Aeon
-
Choice 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…
-
Unlocking 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…
-
Remembering 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,…
-
It’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…
-
Hoaxing 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…
-
Heaven 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…
-
Crafting a Metaphor
One 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…
-
Lady Hermits
Where 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:…
-
What We Remember But Don’t Remember
Over 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…
-
Weekly Geekery
It’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…
-
Weekly Geekery
Keats 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…
-
Scary Stories for a New Generation
We 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…