Why large language models are mysterious – even to their creators | Aeon Videos
River bank or bank account? How chatbots learned to make the quantum leap to context by...
Commitment and cooperation: a coevolutionary relationship | Aeon Essays
Though natural selection favours self-interest, humans are extraordinarily good at cooperating with one another. Why? -...
Havana’s streets become racetracks in this exhilarating portrait of children at play | Aeon Videos
In this immersive portrait of play, children transform the streets of Havana into a racetrack with...
How did rape become a feature of Indian society, like caste? | Aeon Essays
When I moved to India for work, I found that rape was a cultural feature of...
Through rituals of prayer, a monk cultivates a quietly radical concept of freedom | Aeon Videos
‘I think that freedom everywhere, anywhere is love.’ Father Giles, a monk for 47 years, shares...
How humanity moved from ‘eternal’ to ‘bookended’ time | Aeon Essays
Nothing lasts forever: not humanity, not Earth, not the Universe. But finitude confers an indelible meaning...
To better understand the world, follow the paths of mathematics | Aeon Essays
In order to bridge the yawning gulf between the humanities and the sciences we must turn...
The many ways a lizard tongue sticks, grasps, pinches and plops – in slo-mo | Aeon Videos
Striking slow-motion footage captures the awesome evolutionary diversity – and handy usefulness – of a lizard’s...
How the scientists of the 1960s turned the Moon into a place | Aeon Essays
For most of history, the Moon was regarded as a mysterious and powerful object. Then scientists...
‘To my old master’ – a freed slave answers the request to return to his old plantation | Aeon Videos
‘Will you send us our wages for the time that we served you?’ A freed slave...
For Mary Midgley, philosophy must be entangled in daily life | Aeon Essays
For Mary Midgley, the Western philosophical tradition is shaped by the fact that its greatest practitioners...
A ceramicist puts her own bawdy spin on the folk language of pottery | Aeon Videos
A ceramicist puts a playful twist on Italian Renaissance pottery with dirty jokes, emojis and colourful...
What makes a person poor and what should we do about it? | Aeon Essays
By understanding the pernicious myths surrounding poverty, we can make progress towards a lofty goal: dignity...
Villagers struggle to keep their beloved, endangered ape population afloat | Aeon Videos
Humans are both the gravest threat and the greatest hope for the survival of the rare...
When it comes to pornography, what’s the harm in looking? | Aeon Essays
Moral panics about erotica have coursed through the country’s history. Why do so many Americans think...
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement | Aeon Videos
A history of the ‘exquisite corpse’ in art shows how it embodies surrealist ideas of freedom,...
Investigating the roots of the natural/supernatural dichotomy | Aeon Essays
The modern era is often seen as the triumph of science over supernaturalism. But what really...
Why Susan listens to recordings of herself speaking a language she no longer remembers | Aeon Videos
In animations that evoke the fog of memory, Susan returns to her childhood in Korea, speaking...
Why does the world have such an intense stake in Israel/Palestine? | Aeon Essays
More than any other conflict, Israel/Palestine has provoked extraordinarily fervent emotion throughout the world. Why? -...
What Amazonian lives tell us about heart health and longevity | Aeon Essays
Humans always end up with clogged arteries, right? That’s not what the lives of the Tsimane...
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age? | Aeon Videos
Is privacy inherently valuable, or just one more variable in a society’s blueprint? The philosophers’ view,...
Rilke and the art of listening as a way to shape the cosmos | Aeon Essays
It is the dark matter of conversation, the white space around a poem. For Rilke, listening...
Starlings swoosh like brushstrokes across the sky in this dazzling short | Aeon Videos
A filmmaker collaborates with a murmuration of starlings to create spellbinding visuals at the intersection of...
The case for subspecies – the neglected unit of conservation | Aeon Essays
To lump or to split? Deciding whether an animal is a species or subspecies profoundly influences...
‘Astonished and somewhat terrified’ – Victorians’ reactions to the phonograph | Aeon Videos
Hear echoes of the Victorian age, captured in some of the world’s first audio recordings, in...
Pundits and historians declare neoliberalism over: Mexico begs to differ | Aeon Essays
The case of Mexico shows that, despite a proliferating discourse that it is over, neoliberalism is...
The neglected ‘laws’ of chemistry – and why they matter | Aeon Essays
Often dismissed as the poor cousin of the sciences, chemistry has revealed natural laws that illuminate...
From simple motors to levitating trains – how design shapes innovation | Aeon Videos
An inventor traces the evolution of a single engineering idea, from Michael Faraday’s first motors to...
Why Brazil fell for Pentecostalism but not liberation theology | Aeon Essays
How Pentecostalism’s prosperity gospel replaced Catholic liberation theology in Latin American life - by Elle Hardy...
How an artist transformed a dilapidated hunting lodge into a house made of dreams | Aeon Videos
Take a trip to Luna Parc, New Jersey, a former hunting lodge, now part living museum,...
I am a better therapist since I let go of therapeutic theory | Aeon Essays
For twenty years, I was a practising psychotherapist. Today I believe it has no foundation in...
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control? | Aeon Videos
What drives us to create zoos and natural history museums – is it a curiosity about...
Before you define fiction, check your metaphysical assumptions | Aeon Essays
What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction? The answer to this perennial question relies on how we understand...
If you ask ‘Why?’, you’re a philosopher, and you’re awesome | Aeon Essays
Diving into the ring of darkness beyond things easily answerable, asking ‘Why?’ questions is what make...
What’s an ancient Greek brick doing in a Sumerian city? An archeological investigation | Aeon Videos
A British Museum curator explains why making sense of archeological ruins is like finding a single...
The French modernists loathed and loved the mass media of their day | Aeon Essays
How French modernists from Proust to Mallarmé were alarmed and inspired by the voracious dynamism of...
The migrants missing in Mexico, and the mothers who won’t stop searching for them | Aeon Videos
‘We share and feel the same pain’: the mothers looking for their children who disappeared in...
We can still get out of the climate Hellocene and into the clear | Aeon Essays
Despite decades of inaction we can avert the climate Hellocene and restore the atmosphere to keep...
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity | Aeon Videos
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith agreed that vanity was all too human. But one saw it...
How moral resilience helps nurses work through ethical strife | Aeon Essays
Nurses experience deep suffering when they can’t act according to their moral compass. Our research shows...
There are no pure cultures - we have always been global | Aeon Essays
All of our religions, stories, languages and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange...
The tree frog die-off that sparked a global mystery – and revealed a dark truth | Aeon Videos
Returning to the cold case of the disappearing frogs of Costa Rica, a biologist reveals a...
Why prayer is a problem-solving practice that works | Aeon Essays
Praying is a cognitive practice full of problem-solving resources. You can learn from it even if...
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us | Aeon Videos
The history, development and force of the sublime in Western art shows how what we fear...
How the search for beauty drives scientific enquiry | Aeon Essays
We surveyed thousands of scientists in four countries and learned just how important beauty is to...
From Afghanistan to Virginia – the Muslims who fought in the American Civil War | Aeon Videos
The stories of two Muslim immigrants who fought for the Union show that the American Civil...
When women’s needlework becomes an act of subversive protest | Aeon Essays
Knitting and embroidery are laden with stereotypes of domestic femininity – and the subversive potential for...
History is always political, and contest over it is a good thing | Aeon Essays
In his work on republicanism as a living idea, J G A Pocock showed that contesting...
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor | Aeon Videos
The self-sacrifice of ants to save their colonies is an allegory and a euphemism in one...
How the novel became a laboratory for experimental physics | Aeon Essays
By testing the boundaries of reality, Spanish-language authors have created a sublime counterpart to experimental physics...
