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Culture

Essays and videos on the arts, literature, travel, rituals and celebrations
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Death

A hunter’s lyrical reflection on the humbling business of being mortal

6 minutes

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Architecture

‘I listen to the land’ – poetry and greenery intertwine in Emilio Ambasz’s architecture

9 minutes

A colour illustration of a pool of water in which many people are swimming, glimpsed through trees, against a city skyline background
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Mental health

The right to bathe

Water is a great healer. Can New York’s public pools and ‘blue spaces’ be engineered for collective hydrotherapy?

Rebecca Hayes Jacobs

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Nature and landscape

What it’s like to care for Yellowstone during its quietest – and coldest – months

13 minutes

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Beauty and aesthetics

The grit of cacti and the drumbeat of time shape a sculptor’s life philosophy

11 minutes

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Ecology and environmental sciences

From helicopter flybys to trail cameras, there’s no one way to count a wolf

8 minutes

Two sphinx-like statues foreground an intricate formal garden of geometric hedges and a square pond. In the background are cherry trees in bloom
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Nature and landscape

The mystic art of gardening

In an era of 20th-century suburban sprawl, the great designer Russell Page infused soulful philosophy into his gardens

Caleb Smith

A flock of birds fly over a wide expanse of marshland and a river at dusk.
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Biography and memoir

Flat places

Whenever I stand in a flat landscape, I feel myself becoming weightless, taken out of my childhood full of painful nothing

Noreen Masud

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Nature and landscape

Take a serene hike through an ancient forest, inspired by a Miyazaki masterpiece

6 minutes

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Physics

Why does the Sun occasionally flash green as it eclipses the horizon?

7 minutes

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Art

Earthly delights

Noticing first one then many parrots, peacocks, owls and more birds in Old Master paintings taught me to truly see the world

Leanne Ogasawara

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Ecology and environmental sciences

The grassroots project that’s restoring an endangered Hawaiian ecosystem

22 minutes

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Earth science and climate

A biologist on the sorrows of documenting the Great Salt Lake’s collapse

6 minutes

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Animals and humans

Laura fights to protect the magnificence of wild horses running free

6 minutes

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Biology

Flicker through the eclectic beauty and biological diversity of 2,400 leaves

3 minutes

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Deep time

The Rift

Splitting the African continent, it is the only place where our human story can be read continuously from the very start

Tristan McConnell

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Art

At 95, an artist paints swiftly to capture the fugitive light

6 minutes

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The environment

Our contaminated future

In Fukushima, communities are adapting to life in a time of permanent pollution: a glimpse of what’s to come for us all

Maxime Polleri

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Nature and landscape

Home and the birdsong

In the dark, sylvan villages of medieval England, people named places after the birds that filled the night with music

Michael J Warren

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Technology and the self

One woman prepares for the risky solitude of Georgia O’Keeffe’s American West

8 minutes

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Biology

A touch of moss

Inside a rainforest or on the city pavement, moss asks so little yet offers so much: a tactile encounter with time itself

Nikita Arora

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The environment

Here’s to the aquapolis

Unkempt, beguiling and lacking conventional geometry, wetlands bring a roguish, raffish wildness to the city

Tom Blass

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Subcultures

Living off-grid on a remote Scottish island is a mix of rejection and acceptance

13 minutes

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Philosophy of religion

A God beyond logic

The history of natural theology shows that Intelligent Design and New Atheism both got it wrong, in strangely similar ways

Adam R Shapiro