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Persian tar: a living instrument

For the Iranian Australian musician Hamed Sadeghi, one strum of the tar is all it takes to echo millennia of Persian history. The guitar-like...

previous day 50

Aeon

Aeon Video

The tragedy of Trần Đức Thảo

Listen to this essay It took five ill-fated conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre before the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo finally broke with...

previous day 90

Aeon

Rory O’Sullivan

DNA break repair

The biomedical animator Drew Berry is known for his dazzling visualisations of biological processes that unfold on microscopic scales. As...

previous day 80

Aeon

Aeon Video

The spiral of suffering

Listen to this essay ‘The initial weeks of this turmoil were pure hell. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and I had burning in my mouth, throat,...

previous day 50

Aeon

Siddhant Ritwick & Tomi Koljonen

The erotic poems of Bilitis

Listen to this essay In 1894, a German archaeologist named Herr G Heim made a groundbreaking discovery. On the island of Cyprus, he excavated a...

previous day 80

Aeon

Cat Lambert

Red tape on a blue planet

Listen to this essay When summer arrived along Florida’s coastline in 2023, marine scientists nervously watched and waited as seawater temperatures...

previous day 40

Aeon

Irus Braverman

Outside center

Migration can feel liberating and isolating at once: a new country offers openness and possibility, yet the sense of being an outsider rarely...

previous day 100

Aeon

Aeon Video

Children’s game: pau de sebo

In his ongoing Children’s Games series, the Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs documents the diverse games children play across the...

05.01.2026 10

Aeon

Aeon Video

Incandescent anger

Listen to this essay ‘I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that...

05.01.2026 100

Aeon

Paul Katsafanas

Voices of Russia

Since the large-scale expansion of the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2022, Russian citizens have become increasingly isolated from the Western...

23.12.2025 4

Aeon

Aeon Video

Are doctors replaceable?

Listen to this essay If planes fell from the sky with the regularity of deaths due to medical error, there would be outrage, inquiries and sweeping...

23.12.2025 4

Aeon

Charlotte Blease

Philosopher of pride

Listen to this essay In 1705, the Anglo-Dutch physician and philosopher Bernard Mandeville anonymously published a poem called The Grumbling Hive:...

22.12.2025 50

Aeon

Andrea Branchi

If objects could speak

Subtitles for this video are available by clicking the CC button at the bottom right of the video player. Museums across the globe have come under...

19.12.2025 10

Aeon

Aeon Video

Madeleine

After moving from Brazil to Canada, the animator Raquel Sancinetti befriended a woman named Madeleine who, aged 102, was 67 years her senior....

19.12.2025 7

Aeon

Aeon Video

Island of the hornbills

In this captivating short film from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Indonesian conservation biologist Yoki Hadiprakarsa and the US wildlife...

19.12.2025 7

Aeon

Aeon Video

Long live the aeonophiles!

Listen to this essay If you had to nominate the slowest, longest-living organisms on Earth, what would you picture? Among the vertebrates, some...

19.12.2025 20

Aeon

Karen G Lloyd

Green dominion

Listen to this essay In the United States and elsewhere, it’s often taken for granted that the Catholic Church is a conservative institution with...

19.12.2025 20

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Mike Mariani

A life of joy and work

Listen to this essay Recently, I visited a part of my neighbourhood where there’s a park. The green space was hived off by concrete walls, iron...

19.12.2025 40

Aeon

Najla & Asad Nariman