Close

Become a Friend of Aeon to save articles and enjoy other exclusive benefits

Support Aeon
×
Newsletter Privacy Policy

Aeon email newsletters are issued by the not-for-profit, registered charity Aeon Media Group Ltd (Australian Business Number 80 612 076 614). This Email Newsletter Privacy Statement pertains to the personally identifying information you voluntarily submit in the form of your email address to receive our email newsletters

More generally, when visiting the Aeon site you should refer to our site Privacy Policy here.

This Email Newsletter Privacy Statement may change from time to time and was last revised 5 June, 2018.

By clicking ‘Subscribe’ you agree to the following:

  • We will use the email address you provide to send you daily and/or weekly email (depending on your selection). We also send occasional donation requests and, no more than once a year, reader surveys.
  • The email address/es you provide will be transferred to our external marketing automation service ‘MailChimp’ for processing in accordance with their Privacy Policy and Terms. We use MailChimp to issue our newsletters, donation requests and reader surveys. We have no control over, and assume no responsibility for, the conduct, practices or privacy policies of MailChimp.

Unsubscribing

You can change your mind at any time by clicking the ‘unsubscribe link’ in the footer of emails you receive from us, or by contacting us at support@aeon.co 

If you want to review and correct the personal information we have about you, you can click on ‘update preferences’ in the footer of emails you receive from us, or by contacting us at support@aeon.co

Security of your personal information

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. We have taken reasonable measures to protect information about you from loss, theft, misuse or unauthorised access, disclosure, alteration and destruction. No physical or electronic security system is impenetrable however and you should take your own precautions to protect the security of any personally identifiable information you transmit. We cannot guarantee that the personal information you supply will not be intercepted while transmitted to us or our marketing automation service Mailchimp.

Sharing your personal information 

We will not disclose your personal information except: (1) as described by this Privacy Policy (2) after obtaining your permission to a specific use or disclosure or (3) if we are required to do so by a valid legal process or government request (such as a court order, a search warrant, a subpoena, a civil discovery request, or a statutory requirement). We will retain your information for as long as needed in light of the purposes for which is was obtained or to comply with our legal obligations and enforce our agreements.

Access to your personal information

You may request a copy of the personal information we hold about you by submitting a written request to support@aeon.co We may only implement requests with respect to the personal information associated with the particular email address you use to send us the request. We will try and respond to your request as soon as reasonably practical. When you receive the information, if you think any of it is wrong or out of date, you can ask us to change or delete it for you.


Forgotten things

5 minutes

Commodity city

10 minutes

Can apes really ‘talk’ to humans?

8 minutes

Flawed

13 minutes

The Night Watch

8 minutes

What was it like to go to the movies in January 1940?

Movie theatres have historically been places of psychological escape. But even cinemas weren’t safe havens from real-world anxieties during the Second World War – a time when newsreels brought foreboding images of death, destruction and unease to the masses before the full-length feature. Using found footage, Forgotten Things examines the intersection of film with history’s deadliest conflict, highlighting the acute anxiety of a time when nearly everyone on the planet was either at, or seemingly just on the verge of, total war.

Director: Nate DiMeo

Website: The Memory Palace

What was it like to go to the movies in January 1940?

Movie theatres have historically been places of psychological escape. But even cinemas weren’t safe havens from real-world anxieties during the Second World War – a time when newsreels brought foreboding images of death, destruction and unease to the masses before the full-length feature. Using found footage, Forgotten Things examines the intersection of film with history’s deadliest conflict, highlighting the acute anxiety of a time when nearly everyone on the planet was either at, or seemingly just on the verge of, total war.

Director: Nate DiMeo

Website: The Memory Palace

Five miles of fake flowers, cat cushions and muzak: enter the world’s largest market

The Yiwu International Trade City in China is the world’s largest wholesale market for consumer goods, stretching some five miles and featuring roughly 75,000 vendors. The Chinese-American filmmaker Jessica Kingdon’s observational documentary Commodity City employs static shots of everyday scenes from the market – mostly without dialogue – to convey the seemingly endless stretches of vendor booths that specialise in everything from cat pillows to Santa figurines. Through these vignettes, Kingdon captures the incongruous interplay of boredom and commerce, vastness and claustrophobia that characterises this otherworldly space, offering a hypnotic anthropologic exploration of consumer culture and capitalism.

Director: Jessica Kingdon

Producers: Daniel Cooper, Kira Simon-Kennedy

People have been trying to talk with apes for nearly a century. How far have we got?

Since the early 20th century, a number of curious (and sometimes ethically dubious) psychological studies have tried to figure out if we can communicate with great apes using language. In the 1970s, the answer was reported to be an unequivocal ‘yes’ after Koko, a female western lowland gorilla, learned to sign at her handler, a graduate student at Stanford University, using a modified version of American Sign Language. But more recent critiques of the Koko studies (and others) dispute the idea that great apes have had truly meaningful two-way language communication with humans. This video from NPR’s Skunk Bear offers a brief survey of the history of ape-human communication research, suggesting that ‘Can we talk with them?’ might be the wrong question to ask.

Video by Skunk Bear

Producers: Ryan Kellman, Adam Cole

There’s nothing like falling for a plastic surgeon to help you embrace your body as it is

After meeting a potential romantic partner – ‘the nicest guy in the world’– while on vacation, the Canadian filmmaker Andrea Dorfman had a difficult time reconciling everything she liked about him with her judgment of his work as a plastic surgeon. Although most of his work was reconstructive, she couldn’t kick the feeling that the cosmetic surgeries he performed made people feel imperfect, sending the message that some body shapes are better than others. In her charming, vulnerable and heartfelt animated film Flawed, Dorfman sketches out the story of their romance in time-lapse watercolour animations that recreate how the two corresponded with handmade postcards as she confronted insecurities from childhood that challenged her ideas about herself. Flawed was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy Award following its 2010 release.

Director: Andrea Dorfman

Producer: Annette Clark

Website: National Film Board of Canada

How Rembrandt used light and motion to make a mundane commission a masterpiece

The oil painting Militia Company of District II Under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (1642), better-known as The Night Watch, is probably Rembrandt’s most famous work. Its status and critical acclaim, though, have little to do with its subject matter: a civic-guard group tasked with keeping watch on the city walls. In 17th-century Amsterdam, it was highly common for these guilds – mostly well-off men who rarely saw anything resembling conflict – to commission portraits of themselves wearing their uniforms and holding weapons. So why has The Night Watch endured while so many similar portraits have drifted into obscurity? In this video essay, Evan Puschak (also known as the Nerdwriter) examines how Rembrandt’s riveting interplay of light, motion, texture and expression transformed a commonplace commission into a masterwork.

Video by The Nerdwriter

Get Aeon straight
to your inbox
Join our newsletter
Aeon is not-for-profit
and free for everyone
Make a donation
Essay/
Political Philosophy
The voice of Hobsbawm

How the Marxist ideas of a British historian ended up on the bookshelves of Indian civil servants and Brazilian housewives

Emile Chabal

Essay/
Religion
Christian Zionism

It’s one of the most successful, and in some ways unlikely, interfaith movements in the modern world

Dan Hummel