Aeon20h
What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction? The answer to this perennial question relies on how we understand reality itself
What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction? The answer to this perennial question relies on how we understand reality itself ...
Aeon20h
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
What drives us to create zoos and natural history museums – is it a curiosity about the world, or a need to dominate it?
Aeon4d
What’s an ancient Greek brick doing in a Sumerian city? An archeological investigation
A British Museum curator explains why making sense of archeological ruins is like finding a single brick in a huge soil heap ...
Aeon5d
The migrants missing in Mexico, and the mothers who won’t stop searching for them
We share and feel the same pain’: the mothers looking for their children who disappeared in Mexico en route to the US ...
Aeon5d
How French modernists from Proust to Mallarmé were alarmed and inspired by the voracious dynamism of the newspaper world
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, ...
Aeon4d
Diving into the ring of darkness beyond things easily answerable, asking ‘Why?’ questions is what make humans awesome
Imagine a planet on the far side of the galaxy. We will never interact with it. We will never see it. What happens there is irrelevant to us, now and for the conceivable future. What would you hope ...