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Society

Essays and videos on social issues, history, political life and the future
Lessons from the foragers | Aeon
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essay

Anthropology

Lessons from the foragers

Hunter-gatherers don’t live in an economic idyll but their deep appreciation of rest puts industrialised work to shame

Vivek V Venkataraman

Making a Go board | Aeon
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video

Making

From log to Go board – the world’s oldest game, made the old-fashioned way

20 minutes

Linda | Aeon
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video

Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Pondering the peculiar one-sided intimacy of the client-therapist relationship

3 minutes

Enter the conductrice | Aeon
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Music

Enter the conductrice

Will a new generation of women on the podium perpetuate the tyrannical charisma of their male predecessors or overturn it?

Xenia Hanusiak

Blaulicht (Blue light) | Aeon
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video

Medicine

What is it like to be a paramedic, navigating human emergency?

17 minutes

The great abandonment | Aeon
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Demography and migration

How the world’s harshest lockdown hit India’s millions of migrant workers

27 minutes

Small hours | Aeon
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video

Subcultures

The cast of ‘misfit toys’ who keep life on an idyllic tourist island afloat

7 minutes

En pointe! | Aeon
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Dance and theatre

From calluses to burnt shoes, the elegance of ballet is built from the ground up

4 minutes

Lady of the Gobi | Aeon
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video

Work

Living out of a truck, Maikhuu finds promise and peril on Mongolia’s ‘coal highway’

25 minutes

Smoke break | Aeon
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Work

Catch those idle moments of connection between coworkers on a smoke break

10 minutes

Welcome to the pros | Aeon
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Personality

Why a journeyman boxer finds contentment in the art of losing

6 minutes

What lies beneath government | Aeon
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Politics and government

What lies beneath government

Buka Town in Bougainville shows how bureaucratic states could be reimagined, not as concrete buildings but as living gardens

Gordon Peake & Miranda Forsyth

The people of the cloud | Aeon
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Computing and artificial intelligence

The people of the cloud

Hot, strenuous and unsung. There is nothing soft and fluffy about the caretaking work that enables our digital lives

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate

Help! Brain overload | Aeon
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Technology and the self

Help! Brain overload

As tasks mount up, our brain’s ability to juggle goes down. Neuroergonomic tactics can relieve the cognitive burden

Emily Willingham

Poor sleep | Aeon
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Fairness and equality

Poor sleep

Being on-call, out-of-sync and underslept is not just personal but a pervasive political injustice. Bold change is needed

Jonathan White

The chimney swift | Aeon
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video

Economic history

The perilous lives of the ‘climbing boys’ who swept chimneys in 19th-century London

5 minutes

The king of fish and chips | Aeon
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Biography and memoir

Meet Haddon Salt – the would-have-been Colonel Sanders of fish and chips

9 minutes

Departing gesture | Aeon
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Values and beliefs

A funeral director takes in bodies that social stigma leaves unclaimed

11 minutes

How we became weekly | Aeon
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Economic history

How we became weekly

The week is the most artificial and recent of our time counts yet it’s impossible to imagine our shared lives without it

David Henkin

Bug farm | Aeon
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video

Animals and humans

Familiarity breeds roach-respect, and even love, for a group of Florida insect farmers

13 minutes

The field trip | Aeon
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Work

‘Why does life have to be so complicated?’ A school trip to the world of work

12 minutes

The silent pulse of the Universe | Aeon
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video

Astronomy

Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars. The Nobel Prize went to her supervisor

16 minutes

While you were sleeping | Aeon
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Work

What is it like to clean the world for tomorrow while the rest of a city sleeps?

7 minutes

How to breathe in Kern County | Aeon
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Sports and games

After a day’s toil in California’s fields, labourers let loose in street races

9 minutes