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EXCLUSIVE

Reverence

12 minutes

Talking heads

15 minutes

Lee Smolin: space and time

9 minutes

Another Hayride

18 minutes

Why do we, like, hesitate when we, um, speak?

6 minutes

How branded yarmulkes combine traditional Jewish values with popular culture

Kippahs, also known as yarmulkes, are the traditional caps Jewish men have worn for hundreds of years as a reminder of God’s omnipresence. Though the tradition does not have any biblical derivation, its widespread acceptance as a Jewish custom has imbued it with religious significance. Why then are custom yarmulkes, featuring everything from New York Knicks logos to Bart Simpson, on the rise? Reverence is a lively, entertaining debate on the matter, featuring Jewish scholars, rabbis and branded kippah-clad students offering an array of perspectives on this peculiar juncture between faith and popular culture.

Director: Collin Kornfeind

Producers: Sarah Pappalardo, Matthew Waysdorf

Want an unvarnished window into the world of kids? Try cutting their hair

In the Dutch documentary series Talking Heads, the host and seasoned children’s hairdresser Marko Suds provides a window into the eclectic worlds of the eight- to 12-year-old kids who populate his salon chair. The far-reaching discussions span the challenges, passions and dreams of the diverse young patrons – all while the endearing Suds carefully observes their instructions for an ideal hairstyle. In this first episode of the series, Suds cuts and communes with Marijn, who ponders meeting his sperm donor father; Taysen, who’s tired after a night spent watching a television programme about criminal fugitives; Zhuan, who has Tourette’s syndrome; and Annemarie, whose beloved father has had a debilitating stroke.

Director: Menno Otten

Websites: Keplerfilm

Time is fundamental, space is emergent – why physicists are rethinking reality

From Isaac Newton’s ‘absolute space’ and ‘absolute time’, which envisioned the two phenomena as fundamental and separate, to Albert Einstein’s ‘spacetime’, which condensed them into a single concept, the relationship between space and time has been the mystery driving fundamental physics for more than four centuries. And over the past several decades, some physicists, including Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, have come to believe that the fabric of reality is perhaps due to be torn into yet again. In this interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the series Closer to Truth, Smolin discusses how developments in quantum mechanics have left physicists with questions that special relativity can’t seem to accommodate, and why the solution might be a conception of reality in which time is fundamental, and space emergent.

Video by Closer to Truth

The controversial New Age guru who believed self-love healed all – even AIDS

For gay men living with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s, their diagnosis was often accompanied by both fear for their lives and shame for having contracted a highly stigmatised disease. In Another Hayride, the US filmmaker Matt Wolf explores how the US self-help guru Louise Hay (1926-2017) gained an ardent following among HIV-positive gay men in Los Angeles, and then among people experiencing trauma throughout the country, by teaching that they could heal themselves through self-love. The short documentary is built from archival footage – the US talk show hosts Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue make cameos – and narration from the US writer and minister David Ault, who attended Hay’s weekly ‘Hayride’ support groups. Through his portrait, Wolf offers a nuanced recollection of Hay and her gospel of New Age healing, in which extraordinary compassion and magical thinking both played central roles.

Director: Matt Wolf

Producer: Sam Bisbee

Ums, likes and y’knows get no respect – but they’re vital to conversation

If you’ve ever listened to a recording of yourself speaking, the frequency with which you used fillers such as ‘um’, ‘uh’, ‘like’ and ‘y’know’ might have grabbed your attention – and perhaps your scorn. Indeed, these verbal hesitations have been viewed as undesirable since the days of ancient Greece and, more recently, the American linguist Noam Chomsky characterised them as ‘errors’ irrelevant to language. But could there be more to these utterances than initially meets the ear? In this short animation from TED-Ed, Lorenzo García-Amaya, assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan, reveals how ‘filled pauses’ can give conversation partners important context clues, communicate emphasis, help tether related thoughts together, and so much more.

Video by TED-Ed

Writer: Lorenzo García-Amaya

Animator: Yael Reisfeld

How branded yarmulkes combine traditional Jewish values with popular culture

Kippahs, also known as yarmulkes, are the traditional caps Jewish men have worn for hundreds of years as a reminder of God’s omnipresence. Though the tradition does not have any biblical derivation, its widespread acceptance as a Jewish custom has imbued it with religious significance. Why then are custom yarmulkes, featuring everything from New York Knicks logos to Bart Simpson, on the rise? Reverence is a lively, entertaining debate on the matter, featuring Jewish scholars, rabbis and branded kippah-clad students offering an array of perspectives on this peculiar juncture between faith and popular culture.

Director: Collin Kornfeind

Producers: Sarah Pappalardo, Matthew Waysdorf

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Detail of Battle against the inhabitants of Veii and Fidenae (c1598), by Guiseppe Cesari, also known as the Cavaliere d’Arpino. The National Gallery, London. Courtesy Wikipedia

Essay/
Nations and empires
Enlisted, enslaved, enthroned

Vandals, Goths, Alemanni, Sueves… the Romans grappled endlessly with the status of ethnic peoples in their vast empire

Douglas Boin

The Tarkhan Dress is the world’s oldest woven garment with radiocarbon testing dating the garment to the late fourth-millennium BC. Image courtesy the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL

Essay/
Archaeology
The clothing revolution

What if the need for fabric, not food, in the face of a changing climate is what first tipped humanity towards agriculture?

Ian Gilligan