Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
As a young aspiring scientist, the South African cosmologist Renée Hložek, who is now an associate professor at the University of Toronto, noticed that the few female scientists she could look up to seemed to be successful in spite of – and not because of or independently of – their ‘womanness’. And, as she details in this brief animation from Thought Café, when she was getting her start, she began to truly understand the distinct barriers women faced in the male-dominated scientific culture. This includes how the process of tearing down ideas, which is fundamental to scientific practice, can be corrosive to the experience of female scientists – and indeed to science itself – when it bleeds into the interpersonal.
Video by Thought Café
video
Family life
The migrants missing in Mexico, and the mothers who won’t stop searching for them
21 minutes
video
Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
video
Ecology and environmental sciences
The tree frog die-off that sparked a global mystery – and revealed a dark truth
15 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes
video
History
From Afghanistan to Virginia – the Muslims who fought in the American Civil War
22 minutes
video
Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
video
Fairness and equality
Visit the small Texas community that lives in the shadow of SpaceX launches
14 minutes
video
War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
video
Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes