Aeon

Since its inception in 2012, Aeon has become a distinctive online magazine that features some of the most insightful and thought-provoking content available. We delve into significant questions and seek out fresh, original perspectives from prominent experts in fields such as science, philosophy, society, and the arts. Aeon offers three channels, all of which are completely free for readers: Essays – In-depth investigations of complex topics, crafted by talented and thoughtful writers. Ideas – Brief, engaging pieces that uphold Aeon’s high editorial quality while delivering content in a quicker format. Our Ideas are shared under a Creative Commons licence, allowing for easy republication.

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What Stendhal says about the purpose and promise of art

6 days ago | aeon.co | Robert Zaretsky

On 22 January 1817, Henri Beyle’s heart was beating fast. Not because he had braved the robber-infested road from Bologna, but because he was now approaching the city of Florence. Glimpsing ‘like some darkling mass’ the monumental dome, conceived by Filippo Brunelleschi, sitting atop the Santa Maria del Fiore, this first sight of the Tuscan city dazzled him. ‘Behold the home of Dante, of Michelangelo, of Leonardo da Vinci,’ the 30-something Frenchman thought to himself.
To survive the Chaoscene, we will need resilient communities

3 weeks ago | aeon.co | Rupert Read

Where the danger grows, there also grows the saving power. – From ‘Patmos’ (1803) by Friedrich HölderlinThe fad in recent years for largely virtual ‘communities’ of interest across the world is an artefact of a temporary moment in human history, a moment wherein elevated technological progress coincided with a lack of substantial blowback from the waste products of that ‘progress’. That moment is coming to an end, most obviously through the rapidly rising tide of climate disasters.
Would you eat a cockroach? What if it was sterilised? Why not? | Aeon Essays

1 month ago | aeon.co | Alexandra Plakias

The future of food is nutritious and sustainable – if we can overcome our instinctual revulsion to insects and lab-grown meat
Why physics today stands on the wings of angels and demons

1 month ago | aeon.co | Rebekah Wallace

What do the angelic forces of the Heavenly Host have to do with orgasms? The answer, according to the 12th-century philosopher and theologian Maimonides, was simple. Some invisible forces that caused movement could be explained by God working through angels.
Thought-tinkering – the Korean German philosopher Byung-Chul Han | Aeon Essays

2 months ago | aeon.co | Josh Cohen

I came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. My first researches into our culture of overwork and perpetual stimulation soon turned up Han’s The Burnout Society, first published in German in 2010.
Commitment and cooperation: a coevolutionary relationship

2 months ago | aeon.co | Saira Khan

Every week at the office, you and your fellow employees have meetings to discuss progress on group projects and to divide tasks efficiently. Perhaps in the evening, you go home and cook dinner with your partner. At least once in your life, you might have seen a team of firefighters work together to extinguish a fire at a burning house and rescue those inside. You have probably also witnessed or participated in political demonstrations aimed at bettering the treatment of those in need.
The French modernists loathed and loved the mass media of their day

Jan 16, 2025 | aeon.co | Max McGuinness

In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire bemoaned what we might now call doomscrolling:Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity. And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … I do not understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.
We can still get out of the climate Hellocene and into the clear

Jan 14, 2025 | aeon.co | Rob Jackson

Whoosh. Our boat rocks a bit when a pink river dolphin surfaces and blows just a paddle’s length away. We’re in a low, open boat in western Brazil, a few hundred miles downriver from the borders of Colombia and Peru. As a climate scientist at Stanford University, I’m here with colleagues at the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve deep in the Amazon to build new towers for monitoring emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, two of the world’s most powerful greenhouse gases.
History is always political, and contest over it is a good thing

Dec 19, 2024 | aeon.co | Rosario López

At present, describing historians as political actors evokes bias, political manoeuvring and a lack of critical thinking. This description conjures up historians merely as political pundits, rummaging through history in search of evidence to support their own political goals and potentially falling into presentism.
Visit the small Texas community that lives in the shadow of SpaceX launches | Aeon Videos

Dec 17, 2024 | aeon.co

A portrait of the Texas coastline occupied by SpaceX reveals the footprints we leave on Earth in the quest to reach beyond it