Menu
Aeon
DonateNewsletter
SIGN IN

Culture

Essays and videos on the arts, literature, travel, rituals and celebrations
Save

video

Childhood and adolescence

The unique fellowship between teens and young puffins on a remote Icelandic island

20 minutes

Save

video

Stories and literature

Robert Frost’s poetic reflection on youth, as read in his unforgettable baritone

5 minutes

Save

video

Architecture

The celebrated architect who took inspiration from sitting, waiting and contemplating

29 minutes

Save

video

Death

A hunter’s lyrical reflection on the humbling business of being mortal

6 minutes

Save

video

Architecture

‘I listen to the land’ – poetry and greenery intertwine in Emilio Ambasz’s architecture

9 minutes

A colour illustration of a pool of water in which many people are swimming, glimpsed through trees, against a city skyline background
Save

essay

Mental health

The right to bathe

Water is a great healer. Can New York’s public pools and ‘blue spaces’ be engineered for collective hydrotherapy?

Rebecca Hayes Jacobs

Save

video

Nature and landscape

What it’s like to care for Yellowstone during its quietest – and coldest – months

13 minutes

Save

video

Beauty and aesthetics

The grit of cacti and the drumbeat of time shape a sculptor’s life philosophy

11 minutes

Save

video

Ecology and environmental sciences

From helicopter flybys to trail cameras, there’s no one way to count a wolf

8 minutes

Two sphinx-like statues foreground an intricate formal garden of geometric hedges and a square pond. In the background are cherry trees in bloom
Save

essay

Nature and landscape

The mystic art of gardening

In an era of 20th-century suburban sprawl, the great designer Russell Page infused soulful philosophy into his gardens

Caleb Smith

A flock of birds fly over a wide expanse of marshland and a river at dusk.
Save

essay

Biography and memoir

Flat places

Whenever I stand in a flat landscape, I feel myself becoming weightless, taken out of my childhood full of painful nothing

Noreen Masud

Save

video

Nature and landscape

Take a serene hike through an ancient forest, inspired by a Miyazaki masterpiece

6 minutes

Save

video

Physics

Why does the Sun occasionally flash green as it eclipses the horizon?

7 minutes

Save

essay

Art

Earthly delights

Noticing first one then many parrots, peacocks, owls and more birds in Old Master paintings taught me to truly see the world

Leanne Ogasawara

Save

video

Ecology and environmental sciences

The grassroots project that’s restoring an endangered Hawaiian ecosystem

22 minutes

Save

video

Earth science and climate

A biologist on the sorrows of documenting the Great Salt Lake’s collapse

6 minutes

Save

video

Animals and humans

Laura fights to protect the magnificence of wild horses running free

6 minutes

Save

video

Biology

Flicker through the eclectic beauty and biological diversity of 2,400 leaves

3 minutes

Save

essay

Deep time

The Rift

Splitting the African continent, it is the only place where our human story can be read continuously from the very start

Tristan McConnell

Save

video

Art

At 95, an artist paints swiftly to capture the fugitive light

6 minutes

Save

essay

The environment

Our contaminated future

In Fukushima, communities are adapting to life in a time of permanent pollution: a glimpse of what’s to come for us all

Maxime Polleri

Save

essay

Nature and landscape

Home and the birdsong

In the dark, sylvan villages of medieval England, people named places after the birds that filled the night with music

Michael J Warren

Save

video

Technology and the self

One woman prepares for the risky solitude of Georgia O’Keeffe’s American West

8 minutes

Save

essay

Biology

A touch of moss

Inside a rainforest or on the city pavement, moss asks so little yet offers so much: a tactile encounter with time itself

Nikita Arora