To understand how the brain functions, we need to shift away from thinking in terms of individual brain regions and instead consider how they might work together as neuronal ensembles

By our director Inanna Hamati-Ataya @berytia.bsky.social

Who should decide the role of AI in the future of medicine? –Check out my latest essay in @aeon.co aeon.co/essays/who-s... edited by @nigelwarburton.bsky.social

A hero or a murderer? Stalin’s legacy is still a contentious issue in his birthplace, Georgia, seven decades after his death. Start your new year with this accomplished portrait of place – a favourite Aeon Exclusive from the archive

‘One of the best Aeon articles I’ve read.’ – Medora, Aeon reader, September 2025 In this compassionately told Essay, Cynda Hylton Rushton draws out her framework of moral resilience, which she built over three decades as a nurse, researcher and professor of clinical ethics

How do large language models really work – and why do they continue to surprise even their creators? In this clear-eyed explainer created for the Computer History Museum, Grant Sanderson @3blue1brown.com traces the evolution of LLMs and opens up their hidden scaffolding

Globalisation didn’t begin in the 1990s, or even in the past millennia. The tale of globalisation is written across human history. So why do we keep getting the story so wrong? This Essay was one of our most read by you in 2025. Revisit it here:

Take a trip to a former hunting lodge, now part living museum, part work of art. One of our most-viewed archive videos, this playful and quietly profound film invites us to reflect on the character of our own lived-in spaces, as the year draws to a close

This Essay, arguing that philosophy must reckon with the meaning of thermodynamics, was one of our readers’ favourites of 2025. Today we’re re sharing it along with a new quote from the author

The work of the writer and critic Susan Sontag remains endlessly relevant and urgent. She died on this day, twenty-one years ago, and to mark her life we’re sharing a favourite archive essay in memory of her hunger for knowledge and the remarkable body of work she left behind

Protecting the names and identities of its interviewees, this animated short documentary by @artefr.bsky.social gives Russians a rare chance to speak with unguarded honesty about how the war has changed their lives, as well as how they view their homeland in its wake

We are just one branch of a diverse human family tree. Aside from Neanderthals, who were they – and why did we replace them? This excellent essay on human evolution is an editor’s favourite, and the perfect companion to a quiet Boxing Day

Blending live action, animation, and a soulful, hip-hop-infused beat, director Tajana Tokyo offers a rich snapshot of how relationships are understood in Sierra Leone, and how those views diverge from Western ideas – from divorce and cheating to why you should never ‘marry a man you like too much.’

‘Our mental worlds are lively with experiences of absence, yet it’s a mystery how the mind performs the trick of seeing nothing.’ Revisit one of our most read Essays of 2025:

This video captures a group of teenagers in Portugal playing a game known as pau de sebo – which loosely translates as ‘greasy pole’ – in which participants attempt to climb a grease-coated wooden pole to claim prizes hanging from its peak

What differentiates righteous anger from mere grievance? This sharply argued Essay dissects the ‘constitutively negative’ orientation of grievance politics, which ‘what’s essential is the continuous expression of hostility, rather than the attainment of any particular goal’

If we are to think clearly about the question of AI in medicine, we must confront it from an outsider’s perspective, and consider whether new technologies could be part of a wider reckoning with what medicine is for and who it should serve

This film takes us on a journey from the Linden-Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, to Nairobi, Kenya to uncover the meaning of a Kikuyu artefact taken into the museum in 1903

For Mandeville, humankind has a bottomless need to be liked: it is this perennial craving that forms the foundation of society. An Essay by Andrea Branchi

Aeon Essays are now available to listen to on Apple Podcasts and Spotify! Listen now: buff.ly/IKW4hxJ

Self-centered, validation-seeking, prideful – few of us would want to be described this way. But, the 18th-century philosopher Bernard Mandeville argued, these are the traits that allow our society to function. As debates about narcissism abound, Mandeville is a thinker worth revisiting

As an editor for @aeon.co, commissioning an essay about ultra-long-lived organisms called *aeonophiles* was a no-brainer. I loved working on this. Biologist @karenlloyd.bsky.social's research is deeply fascinating... + check out her brilliant book Intraterrestrials! aeon.co/essays/the-d...

My article on aeonophiles (ultra-long lived organisms) came out in Aeon Magazine today!

The discovery of organisms that have been alive for many thousands of years requires a revolution in how we understand life. An Essay by @karenlloyd.bsky.social

Why the stunning rhinoceros hornbills are the farmers of the rainforest and a powerful avian symbol of regeneration

In this captivating short film by @cornellbirds.bsky.social, a conservation biologist and a wildlife photographer travel across Indonesia in search of hornbills, the birds helping to regenerate one of the world’s largest rainforest regions

Some of the longest-lived organisms on Earth aren’t whales, trees or corals, but microbes buried deep in the earth. This eye-opening essay examines the slowest lives on Earth, asking what such lives mean for how we define life itself @karenlloyd.bsky.social

This celebrated short film presents a gentle portrait of intergenerational friendship, imagining a road trip to the sea that they can’t take in real life

My piece on the radical lineage of the Catholic Church, and how tapping into those roots can help the religion play a critical role in combating climate change, is out today in @aeon.co: aeon.co/essays/the-c...

