Culture

The replica and the original

Architectural copies of lost structures require reckoning with history and heritage. At what cost is the past rebuilt?

Elizabeth Kostina

Walk in these

Shoes are deeply personal, literally moulded to our lives. But they create our social lives as much as express them

Matthew McCormack

The beat of goombay

Diasporas are made of vast constellations of countless people, fused together through memory, meaning – and music

Salwa Halloway

A lush tour of Fallingwater – the Frank Lloyd Wright design that changed architecture

14 minutes

Merveilleux-scientifique

With brain swaps and death rays, a little-known French sci-fi genre explored science’s dark possibilities a century ago

Fleur Hopkins-Loféron

Life moves slowly in a Romanian mountain village, shaped by care and the seasons

13 minutes

Defying classification, fantastical artworks reframe the racism of Carl Linnaeus

8 minutes

Space and time expand, contract and combust in this propulsive animation

5 minutes

Young Palestinians find fleeting moments of freedom at a West Bank skate park

13 minutes

Out of the fog

It’s a ‘failed painting’ that obscures the profound power of German Romanticism. Why do we love the ‘Wanderer’ so much?

Gianluca Didino

‘A culture is no better than its woods’ – what our trees reveal about us, by W H Auden

5 minutes

Our narrative prison

The three-act ‘hero’s journey’ has long been the most prominent kind of story. What other tales are there to tell?

Eliane Glaser

A 3D rendering of the Colosseum captures its architectural genius and symbolic power

17 minutes

The ecstatic swoon

As Stendhal knew, the reason for art is to make you feel. Do not try to grasp the artwork: allow it to grasp you instead

Robert D Zaretsky

When East met West in the images of an overlooked, original photographer

9 minutes

What actors know

Acting is an ancient and intrinsically human way to establish vibrant connections with one another. And it’s available to us all

John Britton