Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Renaissance faires are a once-a-year chance for visitors to experience an Elizabethan England-meets-‘World of Warcraft’ fantasy land. But for the travelling performers, festival life means the freedom to choose unconventional families and an alternative to mainstream culture and mores.
Directors: Jarred Alterman, Ryan Scafuro
Producer: Ryan Scafuro
Editor: Jarred Alterman
Cinematographers: Jarred Alterman, Ryan Scafuro
Music: Tyler and Wesley Powell
video
Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes
video
Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
video
Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
video
War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
video
Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
video
History of technology
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
19 minutes
video
Animals and humans
The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net
10 minutes
video
Technology and the self
Why single Chinese women are freezing their eggs in California
24 minutes