essay
Sleep and dreams
Spinning the night self
After years of insomnia, I threw off the effort to sleep and embraced the peculiar openness I found in the darkest hours
Annabel Abbs
essay
Nature and landscape
Laughing shores
Sailors, exiles, merchants and philosophers: how the ancient Greeks played with language to express a seaborne imagination
Giordano Lipari
video
Art
A prisoner in Guantánamo finds some escape in building intricate model ships
6 minutes
video
Meaning and the good life
A Japanese religious community makes an unlikely home in the mountains of Colorado
9 minutes
video
Sex and sexuality
From secret crushes to self-acceptance – a joyful chronicle of ‘old lesbian’ stories
29 minutes
video
Making
Forging a cello from pieces of wood demands its own form of virtuosity
27 minutes
essay
Home
Falling for suburbia
Modernists and historians alike loathed the millions of new houses built in interwar Britain. But their owners loved them
Michael Gilson
video
Physics
The rhythms of a star system inspire a pianist’s transfixing performance
5 minutes
video
Art
Watch as Japan’s surplus trees are transformed into forest-tinted crayons
4 minutes
video
Meaning and the good life
‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’
2 minutes
video
Pleasure and pain
The volunteer musicians who perform in the aftermath of violence and tragedy
12 minutes
essay
Nature and landscape
Land loneliness
To survive, we are asked to forget that our lands and bodies are being violated, policed, ripped up, silenced, sacrificed
Kelsey Day
video
Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
essay
Music
A novel kind of music
So-called ‘classical’ music was as revolutionary as the modern novel in its storytelling, harmony and depth
Joel Sandelson
video
Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
video
Home
An artist endeavours to bring the Moon down to Earth in a ritual of yearning
5 minutes
video
Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
essay
Biography and memoir
The adoption paradox
Even happy families cannot avoid the reality – my reality – that adoption is predicated on transacting the life of a child
Fiona Sampson
essay
Thinkers and theories
Paper trails
Husserl’s well-tended archive has given him a rich afterlife, while Nietzsche’s was distorted by his axe-grinding sister
Peter Salmon
video
War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes
video
Life stages
What Michelangelo’s late-in-life works reveal about his genius – and his humanness
13 minutes
essay
Pleasure and pain
Eulogy for silence
Tinnitus is like a constant scream inside my head, depriving me of what I formerly treasured: the moments of serene quiet
Diego Ramírez Martín del Campo