A fanatic against fanaticism, and other pleasures of Bertrand Russell in his own words

After 378 pages of intensely intricate logical proofs, one comes upon a triumphant sentence: ‘From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, that 1 + 1 = 2.’ The purpose of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica (1910-13), co-authored with Alfred North Whitehead, was to find a logical foundation for mathematics, what is known as the logicist programme. In pursuit of this, the book took 10 years to write and launched modern mathematical logic. For the lay reader, it is the height of esoteric philosophy: hundreds and hundreds of pages of dense logical symbolism, much of which the authors created specifically for their purposes. That is why it comes as something of a surprise to learn that Russell’s political activism earned him two bouts of jail time – one in 1918, the other in 1961. There are not many logicists so willing to get their hands dirty in the muck of the real world. But Russell was much more than a mere philosopher.

In this 1959 interview from the BBC programme Face to Face, Russell recounts episodes of his long and spectacular life. Born in 1872 to a powerful family (his grandfather was a prime minister), he involved himself in many of the most significant political issues of the next century, from the First World War to the Six-Day War, always from a liberal or Left perspective. He was a passionate pacifist (the stance that can be partially blamed for his jail sentence in 1918), an atheist, and supremely moral man whose passion for knowledge was matched only by his empathy for his fellow human. ‘It just won’t do to live in an ivory tower,’ Russell says. ‘This world is too bad, and we must notice it.’

A street-level view of homelessness from a woman living through it

Many portraits of homelessness still end up ‘othering’ people, despite their storytellers’ best intentions. The UK-based Italian filmmaker Giulia Gandini wanted to try something different, aiming to capture an account of homelessness without imposing her own biases. Lily Blackham had been living on London’s streets for 18 months after escaping an abusive relationship when Gandini gave her an iPhone to chronicle her experiences over three days and tell her own story. The resulting short film, Home Stream, is a touching first-person glimpse into the many practical and emotional complications of homelessness and rough sleeping – from feeling invisible to passersby to not having money for sanitary pads. In doing so, Gandini and Blackham build a deeply humanising portrait of a life on the margins, replete with heartache and struggle, but not without moments of joy.

Via Directors Notes

A curtain that twitches as people walk by creates a delightful paradox of privacy

In 2010, the German artist Niklas Roy embarked on a project to take back a small slice of privacy in an era and in a place – his Berlin workshop – where it can be quite hard to come by. The resulting installation, My Little Piece of Privacy, comprised a surveillance camera, ‘computer vision’ software and a small, motorised curtain, which followed pedestrians as they walked past his storefront. As you might imagine, the moving curtain had an inverse (and amusing) effect, causing passersby to spend far more time in front of his window than they would have otherwise. This short video, featuring scenes from the installation set to a retro arcade-inspired score, makes a highly entertaining spectacle out of Roy’s clever provocation of privacy.

Via Colossal

Climate change science is centuries, not decades old, and it was pioneered by a woman

The notion that human activities might be warming the planet started coming into focus in the 1960s and ’70s, before a scientific consensus emerged in the 1980s and ’90s. But the rough outlines of the science surrounding humanity’s greatest contemporary threat has a surprising, little-known history that dates back roughly two centuries. This brief animation from BBC Ideas traces our modern understanding of the greenhouse effect through the work of three pioneering scientists, beginning with the US scientist and women’s rights activist Eunice Foote, whose 1856 work on the heat-trapping effects of CO₂ was buried for decades before being rediscovered in 2010.

After 30 years of solitude, Peter forms an unlikely friendship with a fellow loner

‘I had left my flock, and Ben had left his.’

After taking a walk through a remote Welsh valley, Peter committed himself to a life there, and disconnected from the outside world. In doing so, he found a solitary inner peace – a peace he maintained for nearly three decades, until, one day, he stumbled upon a lamb that had been left for dead. Finding kinship with the fellow ‘dropout’, Peter took the abandoned creature home and named him Ben. The short Peter and Ben (2007) by the UK filmmaker Pinny Grylls captures the duo’s relationship three years after their chance meeting, as Peter attempts to return Ben to the wild. With a melancholic piano score and sweeping views of the Welsh countryside, her touching film lends a lyrical beauty to this tale of unlikely connection and camaraderie between outsiders.