Culture
essay
Metaphysics
The truth about fiction
What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction? The answer to this perennial question relies on how we understand reality itself
Hannah H Kim
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Stories and literature
Elegance and hustle
How French modernists from Proust to Mallarmé were alarmed and inspired by the voracious dynamism of the newspaper world
Max McGuinness
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Cognition and intelligence
The power of prayer
Praying is a cognitive practice full of problem-solving resources. You can learn from it even if you don’t want to do it
Eleanor Schille-Hudson
video
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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Art
Threads of resistance
Knitting and embroidery are laden with stereotypes of domestic femininity – and the subversive potential for protest
Gemma McKenzie
video
Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
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Stories and literature
Laboratories of the impossible
By testing the boundaries of reality, Spanish-language authors have created a sublime counterpart to experimental physics
Joshua Roebke
video
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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Dance and theatre
Why the old man dances
Religious ritual to appease the gods or free expression of human agency? For the ancient Romans, dance could be both
Karin Schlapbach
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Education
A valiant experiment
The progressive and remarkably innovative Woodmead School briefly flourished amid the viciousness of apartheid South Africa
David Dyzenhaus
video
History of technology
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
19 minutes
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Future of technology
A linkless internet
In creating anonymous summaries, AI flattens out all the fascinating architecture of thought that makes the internet hum
Collin Jennings
video
Animals and humans
The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net
10 minutes
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Home
How to lose your home
In a changing climate, the instinct is to save everything you can. But maybe letting go is braver – and better for the future?
Dan Hancox
video
Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
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Biography and memoir
A grief with no name
As a child, I was torn from a culture that I never knew. It is a loss that defines me, even as I struggle to define the loss
Jelena Markovic
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Philosophy of religion
Compassionate time
On his final journey through Asia, Thomas Merton found some peace in the dialectic between refusing the world and loving it
Drew Calvert
video
Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
11 minutes
video
War and peace
‘She is living on in many hearts’ – Otto Frank on the legacy of his daughter’s diary
12 minutes
video
Art
Why Diego Velázquez needed a lifetime to paint his enigmatic masterpiece
31 minutes
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Food and drink
The flavour of mechanisation
Olive oil was revered and cherished by the ancients. But its distinctive peppery taste is really a modern invention
Massimo Mazzotti
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Beauty and aesthetics
Is beauty natural?
Charles Darwin was as fascinated by extravagant ornament in nature as Jane Austen was in culture. Did their explanations agree?
Abigail Tulenko
video
Technology and the self
A haunting scene from ‘Minority Report’ inspires a voyage into time and memory
7 minutes
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Physics
The city of wisdom
Don’t be intimidated by physics: it is made of stories and metaphors. Learn these and the field will open up to you
Jamie Zvirzdin