Today, 250 years since the birth of #JaneAusten, we’re sharing this Essay exploring the relationship between nature and aesthetic beauty in her work. It brings her observations into conversation with Charles Darwin’s, asking the role of beauty in the naturalist’s view and naturalism in the artist’s

Reflecting on her 30-year career as a teacher, lecturer, radio presenter and playwright, an Afghan woman tells a story of joy amidst upheaval. As a new generation of Afghan girls confronts repression with grit and determination, she remains hopeful for the future @untold-narratives.bsky.social

At Aeon, we publish essays on the existentially significant questions, alongside carefully curated short documentaries spanning philosophy, science, psychology, society and culture. Our archive is rich and inexhaustible – a place where every curious mind can find something to enjoy aeon.co

On the 350th anniversary of Johannes Vermeer’s death, we’re re-visiting this Essay which reflects on Stendhal’s vision of art’s enduring purpose. For Stendhal, great works like Vermeer’s transcend visual appeal and technical mastery. The promise of art lies in its power to make you feel

Given Catholicism’s reputation for conservatism, it would appear to be the last place you’d find radical innovation in environmental justice. But looking at the full sweep of the Church’s history uncovers a rich tradition of caring for the whole of God’s creation

This short explores Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ (1923), unravelling how the poem masterfully evokes the tension between the meditative moments that draw us away from clock time and the intrusions that pull us back in

In 1927, Martin Heidegger argued that thinking and theorising presupposes a uniquely human mode of being. This excerpt from the documentary ‘Being in the World’ makes Heidegger’s arguments digestible through interviews with philosophers and artists who demonstrate this way of being

What is religion? Can it only be defined in relation to a complementary ‘secular’ sphere? Can it be defined at all? This Essay by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how, as a concept and a category, religion has endured in the absence of a stable definition

Can machines suffer? As debates over AI deepen, we are increasingly pressed to consider what moral obligations we owe to entities without bodies, whose inner lives we cannot know. Today’s essay examines the slow widening of our moral circle, asking what new frontiers lie ahead buff.ly/u33BC9O

This animation brings the ancient Roman road network to life, traversing disparate regions of the empire at its peak to show how these roads supported the agriculture and commerce that made such a sprawling polity possible

We are sad to note the passing of Martin Parr, the hugely influential Magnum photographer whose long career took him on a worldwide odyssey to prove the everyday remarkable. His lens dwelt on the mundane and the unintentionally odd, imagining us all as human, all too human buff.ly/ZsvPsGG

Liberal values like democracy, individual rights and free markets may seem universal, but they draw on a European individualist framework that stands in sharp contrast to the relational ideals of African thought traditions. What would it mean to build a distinctly African alternative to liberalism?

Aeon is a magazine of ideas, publishing the most incisive and ambitious thinking around the globe. Sign up to our weekly newsletter and enjoy week’s worth of big ideas buff.ly/BnoMzjU

When her friend’s mother died, filmmaker Alice Dunseath and her friend set out on an unplanned road trip through Yorkshire, and the resulting short film offers a simple, aching account of grief. Watch this poignant video from our archive for Grief Awareness Week #griefawarenessweek buff.ly/Y6RjVp4

This insightful Essay details the ways that maternal standards were engineered more than a century ago by Victorian-era experts as a way to control not just children’s development, but women’s bodies, choices and lives

Since the 1930s, the La Quebrada Cliff Divers of Acapulco have performed shows for the public, climbing steep oceanside cliffs and jumping almost 100 feet into the waves below. ‘Voices From the Abyss’ captures the fear, adrenaline, and fanfare involved in this spectacular work.

The Moon’s strange and enigmatic glow has long had influence over traditions and storytelling here on Earth.This Essay explores how authors of the medieval period found versatile, and at times radical, ways to use the moon as a symbol, particularly within Christianity and Islam

Here is the short and pretty version of a paper I published at the beginning of the year in which I argue that sleeping is valuable aesthetically, interpersonally and intrinsically. Happy to say that a short book on this topic is forthcoming with Princeton U press. #philsky #philosophy #sleeping

Today, for Wildlife Conservation Day, we’re sharing this essay from the archive that invites us to look beyond the romantic idea of a distant, untouched ‘wilderness’ and toward a deeper, more honest reckoning with how humans and nature truly relate #WildlifeConservationDay #Biodiversity

What shapes the way we see the world? In this reel, the neuroscientist and Princeton professor Asif Ghazanfar reflects on his essay, which examines Dale Purves’ research and the ways our perception is shaped not just by the world around us, but by our bodies, senses, and experiences buff.ly/DTV8iBu

On the 50th anniversary of #HannahArendt’s death, we revisit this essay on one of her incisive, and quietly radical, challenges to modern life. In a world obsessed with authenticity and the search for a supposedly fixed truth, Arendt offered something far more demanding and liberating: ‘the will’