Culture

The risk of beauty

W Eugene Smith’s photos of the Minamata disaster are both exquisite and horrifying. How might we now look at them?

Joanna Pocock

Laughing shores

Sailors, exiles, merchants and philosophers: how the ancient Greeks played with language to express a seaborne imagination

Giordano Lipari

A prisoner in Guantánamo finds some escape in building intricate model ships

6 minutes

Falling for suburbia

Modernists and historians alike loathed the millions of new houses built in interwar Britain. But their owners loved them

Michael Gilson

Watch as Japan’s surplus trees are transformed into forest-tinted crayons

4 minutes

Land loneliness

To survive, we are asked to forget that our lands and bodies are being violated, policed, ripped up, silenced, sacrificed

Kelsey Day

Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border

14 minutes

A novel kind of music

So-called ‘classical’ music was as revolutionary as the modern novel in its storytelling, harmony and depth

Joel Sandelson

An artist endeavours to bring the Moon down to Earth in a ritual of yearning

5 minutes

Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist

15 minutes

The adoption paradox

Even happy families cannot avoid the reality – my reality – that adoption is predicated on transacting the life of a child

Fiona Sampson