There is nothing wrong with strong opinions. They are healthy in a democracy – an apathetic electorate is an ineffective electorate. But a curious fact about American society’s supercharged political culture is that even the most humble debates (think: Which fried chicken sandwiches are best?) turn a tweet into matters of conviction.

We make numerous assumptions about strangers merely based on their physical appearances or the emotions they express. For example, we might think baby-faced people are naïve, weak, honest, submissive, or warm. And we often consider attractive people competent, intelligent, healthy, outgoing, and sexually receptive. Similarly, we usually view happy individuals as both dominant and social, judge sad and fearful ones as moderately social but low on dominance, and consider angry people as low on affiliation but high on dominance.

On David Malouf, nationality, and the sticky subject of labels. By Nam Le.

Existing is merely the thought of a memory that encapsulates the belief that we exist. One of the greatest misconceptions we are fooled into believing is that objects and specific arrangements alike have substantial meaning. It is easy to imagine the concept of an empty painting, but a painting of a flower becomes a concept to which a subject belongs. The subject is the flower and cannot — unlike the painting – exist without the other.

A Woman Deciding to Eat Children Is Still a Feminist Victory. By Cannibal Witch.

When fighting on behalf of the father you love, who do you become? By Beth Kephart.

Like Nazis looking for Jewishness by checking the foreskins of prisoners, the identitarians of both fascist and social justice strands divine from pale skin and penises the indelible mark of the power to dominate. By Rhyd Wildermuth.

Naked ghosts and phantom fashion. By Aaron Dabbah.

The challenges of defining Latinidad in Queer and Trans Latinx communities.

Getting lost in the text-cities of Joyce, Döblin, and Dos Passos. By Tyler Malone.

The Dress in Your Head. By Rosemary Hill.

Arguing that Facebook collects more data than Aadhaar is both naive and misses the point. By Rohan Venkataramakrishnan.

Can a cardboard box generate empathy between two strangers? Can it help them to fall in love? By Deenah Vollmer. (May 2014)

Aeon Videos

The US left has a fundamental problem, perhaps the root of most of its other problems. That fundamental problem is that the US left is not organized as or led by any class conscious or class oriented formations. Union membership is somewhere around 5% of the workforce, and major unions have long been captured by the Democratic party. By Bruce A. Dixon.

When pediatric surgeon Allan Goldstein entered the operating room to separate conjoined twins, he did so with the knowledge that one would have to die in order to save the other. He recalls the enormous surgical and ethical challenges.

Stanley Bing considers rooting for the bad guys in search of eternal life.

By Elizabeth Weil *with Comments and Corrections by Hannah W Duane. Photograph by Tabitha Soren, assisted by Dixie Lewis, 15.

On life as a stutterer. By Parker Carroll.

The direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23andMe has so far failed to deliver on its promise. By Richard MacManus.