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Why you might want to be a simple oyster in the next life
What creature would you most like to be in another life? A cat? An eagle? Reincarnation, a playful poem made visual through a collaboration between the author Ellen Bass and the artist Jeff Scher, contemplates the frequently overlooked yet dignified existence of a simple oyster as a model of generosity, self-sacrifice – even love.
Animator: Jeff Scher
Poem: Ellen Bass
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Ethics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes
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Home
How an artist transformed a dilapidated hunting lodge into a house made of dreams
8 minutes
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Animals and humans
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
57 minutes
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes
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Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
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Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
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History of technology
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
19 minutes