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Culture

Essays and videos on the arts, literature, travel, rituals and celebrations
A close up picture of hands playing a silver brass flute with a shallow depth of field such that the foreground fingers and keys are more in focus
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Music

To the tune of dystonia

One day, my hand stopped speaking to my brain. As a doctor and flute player, I had to understand this strange affliction

Lynn Hallarman

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

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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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Biography and memoir

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

3 minutes

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Biography and memoir

A young autistic man’s heartfelt letter to the beloved mother he lost

12 minutes

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Family life

The extraordinary story of a Black Holocaust survivor, as told by his daughter

21 minutes

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Stories and literature

The diaries of Kafka

By day an insurance official, by night he was an incessant, insomniacal scribe of the space between waking and dreaming

Ross Benjamin

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Thinkers and theories

A philosophy of secrets

Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the figure of the Marrano Jew, whose identity could barely be told even to themselves

Peter Salmon

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Family life

In Rwanda, Sébastien finds traces of personal history in the wake of national tragedy

21 minutes

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Wellbeing

Through a poetic account of childhood trauma, one woman reclaims her past

28 minutes

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Mental health

Under the mkone tree

When I returned to Kenya, where I grew up, I found biomedicine and traditional medicine in conversation about mental health

Priya Basil

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Biography and memoir

My blackness

At times I’ve tried to escape it. Other times I’ve embraced it. But at all times, people have attempted to define me by it

Colin Grant

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Family life

Fifty years ago, a train collided with Jack and Betty’s car. Here’s how they remember it

9 minutes

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Virtues and vices

From violent criminal to loving parent – a son’s story of his father’s transformation

23 minutes

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Teaching and learning

Ronald grew up in a New York City library. It was as strange and wondrous as it sounds

3 minutes

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Biography and memoir

What Akiko saw at the centre of the Hiroshima blast, and the indelible mark it left

15 minutes

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Art

Can art in a swanky restaurant ever be transcendent? On Rothko’s Seagram Murals

15 minutes

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Film and visual culture

At the movies with Pauline Kael – in the arthouse cinema where she got her start

19 minutes

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Music

Nick ponders the life of the mysterious girl whose used CDs shaped his teenage years

5 minutes

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Nature and landscape

Nature does not care

Too many nature writers descend into poetic self-absorption instead of the sharp-eyed realism the natural world deserves

Richard Smyth

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Knowledge

A poet’s ode to the Hubble Telescope – and to her father, who helped to build it

2 minutes

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Gender and identity

What happened when a gay Black man joined the Metropolitan Police in London

25 minutes

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Human rights and justice

Inside ambiguity

We are suspended between the inescapable facts of our lives and what we do to contest them, nowhere more than in prison

Andy West

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Archaeology

Nefertiti’s bust

How did this ancient and enigmatic sculpture of a beautiful Egyptian queen end up as fortune’s hostage in Germany?

Joyce Tyldesley