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Culture

Essays and videos on the arts, literature, travel, rituals and celebrations
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Physics

A song of ice, fire and jelly – exploring the physics and history of the trumpet

9 minutes

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Stories and literature

Vergil’s secret message

Long derided as mere coincidences, acrostics in ancient poetry are finally being taken seriously – with astonishing results

Julia Hejduk

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Architecture

Tour the European architecture that dreamed of a wondrous, fictitious China

16 minutes

Rubens painting Venus and Cupid reimagined with Venus on the left gazing in a mirror at her mastectomized breast. A cherub like Cupid to the right holds the mirror
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Illness and disease

More than pink

The culture around breast cancer is full of positivity and femininity. But it comes at the expense of the marginalised

Philippa Hetherington

Two Asian film actors are fighting kung-fu style on the beach dressed in 1970s style casual clothes
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Film and visual culture

Fighting kung fu

From chopsocky films to disco earworms, Asian caricatures have proliferated since the 1970s. Can Hollywood kick the habit?

Stephanie Wong

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Philosophy of language

Quantum poetics

How Borges and Heisenberg converged on the notion that language both enables and interferes with our grasp of reality

William Egginton

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Animals and humans

An artist and ants collaborate on an exhibit of ‘tiny Abstract Expressionist paintings’

5 minutes

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Human rights and justice

Beyond obscenity

A century after the trial against ‘Ulysses’, we must revisit the civil liberties arguments of its defender, Morris Ernst

Brett Gary

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Archaeology

The secret life of Druids

The Greeks and Romans portrayed these elusive priests as bogeymen who bathed in their victims’ blood. Who were they really?

Miranda Aldhouse-Green

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Cities

The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith

18 minutes

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Art

Inside the unique creative space where ‘outsider’ artists find their form

14 minutes

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Film and visual culture

Exposed

Slum photography was at the heart of progressive campaigns against urban poverty. And it was a weapon against poor people

Sadie Levy Gale

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Physics

A dreamy tribute to the music of Brian Eno, rendered in paint, soap and water

2 minutes

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Stories and literature

Myths from Earth’s edge – what the Icelandic sagas reveal about Norse morality

57 minutes

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Art

Why European artists shifted their focus from power to peasants in the 16th century

5 minutes

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Anthropology

A riveting collage portrays a century of Inuit history, and envisions a vibrant future

14 minutes

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War and peace

Chorus of testimony

Anne Frank’s diary is one of thousands of desperate, secret and vivid journals each bearing witness to the reality of war

Nina Siegal

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Stories and literature

Poet of impermanence

Enheduana is the first known named author. Her poems of strife and upheaval resonate in our own unstable times

Sophus Helle

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Home

Whether above a pub or in a castle, our childhood homes leave an indelible mark

15 minutes

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Physics

Why does the Sun occasionally flash green as it eclipses the horizon?

7 minutes

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Art

Negative capability

When it comes to our complicated, undecipherable feelings, art prompts a self-understanding far beyond the wellness industry

Aparna Chivukula

EXCLUSIVE
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The environment

Tree-sit with activists as they fight industrial logging from 100 feet above the ground

25 minutes

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Religion

Miracles not magic

It took a tremendous effort to distinguish early Christianity from the finely tuned world of pagan beliefs and rituals

Martha Rampton

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Biography and memoir

The busboy who comforted Robert F Kennedy as he lay dying shares his story

3 minutes