Beauty & Aesthetics

Idea/Love & Friendship

Keeping it in the family: why we pick the partners we do

Tamsin Saxton

Essay/Beauty & Aesthetics

The sea was never blue

The Greek colour experience was made of movement and shimmer. Can we ever glimpse what they saw when gazing out to sea?

Maria Michela Sassi

Video/Art

How the ‘Master of Black’ uses non-colour to manipulate light in his artwork

4 minutes

Idea/Beauty & Aesthetics

The revolutionary figure of the beautiful, self-improved soul

Justine Kolata

Video/Nature & Environment

Preventing the all-consuming sound pollution of modern life starts with listening to nature

10 minutes

Essay/Beauty & Aesthetics

Against flow

In the myth of flow, the performer soars when the music starts. But it's grit and self-analysis until the very last bar

Barbara Gail Montero

Video/Beauty & Aesthetics

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which is the fairest rectangle of them all?

2 minutes

Video/Mathematics

A brilliant ‘geometric ballet’ of sound, shape and symmetry on the theme of 180°

5 minutes

Idea/Physics

How the rainbow illuminates the enduring mystery of physics

Jon Butterworth

Video/Stories & Literature

How E E Cummings’s most famous love poem reaches towards transcendence of self

9 minutes

Video/Art

How a focus on the present moment has given David Hockney many lives

7 minutes

Video/Architecture & Landscape

Light, geometry and symbolism: how Jean Nouvel’s architecture reimagines culture

15 minutes

Video/Art

An artist finds rich pickings in the sprawling mundanity of a Walmart store

4 minutes

Video/Chemistry

Dazzling macro photography reveals the marvels of chemicals meeting

7 minutes

Video/Dance & Theatre

Stephen Fry loathes dancing. To understand better, see it performed – in dance

2 minutes

Video/History of Ideas

Why Socrates believed that sexual desire is the first step towards righteousness

2 minutes

Essay/Beauty & Aesthetics

It is and it isn’t

Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ is not just a radical kind of art. It’s a philosophical dialetheia: a contradiction that is true

Damon Young & Graham Priest

Video/Art

The flickering ray of hope in the stark loneliness of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks

8 minutes

Idea/Stories & Literature

Simplicity or style: what makes a sentence a masterpiece?

Jenny Davidson

Idea/Beauty & Aesthetics

The concrete buildings of Brutalism are beautiful

Barnabas Calder

Essay/Design & Fashion

What do clothes say?

Clothes can be forms of thought as articulate as a poem or equation. Why then does philosophy like to dress them down?

Shahidha Bari

Video/Architecture & Landscape

Frank Lloyd Wright on why architecture should be about ideas and ideals

6 minutes

Video/Art

What can Ansel Adams’s enduring photography teach us in the age of Instagram?

6 minutes

Idea/Sports & Games

Sport is not just about athleticism: beauty matters too

Emily Ryall

Idea/Design & Fashion

How beards put a brave face on threatened masculinity

Christopher R Oldstone-Moore

Idea/Art

The history of ugliness shows that there is no such thing

Gretchen E Henderson

Idea/Beauty & Aesthetics

Bucket lists are a good way to ruin the experience of nature

Tom Winterbottom

Idea/Beauty & Aesthetics

Why physics needs art to help picture the universe

Frank Wilczek

Video/History of Ideas

Music is marvellous, but not mysterious: an interview with Lydia Goehr

6 minutes

Video/Philosophy of Science

Richard Feynman on why science adds beauty in the Universe: it does not subtract