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Culture

Essays and videos on the arts, literature, travel, rituals and celebrations
Namesake | Aeon
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video

Earth science and climate

A biologist on the sorrows of documenting the Great Salt Lake’s collapse

6 minutes

The fate of the wild | Aeon
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video

Animals and humans

Laura fights to protect the magnificence of wild horses running free

6 minutes

The book of leaves | Aeon
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Biology

Flicker through the eclectic beauty and biological diversity of 2,400 leaves

3 minutes

The Rift | Aeon
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essay

Deep time

The Rift

Splitting the African continent, it is the only place where our human story can be read continuously from the very start

Tristan McConnell

The immediate present | Aeon
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video

Art

At 95, an artist paints swiftly to capture the fugitive light

6 minutes

Our contaminated future | Aeon
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The environment

Our contaminated future

In Fukushima, communities are adapting to life in a time of permanent pollution: a glimpse of what’s to come for us all

Maxime Polleri

Home and the birdsong | Aeon
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Nature and landscape

Home and the birdsong

In the dark, sylvan villages of medieval England, people named places after the birds that filled the night with music

Michael J Warren

Ida western exile | Aeon
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Technology and the self

One woman prepares for the risky solitude of Georgia O’Keeffe’s American West

8 minutes

A touch of moss | Aeon
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essay

Biology

A touch of moss

Inside a rainforest or on the city pavement, moss asks so little yet offers so much: a tactile encounter with time itself

Nikita Arora

Here’s to the aquapolis | Aeon
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essay

The environment

Here’s to the aquapolis

Unkempt, beguiling and lacking conventional geometry, wetlands bring a roguish, raffish wildness to the city

Tom Blass

EXCLUSIVEAgainst the tide | Aeon
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video

Subcultures

Living off-grid on a remote Scottish island is a mix of rejection and acceptance

13 minutes

A God beyond logic | Aeon
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Philosophy of religion

A God beyond logic

The history of natural theology shows that Intelligent Design and New Atheism both got it wrong, in strangely similar ways

Adam R Shapiro

Good fire | Aeon
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video

Ecology and environmental sciences

To renew Yosemite, California should embrace a once-outlawed Indigenous practice

6 minutes

James Wines: nature’s revenge | Aeon
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video

Architecture

Why a sculptor pivoted from gallery installations to big-box stores design

9 minutes

John Ruskin: in awe of nature | Aeon
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Beauty and aesthetics

For Ruskin, words couldn’t capture nature’s palette. So here it is in black and white

6 minutes

Nature does not care | Aeon
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essay

Nature and landscape

Nature does not care

Too many nature writers descend into poetic self-absorption instead of the sharp-eyed realism the natural world deserves

Richard Smyth

Pyrocene Park | Aeon
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essay

Ecology and environmental sciences

Pyrocene Park

Fire is a planetary feature, not a biotic bug. What can we learn from Yosemite’s experiment to restore natural fire?

Stephen J Pyne

Dashing to nowhere | Aeon
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essay

Travel

Dashing to nowhere

D H Lawrence’s restless travels in Sardinia were a quest for self-knowledge. The real island slipped beneath his notice

William Atkins

The painter who revolutionised landscapes | Aeon
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video

Beauty and aesthetics

Why Caspar David Friedrich pits nature’s grandeur against the humble human

7 minutes

Arctic summer | Aeon
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video

Ecology and environmental sciences

Life in one of Canada’s northernmost villages, where the land is sinking into the sea

24 minutes

Florent Vollant: I dream in Innu | Aeon
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Nature and landscape

Honouring the caribou, in dreams and memories from an Innu singer-songwriter

5 minutes

Phenomena: magnitudes | Aeon
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video

Biology

The astonishing resonances between patterns in nature, microscopic and cosmic

5 minutes

The diamond | Aeon
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video

Nature and landscape

An afternoon with hobbyist diamond miners in Arkansas is a thing of rare beauty

16 minutes

Acoustic naturalism | Aeon
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essay

Architecture

Acoustic naturalism

Our movies and offices are engineered to sound natural based on what rang false in the theatres of 18th-century Paris

Joseph L Clarke