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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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Cosmology
Tiny, entangled universes that form or fizzle out – a theory of the quantum multiverse
11 minutes
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Music
The peculiar beauty of a song caught between composition and improvisation
3 minutes
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Rituals and celebrations
A beginner’s guide to a joyful Persian tradition of spring renewal and rebirth
3 minutes
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Astronomy
The history of astronomy is a history of conjuring intelligent life where it isn’t
34 minutes
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Love and friendship
Love looks a bit different for a chain-smoking couple in a small apartment
11 minutes
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Metaphysics
Simple entities in universal harmony – Leibniz’s evocative perspective on reality
4 minutes
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Biography and memoir
Passed over as the first Black astronaut, Ed Dwight carved out an impressive second act
13 minutes
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Engineering
A close-up look at electronic paper reveals its exquisite patterns – and limitations
9 minutes
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Architecture
West Africa was once an architectural laboratory. Is it time for a revival?
12 minutes