Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Never in human history have there been so many ways for privacies to be violated – or, often, just given away freely and without much thought. Using the thinly veiled metaphor of an animated alien planet teeming with terrible hovercar drivers, this animation from TED-Ed explores the value of privacy, and especially what we can lose or gain when we relinquish it. Spanning the work of philosophers ranging from Plato, who saw little value in the concept as we understand it today, to modern thinkers like the Israeli philosopher Ruth Gavison (1945-2020), who believed that certain privacies were necessary for modern democracies to function, the short asks viewers to consider both privacy’s worth and its very meaning in the modern world.
video
Design and fashion
A ceramicist puts her own bawdy spin on the folk language of pottery
14 minutes
video
Animals and humans
Villagers struggle to keep their beloved, endangered ape population afloat
19 minutes
video
Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
video
Language and linguistics
Why Susan listens to recordings of herself speaking a language she no longer remembers
5 minutes
video
Information and communication
‘Astonished and somewhat terrified’ – Victorians’ reactions to the phonograph
36 minutes
video
Engineering
From simple motors to levitating trains – how design shapes innovation
23 minutes
video
Animals and humans
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
57 minutes
video
Archaeology
What’s an ancient Greek brick doing in a Sumerian city? An archeological investigation
16 minutes
video
Family life
The migrants missing in Mexico, and the mothers who won’t stop searching for them
21 minutes