Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In his early-Romantic artworks, William Blake (1757-1827) is known for conjuring dramatic, often apocalyptic images inspired by his deep Christian faith. However, as the US video essayist Evan Puschak (also known as the Nerdwriter) lays out in this short, his poem ‘London’ (1794) makes manifest a much more earthly vision of darkness and suffering, born of his everyday life in the metropolis. Placing the poem in the context of 18th-century London – a time when rapid industrialisation was transforming the city, the Church of England held immense power, and the bloody French Revolution was unfolding just across the English Channel – Puschak analyses how Blake’s distinctive and critical perspective on his home city left very little room for optimism.
Video by The Nerdwriter
video
Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes
video
Love and friendship
Never marry a man you love too much, and other views on romance in Sierra Leone
5 minutes
video
Engineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
15 minutes
video
Virtues and vices
Why Bennie tried to disappear, and what happened when he was found decades later
16 minutes
video
History of technology
Curious singles and tech sceptics – what ‘computer dating’ looked like in 1966
6 minutes
video
Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
video
Stories and literature
Two variants of a Hindu myth come alive in an animated ode to Indian storytelling
14 minutes
video
Technology and the self
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy
14 minutes
video
Fairness and equality
There’s a dirty side to clean energy in the metal-rich mountains of South Africa
10 minutes