Scary Stories for a New Generation
We haven’t stopped creating fairy tales and folklore—we just do it online now.For Aeon magazine, Will Wiles has a splendid longread about “creepypasta,” the phenomenon of writing and disseminating...
View ArticleWeekly Geekery
Keats said truth is beauty, but science disagrees.Changing technology means our writing is literally going to the crapper.Investigating the interaction between the mind and the outside world.Sussing...
View ArticleWeekly Geekery
It’s time to shut down the comments section. And all the writers around the world rejoice.Jerkology 101: The science of sorting out your social life.E-books you can fold.Techy the Slate writer says,...
View ArticleWhat We Remember But Don’t Remember
Over at Aeon, Kristin Olson looks at why early childhood memories are so forgettable; still, what’s forgotten from those milky early years may affect us into adulthood. Maybe Mozart in the womb is a...
View ArticleLady Hermits
Where have all the lady hermits gone? Rhian Sasseen is on the case:For women, for most of history, it’s been mother or maiden, daughter or wife. The roles shuffle, their names and details changing, but...
View ArticleCrafting a Metaphor
One thing you learn very quickly as a metaphor designer is that your language and your culture’s resources aren’t infinite. Nor are they as versatile as you might hope. The richness of the semantic...
View ArticleHeaven is (Probably) a Place on Earth
Mya Frazier writes for Aeon on the “heaven tourism memoir” (seen in books such as Heaven is for Real and The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven) and what its popularity as a genre suggests about the 21st...
View ArticleHoaxing History
The mythology of the New World – as expansive as the continent itself – engendered a mania for magical thinking, for reinvigorating Old-World myths in a land that still felt only half-real…. a land...
View ArticleIt’s Complicated, Starring Religion and Archaeology
Rose Eveleth writes for Aeon on the complicated relationship between religion and archaeology and how both have shaped how we tell the story of the world.It’s impossible to do archaeology objectively....
View ArticleRemembering Your Online Life
After all, a toy boat is hardly its former self after a lifetime at the bottom of the sea. No matter how intact an archive, it can never fully reconstruct the texture and completeness of the original...
View ArticleUnlocking the eBook
Craig Mod writes for Aeon on ebooks’ technological stagnation:…it was a stark reminder that pliancy of media invites experimentation. When media is too locked down, too rigid, when it’s too much like a...
View ArticleChoice or Fate in Romance
For Aeon, Polina Aronson writes on the different “romantic regimes” of the world, with “regime” defined as the cultural, economic, and sociological systems behind how we engage in relationships....
View ArticleDoes Anyone Speak English Here?
At Aeon, John McWhorter explores the twists and turns through English’s linguistic history that brought us the “deeply peculiar” language structure used today.Related Posts:Fighting Terrorism Through...
View ArticleThe Paradox of Growth As Good
Martin Kirk writes for Aeon on the paradoxical connection between economic growth and eliminating poverty. Kirk illustrates that increasing the size of the economic pie, by spending the world’s finite...
View ArticleLaboring for Masculinity
Allison J. Pugh writes for Aeon on the role of labor in defining American masculinity. After interviewing nearly a hundred subjects, Pugh looks at how work defines the self-worth of men, and how...
View ArticleKilling Baby Hitler
Rebecca Onion writes for Aeon about taking the “what ifs” of history very seriously:In October 2015, when asked if, given the chance, he would kill the infant Hitler, the US presidential candidate Jeb...
View ArticleIn Defense of Precisely Inexact Language
Writing for Aeon, Elijah Millgram uses 1984 and George Orwell’s Newspeak/doublethink idea of language to examine why imperfect language, and expression that is sometimes inexact, contradictory, or...
View ArticleKeep Your Secrets
For Aeon, Tiffany Jenkins writes on the importance of secrets in a person’s individual development. In addition to psychological and sociological research, Jenkins traces the vital role secrets and...
View ArticleOrigins of the “Fantasy North”
E.R. Truitt writes for Aeon on the long history of the “Fantasy North,” the lands, people, and culture at the top of the world that have fascinated pop culture for centuries. Truitt also marks the...
View ArticleRomancing the Cure
Homer understood in the 8th century BCE what modernity has yet to accept—love can be an addiction, and when it is, we need substantial outside help.Angela Chen writes for Aeon on romantic love as...
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