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While filming the full-length documentary Solitary Nation (2014) on the practice of solitary confinement in the US, the film crew for the PBS series Frontline captured the unnerving combination of banging, howling and screaming that accompany life in Maine State Prison’s solitary confinement unit. The resulting short film, Solitary Confinement Is Crazy Loud, is a brief, visceral blast of the intense psychological stress that solitary confinement places, both on inmates and on prison guards.
Director: Dan Edge
Website: Frontline
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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