘Hell yeah, I would!’ Laughter was a first response: what a ridiculous question! And didn’t Bush […]
...moreLaboring for Masculinity
Allison J. Pugh writes for Aeon on the role of labor in defining American masculinity. After interviewing nearly a hundred subjects, Pugh looks at how work defines the self-worth of men, and how un/underemployed men try to redefine masculinity in light of this: What does it mean to prize something—to understand it as a primary […]
...moreThe Paradox of Growth As Good
Martin Kirk writes for Aeon on the paradoxical connection between economic growth and eliminating poverty. Kirk illustrates that increasing the size of the economic pie, by spending the world’s finite resources, with no change in distribution to impoverished populations, will not only not eradicate poverty in the near future, but will only accelerate the depletion […]
...moreDoes Anyone Speak English Here?
At Aeon, John McWhorter explores the twists and turns through English’s linguistic history that brought us the “deeply peculiar” language structure used today.
...moreChoice or Fate in Romance
For Aeon, Polina Aronson writes on the different “romantic regimes” of the world, with “regime” defined as the cultural, economic, and sociological systems behind how we engage in relationships. Aronson compares the Western “Regime of Choice” with the regime in Russian culture that, until recently, bore little resemblance to one based on choice but rather […]
...moreUnlocking the eBook
Craig Mod writes for Aeon on ebooks’ technological stagnation: …it was a stark reminder that pliancy of media invites experimentation. When media is too locked down, too rigid, when it’s too much like a room with most of the air sucked out of it, stale and exhausting, the exploration stops. And for the intersection of […]
...moreRemembering Your Online Life
After all, a toy boat is hardly its former self after a lifetime at the bottom of the sea. No matter how intact an archive, it can never fully reconstruct the texture and completeness of the original memory. For Aeon, Alana Massey writes about the long memory of the Internet and the inherent imperfections in […]
...moreIt’s Complicated, Starring Religion and Archaeology
Rose Eveleth writes for Aeon on the complicated relationship between religion and archaeology and how both have shaped how we tell the story of the world. It’s impossible to do archaeology objectively. Even determining what constitutes a sacred object is difficult…. Which interpretation is picked often depends as much on the evidence as it does […]
...moreHoaxing History
The mythology of the New World – as expansive as the continent itself – engendered a mania for magical thinking, for reinvigorating Old-World myths in a land that still felt only half-real…. a land without myths can be a lonely place. Ted Scheinman writes for Aeon Magazine on the history of archaeological hoaxes and why […]
...moreHeaven is (Probably) a Place on Earth
Mya Frazier writes for Aeon on the “heaven tourism memoir” (seen in books such as Heaven is for Real and The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven) and what its popularity as a genre suggests about the 21st century’s conceptualization of deities/gods/God. Reading these books catapulted me back into my evangelical past life, reminding me […]
...more