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Joe Wells is a practising Catholic who believes that his work as a shepherd gives him something of a window into the divine, with each day exposing him to cycles of life and death. But although he finds a meaningful resonance between his job and his faith, the day-to-day realities of his all-consuming work are unromantic at best and brutal at worst, leading him to conclude: ‘It’s a world you manipulate but you don’t control.’ The US filmmaker Vern Moen’s The Shepherd profiles Wells as he tends to his sheep in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. With Wells himself providing a rustic violin score, the sparse and poignant short captures how this millennia-old line of work quietly endures, in many ways unchanged, even in the most industrialised countries.
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Stories and literature
Robert Frost’s poetic reflection on youth, as read in his unforgettable baritone
5 minutes
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Sex and sexuality
After a sextortion scam, Eugene conducts an unblushing survey of masturbation
14 minutes
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Film and visual culture
‘Bags here are rarely innocent’ – how filmmakers work around censorship in Iran
8 minutes
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Language and linguistics
Closed captions suck. Here’s one artist’s inventive project to make them better
8 minutes
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Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
5 minutes
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Anthropology
Why are witchcraft accusations so common across human societies?
4 minutes
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Subcultures
Drop into London’s eclectic skate scene, where newbies and old-timers find community
5 minutes
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Technology and the self
A deepfake porn victim confronts the pain of having her likeness stolen and vandalised
19 minutes
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Wellbeing
Born in China, Zee seeks a gender-affirming life in the American Midwest
11 minutes