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Join NOW!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.
...moreWriting 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.
...moreRebecca 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 […]
...moreAllison 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 […]
...moreMartin 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 […]
...moreAt Aeon, John McWhorter explores the twists and turns through English’s linguistic history that brought us the “deeply peculiar” language structure used today.
...moreFor 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 […]
...moreCraig 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 […]
...moreAfter 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 […]
...moreRose 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 […]
...moreThe 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 […]
...moreMya 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 […]
...moreOne thing you learn very quickly as a metaphor designer is that your language and your culture’s resources aren’t infinite. Nor are they as versatile as you might hope. The richness of the semantic resources that a designer can muster always encounter friction from the human brain’s built-in biases and preferences, as well as cultural […]
...moreWhere have all the lady hermits gone? Rhian Sasseen is on the case: For women, for most of history, it’s been mother or maiden, daughter or wife. The roles shuffle, their names and details changing, but all share one feature: which man does she care for, which man does she take care of? Woman as […]
...moreOver at Aeon, Kristin Olson looks at why early childhood memories are so forgettable; still, what’s forgotten from those milky early years may affect us into adulthood. Maybe Mozart in the womb is a little farfetched—but reading youngins stories is likely still a good idea. I can imagine them patiently feeding me the lines to […]
...moreIt’s time to shut down the comments section. And all the writers around the world rejoice. Jerkology 101: The science of sorting out your social life. E-books you can fold. Techy the Slate writer says, “Only you can prevent the viral lies.” The Internet is making your Ph.D. in English irrelevant. Or so argues The […]
...moreKeats said truth is beauty, but science disagrees. Changing technology means our writing is literally going to the crapper. Investigating the interaction between the mind and the outside world. Sussing out the Ur text of memes. What is the state of feminism in technology?
...moreWe haven’t stopped creating fairy tales and folklore—we just do it online now. For Aeon magazine, Will Wiles has a splendid longread about “creepypasta,” the phenomenon of writing and disseminating scary stories on the Internet. Their subject matter—horrific lost episodes of TV shows, malicious computer code that causes seizures—reveal how the loci of our anxieties […]
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