Society
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
video
Making
From log to Go board – the world’s oldest game, made the old-fashioned way
20 minutes
video
Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Pondering the peculiar one-sided intimacy of the client-therapist relationship
3 minutes
essay
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
video
Medicine
What is it like to be a paramedic, navigating human emergency?
17 minutes
video
Demography and migration
How the world’s harshest lockdown hit India’s millions of migrant workers
27 minutes
video
Subcultures
The cast of ‘misfit toys’ who keep life on an idyllic tourist island afloat
7 minutes
video
Dance and theatre
From calluses to burnt shoes, the elegance of ballet is built from the ground up
4 minutes
video
Work
Living out of a truck, Maikhuu finds promise and peril on Mongolia’s ‘coal highway’
25 minutes
video
Work
Catch those idle moments of connection between coworkers on a smoke break
10 minutes
video
Personality
Why a journeyman boxer finds contentment in the art of losing
6 minutes
essay
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
essay
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
essay
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
essay
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
video
Economic history
The perilous lives of the ‘climbing boys’ who swept chimneys in 19th-century London
5 minutes
video
Biography and memoir
Meet Haddon Salt – the would-have-been Colonel Sanders of fish and chips
9 minutes
video
Values and beliefs
A funeral director takes in bodies that social stigma leaves unclaimed
11 minutes
essay
Economic history
How we became weekly
The week is the most artificial and recent of our time counts yet it’s impossible to imagine our shared lives without it
David Henkin
video
Animals and humans
Familiarity breeds roach-respect, and even love, for a group of Florida insect farmers
13 minutes
video
Work
‘Why does life have to be so complicated?’ A school trip to the world of work
12 minutes
video
Astronomy
Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars. The Nobel Prize went to her supervisor
16 minutes
video
Work
What is it like to clean the world for tomorrow while the rest of a city sleeps?
7 minutes
video
Sports and games
After a day’s toil in California’s fields, labourers let loose in street races
9 minutes