Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
In this short, the US video essayist Evan Puschak (also known as the Nerdwriter) makes his case that Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) is the ‘great English poet of grief’. Combining biography and literary criticism, Puschak details how the sudden death of Tennyson’s best friend at a young age moulded him into an extraordinary writer on a subject that he surely wished he didn’t understand so acutely. In particular, Puschak centres his analysis on the poem Break, Break, Break (1842), which, in just 16 lines, traces the trajectory of a life from boyhood to the grave. Through this, Puschak argues, the work captures the feeling of an ‘incessant reaching for something that’s not there’ and the jarring indifference of the greater world that characterise bereavement.
Video by The Nerdwriter
video
Language and linguistics
The little Peruvian guide to public speaking that conjures up a grandiose world
7 minutes
video
Life stages
What Michelangelo’s late-in-life works reveal about his genius – and his humanness
13 minutes
video
Biography and memoir
Preserving memories of a Japanese internment camp, and the land where it stood
8 minutes
video
Making
Trek to a remote Himalayan village where artisans craft teapots fit for kings
11 minutes
video
Childhood and adolescence
The unique fellowship between teens and young puffins on a remote Icelandic island
20 minutes
video
Animals and humans
Why be dragons? How massive, reptilian beasts entered our collective imagination
58 minutes
video
Rituals and celebrations
Flirtation, negotiation and vodka – or how to couple up in 1950s rural Poland
5 minutes
video
Technology and the self
In the town once named Asbestos, locals ponder the voids industry left in its wake
16 minutes
video
Biology
How the world’s richest reds are derived from an innocuous Mexican insect
5 minutes