The making of the Ghetto on a Venetian island in 1516 | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Alexander Lee8h ago
Listen to this essay 25 minute listen On 29 March 1516, the Venetian Senate voted to create the world’s first ‘ghetto’.
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aeon.coadded August 2026
top 96%The life-saving scientific knowledge hiding in plain sight | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Helen Pearson2d ago
Listen to this essay 26 minute listen When reading the news, you may occasionally be bemused by the flip-flopping science and health stories: one week you’re told coffee is good for you, the next...
What I have learned from posting episodes of my life on Facebook | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Thomas Söderqvist3d ago
Listen to this essay 34 minute listen When I was about 15, alone in the flat one afternoon, I sneaked into my mother’s writing desk and found a small pocket calendar from 1946 pushed to the back of...
Early violence is a bad teacher. But the mind can learn anew | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Megan Kang6d ago
Listen to this essay 25 minute listen The day before we spoke, King1, 26, had learned that his friend Lamont had been killed.
Why real intelligence is something more than optimisation | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Sasha Mudd7d ago
Listen to this essay 24 minute listen A few months ago, I sat in a packed university auditorium listening to a celebrated computer scientist explain the brilliance of large language models (LLMs).
We need a better way to describe what is often called ‘cancer’ | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Matthew R Cooperberg9d ago
Listen to this essay 30 minute listen William came to me for a third opinion. He was 53 and healthy, with a wife and two teenage children, a busy job, and a typically hectic work-and-family...
When a man becomes a father and a poetic revolution follows | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Daniel Swift10d ago
Listen to this essay 25 minute listen Here’s an old story, often told. In Book 6 of the Iliad, Hector – dressed splendidly in bronze armour and a helmet with a horsehair crest – bids farewell to...
Habermas’s theory of truth meant he changed his mind | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Emilie Prattico13d ago
Listen to this essay 22 minute listen Jürgen Habermas died on 14 March 2026, in the German town of Starnberg, aged 96.
Before the Hindenburg there was R101 – Britain’s ill-fated airship | Aeon Videos
Aeonby Aeon Video14d ago
In this short video, Bill Hammack, an engineer and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, details the extraordinary making and tragic ending of the British airship known as R101.
A prairie enthusiast in search of a farming land ethic | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Craig Maier14d ago
Listen to this essay 29 minute listen Forty iron rectangles, each one blunt as a piano key, rotate into a blurring fury that hides the eight-foot-long shaft at the heart of the flail chopper.
A scientist’s search for answers about Amanita muscaria gummies | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Eric Leas16d ago
Listen to this essay 28 minute listen In late summer 2023, I found myself in a smoke shop looking at a package of ‘magic mushroom’ gummies.
A good sceptic has more than doubt and less than certainty | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Massimo Pigliucci17d ago
Listen to this essay 22 minute listen How tightly should you hold your beliefs? You face the question several times a week without noticing.
Black holes ring like bells. What happens next is stranger | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Richard Dyer20d ago
Listen to this essay 20 minute listen It is 9 am on a warm July Sunday in Cambridge, as I head towards a café in the city centre.
If computers count all the petals, who tastes the cherries? | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Liam Spradlin21d ago
Listen to this essay 19 minute listen On a sunny day in the summer of 2015, I found myself standing in the basement of an office building in Silicon Valley.
Italianness is a state of travelling in both directions | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Ben Faccini23d ago
When he was a child growing up in Emilia-Romagna, my great-grandfather Marco once found an eagle fledgling that had fallen from its nest.
It’s not just screen time: kids are bombarded by hectic media | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Natalia Kucirkova24d ago
Listen to this essay 19 minute listen I am at the airport gate waiting to depart, watching passengers hurry past with rolling suitcases and paper cups of coffee.
The curio cabinet of medieval mental health | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Katherine Harvey28d ago
Listen to this essay 29 minute listen Early one morning in the late 12th century, Bishop Hugh of Lincoln arrived in the Hertfordshire village of Cheshunt.
What palmistry and medicine have always had in common | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Alison Bashford8 Sept 2026
Listen to this essay 22 minute listen Signs of the future are marked in our hands, or so any palmist will declare. But do hands also hold signs of the past? Do they have a history?
Why the Pan-American Highway only half-exists | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Shawn Miller7 Sept 2026
Listen to this essay 26 minute listen Leônidas Borges de Oliveira drove the first 300 miles of the world’s longest road trip alone.
Why Western democracy is ailing and how to fix it | Aeon Essays
Aeonby Les Coleman4 Sept 2026
Listen to this essay 21 minute listen If the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame for...