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‘More and more I have come to admire resilience…’
A collaboration between the US poet Jane Hirshfield, the US animator Kelli Anderson, and Bulgarian-born, US-based writer Maria Popova, Optimism is a brief yet powerful celebration of ‘the persistence of life against all odds’. Inspired both by a moment in which Popova stopped to marvel at a tiny weed emerging from a San Francisco sidewalk and by Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem ‘Song of Winnie’ (‘Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can’), Anderson’s stop-motion animation springs tiny, vibrant paper plants to life out of concrete cracks and crevices around Brooklyn. Read more about the project on Popova’s blog Brain Pickings.
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Architecture
A lush tour of Fallingwater – the Frank Lloyd Wright design that changed architecture
14 minutes
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Home
Life moves slowly in a Romanian mountain village, shaped by care and the seasons
13 minutes
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Nature and landscape
‘A culture is no better than its woods’ – what our trees reveal about us, by W H Auden
5 minutes
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Animals and humans
One man’s quest to save an orphaned squirrel, as narrated by David Attenborough
14 minutes
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Biology
Butterflies become unrecognisable landscapes when viewed under electron microscopes
4 minutes
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Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes
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Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
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Biology
‘Save the parasites’ may not be a popular rallying cry – but it could be a vital one
11 minutes
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Evolution
The many ways a lizard tongue sticks, grasps, pinches and plops – in slo-mo
6 minutes