Welcome to the first Letter from the editors! Senior editor Sally Davies takes us behind the scenes at Aeon

Today from Aeon. [View online]( [Your trial Friends of Aeon membership ends this Friday.]( [Only Friends are able to save and annotate articles and receive our monthly letter from our editors (we’ve included our first one below).]( [Please join now to help Aeon in its mission to spread knowledge and promote a cosmopolitan worldview. Friends donate US$5 a month or US$50 a year.]( This month’s email to Friends is from senior editor Sally Davies Sally is a senior editor at Aeon, based in London. Her interests include neuroscience, the history and philosophy of science and technology, feminism and speculative fiction. She can be found on Twitter as [@daviesally]( Welcome, Friends, to the first letter from the editors: a round-up of what we’re chewing on and reading about, plus a glimpse into the thinking behind some of our upcoming pieces. Each month, you’ll hear from a different member of our editorial staff, and I’m delighted to be taking my turn. In the five years since Aeon began, we’ve become something of a caravanserai for the weary online traveller – a place to lay down your burdens after wading through the daily swamp of hot takes and clickbait and constant calls on your attention. Our hope is that these monthly notes will respond to your enthusiasm for the art of reflective reading. It’s worth remembering that the well-known etymology of ‘philosophy’ – philo and sophia, for ‘love’ and ‘wisdom’ – is bound up with the Ancient Greek word philia, meaning ‘friendship’, ‘affection’ or ‘fondness’. We’re a heterodox bunch here at Aeon, but what binds us together is a commitment to humane inquiry. What I’m reading The [replication crisis]( has sliced through the credibility of huge tracts of social science and psychology in recent years. But this New York Times Magazine story of [Amy Cuddy]( gives the controversy a human face. It also raises serious concerns about when reasoned debate tips into academic harassment. Cuddy is a Harvard researcher whose work on so-called ‘power poses’ (hands on hips, arms extended, legs outspread) highlighted a connection between your body language and how powerful you feel – as well as the level of testosterone or cortisol present in your system. Cuddy was catapulted to TED-talk fame with a book at the top of the bestseller lists, but her slide into obloquy has been equally swift, and shows that even crusades for rational thinking can have an ugly underbelly. Reason, of course, is a slippery thing, and one that depends upon the speakers sharing a conceptual language. This problem informed C P Snow’s famous [diagnosis]( of a schism between the ‘two cultures’ of science and the arts; but lately I’ve been pondering a spin on Snow’s problem, about how feminists and scientists can talk fruitfully to one another. This year’s Royal Society Book Prize-winner, Cordelia Fine’s [Testosterone Rex]( offers a splendid archetype of this dialogue. With vim, vigour and well-pitched humour, Fine argues that using testosterone to explain [‘male’ behaviours]( (risk-taking, infidelity, buying expensive cars) is muddle-headed – and that we need to see biology and culture as much more intimately and weirdly entangled. They are entangled, too, when it comes to consciousness, a subject I’m frankly hooked on. Dialogue seems to be a particularly apt format for getting at a subject so haunted by the mysteries of first-person experience. I’ve enjoyed the [conversation]( that’s unfurled over several months between the distinguished writer [Tim Parks]( and the philosopher and roboticist Riccardo Manzotti at The New York Review of Books. Parks plays the naïf and Manzotti knocks over his preconceptions with glee, as well as lobbing a few curveballs of his own (in a recent instalment, Manzotti suggested that the famous ‘hard problem’ was a relic of a pre-Copernican delusion about human significance). The illuminating and rather [amicable disagreement]( between the philosophers Daniel Dennett and David Papineau at The Times Literary Supplement is worth a look, too. (For the record, I tend to side with Dan.) And if you’ll humour me and count a book review as a dialogue between author and writer, Amia Srinivasan’s London Review of Books piece on [octopus intelligence]( might just have the best and naughtiest opening tableau of anything I’ve read all year. Finally, The Paris Review is doing what The Paris Review does best, which is to probe writers about the crannies and curiosities of their craft and practice. In this chat with [Svetlana Alexievich]( the Nobel Prize-winner meditates on how she came to her uniquely ventriloquising literary style (it involves reflections on the symbolic potency of meatballs and salami, among other things). What I’m working on Theoretical physics has captured a philosophical niche in the public conversation. But on the editorial team at Aeon, we’ve been wondering: could chemistry, mathematics or biology do the same? We’re testing the waters now by working up a few more ‘deep’ biology pieces, each of which you'll see in Aeon over the next few months. The behavioural and evolutionary biologist [Kevin Laland]( comes out swinging with an upcoming essay in favour of Extended Evolutionary Synthesis – the controversial idea that we need to extend current evolutionary theory to take account of new findings in epigenetics, niche construction (how organisms change their own environment), and the idea that selection might occur at both an individual and group level. Meanwhile the philosopher [John Dupré]( stakes out a defence of the controversial idea that the life sciences can answer fundamental metaphysical questions about what it means to exist; while we hope that an essay on the neglected ‘cognitive’ capacities of plants (can they remember? and feel?) by Laura Bottrill, might cause a bit of a stir early in the new year. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Today we publish a crunchy, captivating [essay]( by the MIT biophysicist [Jeremy England]( whose work aspires to analyse the building blocks of life by breaking it down into basic physics. He and his colleagues have developed what they’re calling dissipative adaptation – a theory which suggests the flow of heat creates life-like features in matter, if you leave it brewing long enough under certain, special conditions. But stranger still is that England features as a key character in Dan Brown’s latest novel, Origin. On the question of whether you’ll get more from Aeon or a cryptic potboiler, as Frank Underwood in House of Cards might say: ‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’ New! Aeon Edition 2 Finally, we have a new Aeon Edition for you – this is a collection of Essays and Ideas designed specially to be read offline. This month’s selection includes Rebecca Lawton on the healing effects of [forest bathing]( J Richard Gott on the [bubble universe]( Chris Frith on [our illusory sense of agency]( Jamie Bartlett on the return of the [city-state]( and more. [Download it here](. Thank you for reading! Sally Davies Senior editor You’ve received this email because you’re a Friend of Aeon. Do you know someone else who might like receiving this? Please feel free to pass it on! [Unsubscribing]( from this list won’t affect receiving the Aeon daily or weekly newsletters.