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Society

Essays and videos on social issues, history, political life and the future
A weary looking medical staff member in scrubs and face mask sits at a desk in a hospital room surrounded by medical paraphernalia
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Public health

It’s dirty work

In caring for and bearing with human suffering, hospital staff perform extreme emotional labour. Is there a better way?

Susanna Crossman

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Economics

Who bears the risk?

Under the guise of empowerment and freedom, politicians and business are offloading lifethreatening risk to individuals

Suzanne Schneider

A colour illustration of a pool of water in which many people are swimming, glimpsed through trees, against a city skyline background
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Mental health

The right to bathe

Water is a great healer. Can New York’s public pools and ‘blue spaces’ be engineered for collective hydrotherapy?

Rebecca Hayes Jacobs

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Sex and sexuality

For ages, solo sex was hardly taboo. What led to its centuries-long dry spell?

4 minutes

A woman and two children dressed in traditional First Nations clothing stand in front of a teepee structure
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Language and linguistics

Language is medicine

For First Nations people, health is not a matter of mechanical fitness of the body, but of language, identity and belonging

Erica X Eisen

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Cities

Sick city

My dad grew up in Robert Moses’s New York City. His story is a testament to how urban planning shapes countless lives

Katie Mulkowsky

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Analysis for the people

Group therapy promised to be both democratic and radical, but it failed to take hold. Has its time finally come?

Jess Cotton

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Tōjisha-kenkyū

This radical movement makes space for people with mental health and other challenges to study (and celebrate) themselves

Satsuki Ayaya & Junko Kitanaka

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Illness and disease

The war on cancer

Is it time to abandon the century-old idea that cancer is best met with a ‘fight’ from patients and their doctors alike?

Elaine Schattner

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History

Medieval babycare

From mansplaining about breastfeeding to debates on developmental toys, medieval parenting was full of familiar dilemmas

Katherine Harvey

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The environment

Our contaminated future

In Fukushima, communities are adapting to life in a time of permanent pollution: a glimpse of what’s to come for us all

Maxime Polleri

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Addiction

Why we crave

The neuroscientific picture of addiction overlooks the psychological and social factors that make cravings so hard to resist

Zoey Lavallee

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History of technology

Care from afar

For over a century telemedicine has promised healthcare for all. But will it ever replace seeing a human being in person?

Jeremy A Greene

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Human rights and justice

The staggering cruelty of Ireland’s Church-run ‘mother and baby homes’

18 minutes

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Environmental history

Contaminated kinship

If your hometown were beset with toxic dust, like Australia’s Broken Hill, would you feel any less connected to it?

Lilian Pearce

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

The humane asylum

As a society we are failing people with severe, persistent mental illness. It’s time to reimagine institutional care

Madeleine Ritts & Daniel Rosenbaum

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Education

Sex on the curriculum

Sex education is a battlefield over morals and young bodies, and has exposed fractures in American life for over a century

Kristy Slominski

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Work

Emergency first responders meet chaos with dissonant calm in this gripping short

9 minutes

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Public health

When two punk bands came to a psychiatric hospital, beautiful chaos ensued

27 minutes

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Anthropology

Safety is fatal

Humans need closeness and belonging but any society that closes its gates is doomed to atrophy. How do we stay open?

David Napier

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Anthropology

Longhouse lockdown

On a regular cycle, the Nias islanders of Indonesia would retreat into enforced seclusion. What can we learn from them?

Andrew Beatty

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Illness and disease

The wisdom of pandemics

Viruses are active agents, existing within rich lifeworlds. A safe future depends on understanding this evolutionary story

David Waltner-Toews

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Economic history

Economics for the people

Against the capitalist creeds of scarcity and self-interest, a plan for humanity’s shared flourishing is finally coming into view

Dirk Philipsen

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Public health

It didn’t have to be this way

A bioethicist at the heart of the Italian coronavirus crisis asks: why won’t we talk about the tradeoffs of the lockdown?

Silvia Camporesi