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What’s behind the urban meme of shoes hanging from overhead wires?
A peculiar meme with global reach, you can find shoes hanging from telephone lines in New York City, Sydney and Madrid. Like being able to find a McDonald’s or a Starbucks in almost any major city, the spread of the strange phenomenon is a testament to how quickly ideas and culture travel in the global age even when the significance remains opaque. The Mystery of the Flying Kicks is a crowd-sourced collage that combines animation, donated video, photographs and phone messages to shed light on the trend.
Director: Matthew Bate
Producer: Viron Papadopoulos
video
Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
14 minutes
video
Food and drink
The passage of time is a peculiar thing in a 24-hour diner
14 minutes
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Art
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement
15 minutes
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History of technology
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
19 minutes
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Art
The sprawling mural that depicts an unflinching people’s history of Los Angeles
7 minutes
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Art
In his poem ‘London’, William Blake crafted a bleak vision of the city he loved
9 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’
2 minutes
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War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes
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Stories and literature
To capture grief in poetry is to describe the ineffable. Here’s why Tennyson did it best
8 minutes