Aeon

Listen to this essay 24 minute listen Few problems feel more pressing today than housing. Across the world, access to affordable, stable, dignified housing has become one of the defining challenges of our time, in wealthy capitals and struggling peripheries alike. According to UN-Habitat, more than 2.8 billion people – roughly 35 per cent of the global population – lack access to adequate housing.

Star Axis is an artwork of extraordinary ambition. For half a century, the US land artist Charles Ross has been building this ‘granite pyramid’ in a remote stretch of desert in New Mexico. The structure’s decades in the making, however, are just a blink in the timescale it aims to capture. The unique observatory puts 26,000 years of celestial movement perspective, allowing viewers to visualise Polaris – our steady ‘North Star’ throughout human history – becoming unfixed in the night sky.

It is Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic calendar, and I am sitting in a rooftop café in Mecca, the holiest city of the religion. The sun has gone down, and an array of glittering shops and hotels lights up the urban expanse below me. At the heart of this ancient city, the foremost site of Muslim worship, guarded with fortress-like marble walls, is the Masjid al-haram complex – the largest mosque in the world.

For his celebrated short documentary Bouncy Brothers, the US director Nicholas J Santore chronicled his uncle Anthony Glazier’s pursuit of the American dream – that deeply entrenched national notion that anyone with a worthy idea and sweat to spare can succeed. Attempting to escape the confines of suburban Chicago and the nine-to-five grind, Glazier upended his life in his 50s, moving away from his extended family to run an inflatable bouncy house business in central Florida.

In 1972, Shere Hite, a Playboy model turned feminist sex researcher, jumped on a motorbike and drove around Manhattan. With a cascade of strawberry blonde curls peeping out under the helmet, rosebud lips visible under the visor, and a vintage lace gown streaming behind her, she handed out surveys to any woman who would take one. It was all about sex.

This video essay from the YouTube channel Kings and Things explores the intricate history and unique architecture of what’s widely considered to be the oldest surviving Buddhist temple in Europe: Khosheutovsky khurul in southwestern Russia.

Overgeneralising has a bad rap. It seems an obvious, if understandable, mistake to generalise beyond what our evidence supports. A child playing in the park may assume, based on their experiences of their friendly pet golden retriever, that all dogs are friendly. But they would be wrong to approach an XL Bully, a breed of dog effectively outlawed in the UK recently following a string of attacks on children.

How do you go about capturing a monster? The search for Bigfoot, or Sasquatch – often referred to as Bigfooting – may sound like a whimsical endeavour: an activity of tall tales and cartoonish representations. Yet if you spend time listening to what Bigfooters themselves have to say, you discover a different picture. We did exactly that.

Located west of Paris, La Défense is often called the most beautiful business district in Europe. With nearly 70 monumental works of art erected alongside its skyscrapers, the busy, opulent neighbourhood doubles as an open-air museum. In The Great Arc, the French animator Camille Authouart takes the audience on ‘a poetic and social stroll’ around La Défense, with her beautifully textured pastel animations of the district ultimately evolving into a surreal meditation on class and shared space.

When Charles Percy Snow rose to deliver the Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959, he had good reason to be satisfied with himself. By sensible tenacity he had reached an upper station of English society, an unlikely terminus for one raised by a lower-middle-class family from a suburb of Leicester. He had grown up surrounded by artisans and labourers, a distant but kindly father, three beloved brothers, and a smothering mother.