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Loving a pet is usually accompanied by a sombre and unavoidable truth: unless you’ve bought a puppy to accompany you through your final days or are providing excellent care to your tortoise, your dear animal companion will likely precede you in death. However, if you’re a dog owner who happens to have $100,000 to spare, the wonders of modern medical technology do offer a potential loophole. Co-starring the Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari, her beloved 16-year-old Shih Tzu Norman and the US singer and dog-cloning proponent Barbra Streisand, Norman, Norman follows Romvari as she falls into a YouTube hole on the promises, perils and prohibitive cost of pet cloning. Bittersweet and inflected with understated humour, this offbeat short debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2018.
Director: Sophy Romvari
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Neuroscience
The brain repurposed our sense of physical distance to understand social closeness
5 minutes
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Consciousness and altered states
You need to make friends with pain to run through the Grand Canyon and back
5 minutes
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Art
Grotesque imagery meets religious conservatism in Hieronymus Bosch’s art
51 minutes
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Architecture
Why a sculptor pivoted from gallery installations to big-box stores design
9 minutes
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Mathematics
How a verbal paradox shattered the notion of total certainty in mathematics
5 minutes
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Wellbeing
A tender poem doubles as a guide to sitting comfortably in one’s own company
3 minutes
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Values and beliefs
How a God-fearing Jewish woman found atheism – and bacon – in her later years
9 minutes
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War and peace
Before he leaves to go to war, Artem, 18, says goodbye to the man who raised him
12 minutes
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Art
A mindbending trip that summons the forgotten women of surrealism
17 minutes