Aeon (digital magazine)
| Aeon Magazine | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Web address |
www |
| Available in | English |
| Created by | Paul Hains and Brigid Hains |
| Editor | Brigid Hains |
| Launched | September 17, 2012 |
Alexa rank |
 12,748 (June 2014)[1] |
Aeon Magazine is a digital magazine of ideas and culture, founded by Paul and Brigid Hains in 2012.[2] Publishing a substantial essay nearly every weekday, Aeon declares itself as committed to having "a cosmopolitan outlook, open to diverse perspectives and committed to progressive social change. [The magazine] has a high regard for science and other empirical knowledge, but also for imagination and personal experience."[3] Contributors have included Julian Baggini, A.L. Kennedy, David Dobbs, Michael Graziano, Sven Birkerts, Marek Kohn, Tim Lott, Jessa Gamble, Ruth Padel, Steven Poole, John Quiggin, Roger Scruton, David Deutsch and Dava Sobel.
Longform
Aeon writes long-form journalism.[4] Thomas Levenson writes that sites like Aeon are "in direct contradiction to the daily-evident failure of those media institutions that have tried to chase a presumed ever shorter attention span and/or a hunger for one flavor or another of raw meat."[5] Tech blogger Hamish McKenzie concurs, "It is the magazine that isn’t, the anti-aggregator, the publication that insists on going slow when every other force of the Internet demands that we speed up." [6]
Structure and content
Aeon covers an array of topics, often from a panoramic perspective that aims to capture the big picture. There is little attention paid to day-to-day current events, in order to focus instead on deeper and more enduring questions.
The magazine is organized into five sections, each focusing on broadly different subject matter. Aeon describes its sections as follows:
- World Views takes on contemporary culture clashes, ancient philosophical conundra and the many ways in which our beliefs shape experience.
- Nature & Cosmos looks through the eyes of cutting-edge scientists, explorers and other attentive observers to bring the universe’s myriad patterns into focus.
- Being Human puts our own nature under the microscope, comparing insights from psychology, anatomy, evolutionary theory and simple introspection.
- Living Together searches for fresh lessons and hopeful developments in the greatest and most complicated of human projects, co-existence.
- Altered States explores ritual, play, recreation and imagination: whatever it takes to get beyond the everyday world.[7]
A sister site, Aeon Film, hosts short documentaries that track the same sections and grapple with similarly perennial issues.
Reception
Aeon has received attention from several leading digital outlets. Boing Boing[8] quoted contributor Erik Davis regarding Aeon as 'A new ... outfit that is charting a very interesting zone between science, religion, culture, and good writing.' The Browser, another popular aggregator, wrote of the magazine, 'Let nobody say that Aeon ducks the big questions.'
Several of Aeon's essays were featured on Conor Friedersdorf's annual list, '100 Pieces of Fantastic Journalism' for 2013. The magazine is also regularly featured and discussed on popular blogs such as Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish, the aggregator 3quarksdaily, Arts & Letters Daily, the New York Times' "The Stone", and Digg.
Contributor Jessa Gamble's essay "The End of Sleep?" was named the best feature of 2013 by the Association of British Science Writers.[9]
References
- ↑ "Aeonmagazine.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-06-19.
- ↑ "journalism.co.uk, Sept 17, 2012".
- ↑ "About Aeon magazine".
- ↑ "journalism.co.uk longform, Nov 15, 2012".
- ↑ The Inverse Square Blog, by Thomas Levenson, 08/06/2013
- ↑ The best magazine on the Internet?, by Hamish McKenzie, 09/16/13.
- ↑ "Aeon Magazine 'About' section".
- ↑ "Boing Boing".
- ↑ "Association of British Science Writers: Winners Announced, June 17, 2014".