YOU GIVE LOVE A BAD LEGAL NAME
Against Marriage
Marriage is what happens when the state gets involved in endorsing and regulating personal relationships. It's a bad idea.
aeon
INHERITING PAIN
Haunted By History
War, famine and persecution inflict profound changes on bodies and brains. Could these changes persist over generations?
POWERING UP
Fueling The Future
Fantasies about new power sources for human ambitions go back a century or more. Could these past visions energise our own future?
THAT'S CERTAINLY A NEW TAKE
So You're Too Ethical To Eat Meat; But Should Cows Go Extinct?
Cows don’t belong to the natural world, because they owe their existence to our selective breeding, not evolution. So what happens if we stop using them for meat and dairy products?
STOP SETTING GOALS, ACHIEVE THEM
How Schopenhauer's Thought Can Illuminate A Midlife Crisis
When you are obsessed with projects, ceaselessly replacing old with new, satisfaction is always in the future. Or the past.
'TOO MUCH SEX... A REAL MEDICAL CONCERN'
Sex In The Middle Ages Was Surprisingly Salacious
Medieval people feared death by celibacy as much as venereal disease, and practiced complex sexual health regimens.
EVERYTHING IS FINE AND DANDY
The Deterrence Myth
Nuclear deterrence continues to dominate international relations. Yet there is no proof it ever worked, nor that it ever will.
IT'S TIME FOR A CHANGE
Has The Time Come For A Quantum Revolution In Economics?
Money and brains are both quantum phenomena — so it's not surprising that economics is overdue for a quantum revolution.
ARMCHAIR SCIENCE
Do Thought Experiments Really Uncover New Scientific Truths?
Thought experiments played a crucial role in the history of science. But do they tell us anything about the real world?
ARE MUSLIMS 'FREE' TO BE MUSLIMS?
Is It Time To Look Beyond The Idea Of Liberal Islam?
Western liberalism is not the apex and terminus of human history, and it ought not to serve as the measure of Islam.
AND LIVING THINGS ARE THE WORST
Why Black Holes Are Simpler To Understand Than Forests
Atoms and astronomical phenomena — the very small and the very large — can be quite basic. It's everything in between that gets tricky.
NO REASON, JUST CURIOUS
Do Civilizations Collapse?
The idea that the Maya or Easter Islanders experienced an apocalyptic end makes for good television but bad archaeology.
HIGHEST EDUCATION
How The US College Went From Pitiful To Powerful
In its first century the American higher-education system was a messy, disorganised joke. How did it rise to world dominance?
THIS MUST BE THE PLACE, AND WORD
We Have A New Word For That Feeling When Travel Makes Everything New
This heightened and delighted attention to the ordinary, which manifests in someone new to a place, does not seem to have a name. So I have given it one: allokataplixis.
IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD
Where Pain Lives
Fixing chronic back pain is possible only when patients understand how much it is produced by the brain, not the spine.
FOREVER YOUNG AT HEART
The Coming-Of-Age Con
How can you go about finding "who you really are" if the whole idea of the one true self is a big fabrication?
THE BIT BOMB
How A Polymath Transformed Our Understanding Of Information
It took a polymath to pin down the true nature of "information." His answer was both a revelation and a return.
WELL THAT'S A DOWNER
Don't Think Too Positive
Fantasies about the future have a troubling effect on achieving actual goals. If positive thinking doesn’t work, what does?
FREUDIAN FLIP
Freud The Philosopher
Before fathering psychoanalysis, Freud first slayed the dominant Cartesian intellectual tradition of mind-body dualism.
NOW WE'RE IN BUSINESS
I Think I Know Where Babies Come From, Therefore I Am Human
As far as we can tell, no other animal knows that sex makes babies. Did our understanding of baby-making change the course of human history?
