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Society

Essays and videos on social issues, history, political life and the future
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Rituals and celebrations

Meet the entrepreneur whose business is crafting perfect peak experiences

12 minutes

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Work

Does capitalism make ‘non-playable characters’ of us all? An uncanny exploration

21 minutes

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essay

Race and ethnicity

Battling implicit bias

Training is a cheap solution to a hard problem. It is the systems that allow for biased behaviour that need to change

Jeffrey To

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Personality

Why cleaning up crime scenes requires a rare mix of grit and empathy

9 minutes

A shirtless man in jeans lies sleeping beside his 1970s era car on the sandy beach
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Work

Disengage

Modern life subjects us to all-consuming demands. That’s why we should reflect on what it means to step away from it all

David J Siegel

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Mood and emotion

Moments of poetry pierce through the mundane at a small-town grocery

13 minutes

Peach Twig (Prunus Persica) (1918) by Royal Charles Steadman
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Biology

In 1886, a US agency set out to record new fruit varieties. The results are wondrous

5 minutes

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essay

Work

Freedom at work

There is always a demand for more jobs. But what makes a job good? For that, Immanuel Kant has an answer

Tyler Re

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essay

Anthropology

Lessons from the foragers

Hunter-gatherers don’t live in an economic idyll but their deep appreciation of rest puts industrialised work to shame

Vivek V Venkataraman

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Making

From log to Go board – the world’s oldest game, made the old-fashioned way

20 minutes

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Pondering the peculiar one-sided intimacy of the client-therapist relationship

3 minutes

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Music

Enter the conductrice

Will a new generation of women on the podium perpetuate the tyrannical charisma of their male predecessors or overturn it?

Xenia Hanusiak

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Medicine

What is it like to be a paramedic, navigating human emergency?

17 minutes

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Demography and migration

How the world’s harshest lockdown hit India’s millions of migrant workers

27 minutes

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Subcultures

The cast of ‘misfit toys’ who keep life on an idyllic tourist island afloat

7 minutes

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Dance and theatre

From calluses to burnt shoes, the elegance of ballet is built from the ground up

4 minutes

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Work

Living out of a truck, Maikhuu finds promise and peril on Mongolia’s ‘coal highway’

25 minutes

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Work

Catch those idle moments of connection between coworkers on a smoke break

10 minutes

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Personality

Why a journeyman boxer finds contentment in the art of losing

6 minutes

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Politics and government

What lies beneath government

Buka Town in Bougainville shows how bureaucratic states could be reimagined, not as concrete buildings but as living gardens

Gordon Peake & Miranda Forsyth

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Computing and artificial intelligence

The people of the cloud

Hot, strenuous and unsung. There is nothing soft and fluffy about the caretaking work that enables our digital lives

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate

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Technology and the self

Help! Brain overload

As tasks mount up, our brain’s ability to juggle goes down. Neuroergonomic tactics can relieve the cognitive burden

Emily Willingham

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Fairness and equality

Poor sleep

Being on-call, out-of-sync and underslept is not just personal but a pervasive political injustice. Bold change is needed

Jonathan White

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Economic history

The perilous lives of the ‘climbing boys’ who swept chimneys in 19th-century London

5 minutes