‘A Marxist before Marx, an anarchist before anarchism, an evolutionist before Darwin.’ Mostly forgotten by mainstream culture, the rural French priest Jean Meslier’s work was visionary and radical – and has outlasted attempts to erase him from history

The ‘worst’ and ‘best possible’ job at once: what it’s like to dedicate your life to documenting crimes against humanity.

Tech titans claim the science fiction genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future. An Essay by @alirizataskale.bsky.social

In today’s Essay, the science writer Ananya Palivela explores the history of astronomers' obsession with Venus and what it reveals about science.

Tech billionaires didn’t misread science fiction. They performed an edit: keeping the frontier, the visionary, the chrome; cutting the public institution, the collective, and the warning. Every. Single. Time. My new piece is now up in Aeon.

Over the last 90 years, vast swathes of Louisiana’s coastline have disappeared. In the short documentary ‘What Remains’, the filmmaker Pavoo Hanninen captures a simple yet effective effort to preserve and restore this coast: recycling oyster shells

At the turn of the 20th century, there was more than just coffee brewing in the cafés of central Europe – from the Modernist movement in Vienna to political turmoil in Belgrade, two coffee cultures were on a collision course that would light the fuse for the First World War

In this Aeon Exclusive Video, the animator Aurelijus Čiupas ponders his purpose as a conjurer of images amid the rapid rise of AI tech with seemingly infinite image creation capacities

A couple of years ago I started wondering why I was spending so much time on hobbies cosplaying obsolete jobs. This is a go at an answer: I'm in the grips of *skill nostalgia*, and the problem is to avoid it becoming reactionary. It turns out John Ruskin (??) has the answer aeon.co/essays/the-r...

A few years ago, my mum started ghosting me, without ever explaining why. I’ve written a piece for @aeon.co about how this estrangement created an odd kind of amnesia. It explores the role family narratives play in our identity - and what happens when they crumble aeon.co/essays/when-...

Tech billionaires like to claim their work is inspired by science fiction, but in truth, they are using its ‘chrome-plated aesthetic’ as a fig leaf to further what the social theorist Ali Rıza Taşkale labels ‘reactionary futurism’

Patricia Evangelista is an investigative journalist who has extensively reported on the so-called war on drugs in the Philippines. In this video, Evangelista reflects on the purpose of her work and the extraordinary toll it can take

In the wake of being ghosted by his mother, the science writer David Robson noticed a strange phenomenon: as she disappeared from his life, so did his sense of a coherent life narrative. Read here: buff.ly/epZK0Ou

From confirmation bias to loss aversion, everyone suffers from cognitive biases. Skilfully targeted mindfulness can help. An Essay by Stephanie Dorais

Is all the beekeeping, baking and leatherwork just escapist fantasy or the start of a radically human approach to work? An Essay by @impractknow.bsky.social

Hidden within the rings of ancient trees is an archive stretching back thousands of years. Today’s Essay explores the exciting discoveries dendrochronologists have made through decoding these rings. buff.ly/rmzOhXq

In this Essay, Oxford ecosystem science professor, Yadvinder Malhi presents a new metric which asks not only how wealthy or healthy societies are, but what kinds of landscapes, cities and planetary relationships their prosperity produces

My new essay for @aeon.co out today explores what Sartre got right & wrong about freedom and anguish in a lecture so packed that 30 chairs got broken & 15 people passed out! aeon.co/essays/re-re...

Human prosperity depends on nature, but no global metric has captured this with precision. Enter the Nature Relationship Index. An Essay by Yadvinder Malhi

The testimonies of Ukraine’s war widows reveal the mortal risk of love and the possibility of dying while alive: a black pain. An Essay by Julie Reshe

‘Society, in fact, is neighbourhoods’ – how Karl Hess transformed from a Republican speechwriter into a radical welder

In the shattered aftermath of war, Sartre delivered a formidable lecture on freedom and meaning. Its urgency remains. An Essay by @skyecleary.bsky.social

Hand-painted animations bring to life Isamu Noguchi’s ideas for playgrounds that could integrate art with everyday life.

When 13 billion years of the cosmos get condensed into 10 epic minutes, when in the timelapse do you think humans appear?.

I'm thrilled to share my new essay in @aeon.co Who are The Fire Tamers? For the past year, I travelled through salt marshes, visited remote farmhouses & oncology clinics to uncover the secret world of French healers working in parallel with conventional medicine. aeon.co/essays/who-a...

