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Think modern democracy is stagnant, stifled by bureaucracy and undone by a fickle populace? Plato saw it coming from some two-and-a-half millennia away. This short animation from BBC Radio 4 explains why Plato had little love for democracy, and believed that it was the true elite – trained philosophers, of course – who should steer the ship of state.
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Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
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War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
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Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
11 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