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For much of her life, Debra Fisher knew that her father Oscar’s account of surviving Auschwitz as a teenager had been sugarcoated to protect her – and perhaps him as well – from the reality of the horrors he had experienced there. In this brief animation from StoryCorps, Fisher reflects on asking her father, who was nearing death, to let her into a ‘room that she could never leave’ by sharing the truth about his time at the notorious concentration camp. The resulting short forms a brief yet powerful look at how the drive to know the truth can override one’s desire to guard from its sometimes haunting, life-changing gravity.
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Information and communication
Coverage of the ‘balloon boy’ hoax forms a withering indictment of for-profit news
17 minutes
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Childhood and adolescence
Marmar is living through a devastating war – but she’d rather tell you about her new dress
8 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
Wander through the English countryside with two teens trying to make sense of the world
10 minutes
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Computing and artificial intelligence
The ‘cloud’ requires heaps of energy to stay aloft. Could synthetic DNA be the answer?
12 minutes
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Art
A puppeteer makes sense of an overwhelming world by shrinking it down to size
5 minutes
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History
There are fragments of Romani Gypsy history all over the UK – if one knows where to look
3 minutes
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Biology
Brilliant dots of colour form exquisite patterns in this close-up of butterfly wings
3 minutes
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Anthropology
Does Mogi’s future lie with her horses on the Mongolian steppe, or in the city?
16 minutes
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Genetics
Why it took a century to work out that humans interbred with Neanderthals
22 minutes