Drawn from childhood memories and shared stories, Maryam Mohajer’s ‘And Granny Would Dance’ captures the world through the eyes of six-year-old Marmar as she watches her grandmother and her friends gather over cards, tea and conversation

How do you distinguish an outlandish dream from a life you can reasonably build? For Pierre Bourdieu, the answer was found in the subconsciously encoded ‘rules of the game’ that shape our lives. This short video essay by Lewis Waller offers an accessible introduction to this idea

We think of them in separate categories, but police officers and soldiers share something essential with cartel members: 'They are all specialists in violence,' the sociologist @rgzepeda writes. In this incisive Essay, Gil explores what drives young men to pursue a career in violence

From science to literature, moments of insight allow us to notice likenesses where before we saw none – and from that new connection, we see new meaning. Read more in today’s Note to Self:

This short documentary finds a man who goes by the name of Hat in a remote stretch of the American West, where he’s built a humble life ‘off the official grid’. Through him, the director Jesper Wachtmeister crafts a thoughtful meditation on the balance between freedom and conformity

All across France, folk healers called 'fire-tamers' operate an 'alternative, unofficial and ancient grassroots system of care'. Testing the limits of her natural scepticism, the writer Susanna Crossman set out to learn more about their world of belief, trust and healing

This extraordinary documentary traces how Akihiko Okamura (1929-85) came to create some of the most original and thoughtful photography documenting the violence of the early years of the Troubles in Ireland and Northern Ireland

Whenever there's a terminology change in our society curmudgeonly complaints about hypersensitivity arise. But this constant rollover is actually a sign of a 'linguistically mature society', as the linguist John McWhorter explains in this Essay from the Aeon archive

Where Confucianism sees success as a result of individual effort, the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi sees a more fragile reality. In this illuminating Essay, Christine Abigail L Tan examines where Confucianism goes wrong, finding similarities in the modern ideology of meritocracy

At the end of last year my mother was in a horrific car accident and it got me thinking about trauma, and how the meaning of the word has changed over the generations. Here I have written about it for @aeon.co It's published today aeon.co/essays/not-e...

Strong resistance to AI among writers is understandable. But it obscures what we share with the machines: language itself. An Essay by Martin Puchner

Thao Lam was one of around 1 million refugees who fled Vietnam after the war, though it’s hardly an experience she remembers. For #WorldRefugeeDay, we’re re-sharing this deeply moving film which describes the journey of Lam’s family through metaphor and animation

As my grandfather’s billions taught, wealth can be a poison. The rich must reckon with its costs to recover their humanity. An Essay by Alexa Clay

'One day I shouted: "I will no longer tolerate someone claiming it’s traumatic to break their acrylic nail!" Then I felt guilty.' In this nuanced, deeply moving Essay, the writer Lily Dunn reflects on the history of the word trauma – and argues persuasively for rescuing it from overuse

In the mid-19th century, a group of workers stumbled upon 16 bones that upended how we see our species – those of a Neanderthal. This exciting short from BBC Global dives into the history and meaning of this monumental discovery

Adopting a cautiously optimistic perspective on AI, the literary critic and editor Martin Puchner proposes that we share something fundamental with the machines: the use of language. To explore this, he draws on a rich tapestry of theory, literature and life experience in this Essay

My piece in Aeon on ancient domesticity

In this the first instalment of our new Aeon Original series on female philosophers, the story of the 12th-century nun and philosopher Héloïse is refocused from the tragic nature of her love life to the trailblazing nature of her philosophical ideas

What is a rock? For a long time, the answer seemed fairly easy: they're the hard stuff that makes up the Earth, formed by natural processes over aeons. But now, baffled geologists are finding that humans make rocks, too – and they'll one day be the most visible thing we leave behind

In this Essay, Alexa Clay draws from her experiences with the ultra wealthy to explore the distorting effects of wealth. Clay argues for a re-education for billionaires that allows them to step outside of their wealth bubble and reflect on the raw injustice of deep-seated inequality

In this short video, engineer and professor Bill Hammack explores the science behind the revolutionary engine that became the bedrock of global energy – born of a curiosity from 130 BCE

Terrorists and tech bros alike view accelerationism as a revolutionary weapon. Nick Land glimpsed something much darker. An Essay by Vincent Lê

We think of ancient Greek philosophy as not particularly concerned with the home or the role of women, but this, it turns out, may be mostly an accident of history – and we just need to learn to read the right sources, writes the French philosopher Sandrine Bergès in this Essay

One of the cardinal rules of museum-going is that the art works should never be touched. However, as this short documentary from the Museum of Modern Art interrogates, Japanese artist Yoko Ono’s ‘Painting to Be Stepped On’ (1960-61) upturned this rule

'It began with one man’s ecstatic philosophy of human extinction,’ the philosopher Vincent Lê writes in this urgently needed unpacking of accelerationism. Tracing the evolution of Nick Land, who originated the concept, Lê dives deep into how we’ve ended up in this strange moment