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Marina Benjamin

Senior Editor, Aeon+Psyche

Marina is a former arts editor of the New Statesman and deputy arts editor of the Evening Standard newspaper in London. Her books include, Living at the End of the World which looked at end-time cults, Rocket Dreams, an off-beat elegy to the Space Age, and Last Days in Babylon, the story of the Jews of Iraq. Marina specialises in the culture of science, developmental psychology and strong personal narratives. Her acclaimed memoirs The Middlepause and Insomnia have been translated into 9 languages. Her latest memoir A Little Give will be published in 2023. She can be found on Twitter @marinab52.

Written by Marina Benjamin

Edited by Marina Benjamin

Milk, pity and power | Aeon
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Art

Milk, pity and power

Since antiquity, artists have depicted a perverse scene of a daughter breastfeeding her aged father. What does it mean?

Margie Orford

My blackness | Aeon
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Biography and memoir

My blackness

At times I’ve tried to escape it. Other times I’ve embraced it. But at all times, people have attempted to define me by it

Colin Grant

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

The first Romantics | Aeon
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History of ideas

The first Romantics

How a close group of brilliant friends, in a tiny German university town, laid the foundations of modern consciousness

Andrea Wulf

Our Earth, shaped by life | Aeon
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Earth science and climate

Our Earth, shaped by life

Darwin was the first to see that all lifeforms, from worms to corals, transform the planet. What does that mean for us?

Olivia Judson

The invention of free love | Aeon
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History of ideas

The invention of free love

Percy Shelley thought romantic love freed men and women from the strictures of monogamy, but did it free them equally?

Neil McArthur

Leave them alone | Aeon
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Stories and literature

Leave them alone

Parenting advice from D H Lawrence: don’t smother your children with love. They are more sagacious than you think

Lara Feigel

The utopian machine | Aeon
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Subcultures

The utopian machine

For children like me, growing up in an utopian community, life was a bewildering chaos of freedom and indoctrination

Susanna Crossman

A touch of moss | Aeon
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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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The environment

Here’s to the aquapolis

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

Tom Blass

Reasons to be cheerful | Aeon
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History of ideas

Reasons to be cheerful

A cheery mood, you might think, is a terribly self-absorbed response to serious times. But history tells us otherwise

Timothy Hampton

The haunted city | Aeon
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Cities

The haunted city

The city, for all its mechanical speed, artificial light and industrialisation, is the most uncanny of human habitats

Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel