What’s so golden about the golden ratio? A myth-busting investigation tells the story of a misunderstood mathematical idea ...

Aeon is a magazine of ideas and culture. We publish in-depth essays from the world's most incisive and ambitious thinkers, and a mix of original and curated videos — free to all.

Photos and journal entrees chronicle Michael C Rockefeller’s fateful 1961 journey to New Guinea in search of local art ...

Just as humans can use mobile phones or notebooks for memory storage and recall, slime moulds can use slime. Granted, ...

I have sometimes heard arguments that assisted dying should be discouraged because it amounts to ‘choosing death’. That is inaccurate. We human beings have made remarkable progress in extending our ...

The powerful short documentary Blue Room observes individuals incarcerated in two prisons in the Pacific Northwest as they participate in an experimental programme that allows them to take in tranquil ...

René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, was furiously condemned by his contemporaries. Why did they fear him?

Architectural copies of lost structures require reckoning with history and heritage. At what cost is the past rebuilt?

Can societies exist without families? Can individuality thrive in them? Margaret Mead on the brave new world of 1959 ...

Cinematic shots of Californian farmland frame the stories of its immigrant workers, who live between precarity and hope ...