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Ideas can change the world

Aeon is a registered charity committed to the spread of knowledge and a cosmopolitan worldview.
But we can’t do it without you.

Aeon is a registered charity committed to the spread of knowledge and a cosmopolitan worldview. Our mission is to create a sanctuary online for serious thinking.

No ads, no paywall, no clickbait – just thought-provoking ideas from the world’s leading thinkers, free to all. But we can’t do it without you.

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Essay/Stories & Literature

Readers of the world unite

How markets, Marx, and provincial elites created world literature to fight both empire and nationalism

Martin Puchner

Essay/Philosophy of Mind

Change becomes you

Being the same person over time is not about holding on to every aspect of your current self but about changing purposefully

Kevin Tobia

Idea/Stories & Literature

This ancient mnemonic technique builds a palace of memory

Lynne Kelly

ORIGINAL
Video/Cognition & Intelligence

For millennia, we’d never seen anything like film cuts. How do we process them so easily?

7 minutes

Ideas make a difference

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Idea/Space Exploration

To find aliens, we must think of life as we don’t know it

Ramin Skibba

Video/Mathematics

Going from A to B isn’t always a straight line – but it can be very good fun

2 minutes

Essay/History

Les Anglo-Saxons

Not just American or British, the Anglo-Saxon is a mirror to Frenchness: the country’s alter-ego and most feared enemy

Emile Chabal

Idea/Travel

We have a new word for that feeling when travel makes everything new

Liam Heneghan

Video/Agriculture

One man’s quixotic quest to bring American bison to his Scottish homeland

16 minutes

Essay/Cultures & Languages

Talking gibberish

The study of languages has long been prone to nonsense. Why is linguistics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots?

Gaston Dorren

Popular this month
Essay/Cities

Return of the city-state

Nation-states came late to history, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest they won’t make it to the end of the century

Jamie Bartlett

Essay/Neuroscience

Where pain lives

Fixing chronic back pain is possible only when patients understand how much it is produced by the brain, not the spine

Cathryn Jakobson Ramin

Essay/Data & Information

The bit bomb

It took a polymath to pin down the true nature of ‘information’. His answer was both a revelation and a return

Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni

Idea/History of Science

Why religion is not going away and science will not destroy it

Peter Harrison

Idea/Stories & Literature

The 13th-century revolution that made modern poetry possible

Eric Weiskott

Video/Cosmology

We are born of supernovas – our spectacular and totally ordinary origin story

4 minutes

Essay/War & Conflict

Don’t look away

Photography came of age amid the wars and atrocities, as well as the humanitarian aspirations, of the modern world

Jeremy Adelman

Idea/History of Science

The most wonderful words in science: ‘We have no idea… yet!’

Daniel Whiteson

Video/Law & Justice

What is Mother’s Day to a child whose mother is in prison?

8 minutes

Essay/Neuroscience

Where pain lives

Fixing chronic back pain is possible only when patients understand how much it is produced by the brain, not the spine

Cathryn Jakobson Ramin

Idea/Race

How ‘white people’ were invented by a playwright in 1613

Ed Simon

Video/Philosophy of Mind

It’s easy to get caught up in constructing our selves, but what does it cost us?

3 minutes

Essay/Human Evolution

Imagination is ancient

Our imaginative life today has access to the pre-linguistic, ancestral mind: rich in imagery, emotions and associations

Stephen T Asma

Idea/Cities

This striking feature of Manila makes it an emblematic global city

Nancy Kwak

Video/Cities

In the shadows of high-rises, Shanghai’s small neighbourhoods struggle to survive

13 minutes

Essay/Stories & Literature

The coming-of-age con

How can you go about finding ‘who you really are’ if the whole idea of the one true self is a big fabrication?

Cody Delistraty

Idea/Ethics

A ‘humanely’ killed animal is still killed – and that’s wrong

Anna E Charlton & Gary L Francione

Video/Physics

Why the apparent flatness of space is an enduring cosmological mystery

4 minutes

Essay/History

The Irish diaspora

There are 70 million people around the world who claim Irish ancestry. What shaped and made the great Irish emigration?

Kevin Kenny