Aeon

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 schedule. He’d taken time to do the right thing and had visited his primary care provider for a routine health exam and blood tests, his first in many years.

In the mid-1990s, some thinkers began to challenge the prevailing notion that our selves are largely constructed through language and turned to our bodies to make sense of how we build our worlds. In this video, the UK video essayist Lewis Waller examines what’s known as the ‘affective turn’ in the humanities.

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 his wife Andromache. She begs him not to return to battle and hands him their newborn son. Hector raises the boy into the air, says a short prayer, and hands him back.

Jürgen Habermas died on 14 March 2026, in the German town of Starnberg, aged 96. Every fall, from the mid-1990s into the late-2000s, he would come to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois to teach and give talks, a visit that a dedicated group of students looked forward to every fall term. The year that has stayed with me is 2004, when he taught what he’d spelled out in Between Facts and Norms (1992), his opus applying his theory to democratic politics.

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. I am perched atop several tons of iron, with 80 horsepower at my command. This part of farming is straightforward – even a mechanically challenged tree-hugger like me can manage to depress the clutch, shift into second, and ease the throttle forward.

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. Conceived in 1924 and first flown in 1929, R101 was intended to fly a regular route from England to India.

‘Who wants a pistol? Raise your hand.’ At the Old Tucson theme park in Tucson, Arizona, visitors step out of their normal lives and into the city’s past. Or, more accurately, a funhouse mirror of the past that plays up the cowboy romance and tamps down the drudgery and poverty to cultivate a good ol’ time.

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. That phrase, magic mushrooms, usually calls to mind one type of mushroom: those containing psilocybin, the compound showing promise as a therapy for depression, addiction and other psychopathologies. But these gummies were not psilocybin.

For Abidin, a Balik elder who lives in East Kalimantan in Borneo, Indonesia, the sounds of nature aren’t merely a backdrop but a vital part of how he navigates the world. But as the rainforest around him has become more developed, the calls of creatures once heard everywhere have grown scarce. And that process is speeding up.

Listen to this essay 22 minute listen How tightly should you hold your beliefs? You face the question several times a week without noticing. Hold them too loosely and you don’t stand for anything, hold them too tightly and you become the sort of person no argument can reach. Most of us swing between the two and have no vocabulary for the ground in between. A Roman lawyer worked one out, under pressure far worse than anything we are likely to face, and it is still the best answer available.