Ross Andersen

There’s a famous scene at the end of Anna Karenina, when Levin first lays eyes on his first born. He feels a rush of emotions, but the one that stands out most is a sudden feeling of vulnerability. I remember reading that passage before I had kids, and thinking it was lovely, but it was only after I had kids that it really sunk in. Of course, Tolstoy meant vulnerability to the loss of his child, not vulnerability to his own death, but in a way, the two are connected.

When I was 17, I was in a car—driven by a fellow teenager—that rolled 4 times in the middle of the highway. The car was a top heavy SUV, and as it started to tip over after a hard swerve, I remember time slowi...

What is creativity? Wikipedia defines it as “the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.” You can see why people would be tempted to use creativity boosting drugs. Art is hard work. Original ideas are difficult to produce. There is a great deal of competition. There are smart people everywhere. Many of them are spending every waking hour trying to squeeze out new ideas. They are camping out at the frontier of human thinking, and they are performing experiments, until voila, one works, and all of the sudden, there is a new idea in the world. Many people believe that these new ideas are babies, produced by the merging of two parent ideas. ...

Last year, the philosopher Lisa Guenther wrote a stirring essay about the phenomenology of solitary confinement for Aeon. In her essay, Guenther sought to argue that solitary confinement was torture of the worst kind. Key to her analaysis was her claim that humans are relational beings. “Prisoners might enter [solitary] with good vision, good hearing, and stable mental health,” she wrote. “But the longer they remain in isolation, the greater chance their sensory awareness, cognitive ability, and emotional stability will erode. This is because, as relational be...

In his 1994 book, Collective Intelligence, French philosopher Pierre Levy argued that the 1772 publication of Frenchman Denis Diderdot and Jean d’Almbert’s Encyclopedie marked “the end of an area in which a single human being was able to comprehend the totality of knowledge.” Intellectual historians have made this announcement many times. Aristotle was once described as the last man to know everything there was to know. So were the Bacons, both Roger and Francis. Ditto for Da Vinci, Kepler, Milton, Kircher, Leibniz, Kant, Goethe, Mill, Poincare, and Weber.

Of course, no one has ever known everything. How could they? Humans don’t even know everything, collectively. Consilie...

To know whether a thing exists, we must first know what it is. There are many dictionary definitions of “wilderness,” but lets skip those and pick one with some teeth. According to The Wilderness Act, a bill that was signed into American law by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, a “wilderness” is “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

It was difficult to pass The Wilderness Act. It took eight years and more than fifty drafts. Its authors labored over their definitions, and it shows. “A community of life untrammeled by man,” has a nice ring to it. And yet, later, in a more practical section of the bill, “w...

Most days, I feel lucky to live during dynamic times. I have spent my life embedded in a culture that generates new technologies at an unimaginable rate. The Internet didn’t take off until I was an adolescent. Now it seems more fundamental to human life than heavy infrastructure. Ditto for mobile phones, our main portal to the Internet in this day and age. I got my first mobile phone a few months shy of my 18th birthday. It was a boxy thing with a green backlit screen and black calculator numerals. Now I use my phone to stream Aeon’s serene nature videos with my daughter ...

In his excellent book, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, Jim Holt says that “all men” (and presumably all women) “are beggars before this question.” What question? This one:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Why indeed? Let’s work backwards.

First off, it should be uncontroversial that there is something. Even if you’re a solipsist who is skeptical about the existence of the external world, it doesn’t take much epistemological courage to admit that you exist, or at least some hazy set ...

The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes changed my life and thinking in a very specific way. I did not discover a new personal philosophy or politics within its pages. It is not a book of great truths. It is a popular biographer’s take on a thin slice of time in the history of science. It was its aesthetic that lodged inside me. It set something to working inside my mind, something that lingered for a few years, doing lord knows what beneath the surface of my consciousness, until it breached like a Humpback whale, and rearranged my entire life.

As a ...

In a recent essay for Aeon, Karen Emslie wrote eloquently about what it is like to write in the wee hours of the night:

If I write in these small hours, black thoughts become clear and colourful. They form themselves into words and sentences, hook one to the next – like elephants walking trunk to tail. My brain works differently at this time of night; I can only write, I cannot edit. I can only add, I cannot take away.

Don Delillo called this the “night side of the mind,” and it’s one that I know well. In the middle of the ni...

My brother and I were obsessed with ninjas as kids, so I’ll give this a shot. My theory: ninjas have the same appeal that spies do, but they have three advantages over spies. For one, like a spy, they play to deep human fantasies of stealth and invisibility, but only moreseo. There is also something more elemental about a ninja’s skills, because they rely oonly n the body or ancient, rudimentary tools, instead of whiz bang technological gadgets. Finally, in the West, ninjas have (more than) a hint of the exotic, and the mystique that comes with a deep tradition, complete with its own costumes and legends.

Having said all that, doesn’t it seem like we’ve passed through peak martial ...