The 17th-century town Cacheu was a hub of West African and European cultures, languages and beliefs (and run by women) ...

For India’s travelling stunt drivers, who risk their lives for a living, freedom lies on the other side of fear ...

While their stories are distinct, overlapping themes of loneliness, agony and elaborate mental escapes run throughout. Beyond making a forceful case against the use of solitary confinement, the film ...

Light is one aspect of the Universe that, for most people, holds a deep and noticeable value in everyday life, helping them ...

A documentary connecting two Singapores: the Asian country expanded on imported sand and a town in Michigan buried by dunes ...

From fluffing feathers to washing skins, a museum taxidermist shows the hidden art behind creating an ‘illusion of life’ ...

is assistant professor of Classics at Cornell University in Ithaca, US. She is working on a book titled Bad Readers and Ancient Rome. A 3rd-century Egyptian fragment of Sappho’s poetry from papyri ...

In his short film Papers (1991), the Japanese artist Yoshinao Satoh assembles thousands of newspaper images into a transfixing animation. Moving through a flurry of Japanese characters, moon phases, ...

Updates on everything new at Aeon. Aeon is published by registered charity Aeon Media Group Ltd in association with Aeon America, a 501(c)(3) charity.

Here’s a story you might have read before in a popular science book or seen in a documentary. It’s the one about early Earth as a lifeless, volcanic hellscape. When our planet was newly formed, the ...

More than a century before Carl Linnaeus set out to categorise the natural world, the 16th-century Flemish painter and polymath Joris Hoefnagel began to render the creatures around him in ...

For the vast majority of human history, we’ve relied on the Sun to tell time – a reliably unreliable method, given the body’s tendency to disappear behind clouds and the horizon. This animation from ...