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Society

Essays and videos on social issues, history, political life and the future
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essay

Mental health

The last great stigma

Workers with mental illness experience discrimination that would be unthinkable for other health issues. Can this change?

Pernille Yilmam

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Music

Folk music was never green

Don’t be swayed by the sound of environmental protest: these songs were first sung in the voice of the cutter, not the tree

Richard Smyth

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Ethics

The scourge of lookism

It is time to take seriously the painful consequences of appearance discrimination in the workplace

Andrew Mason

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video

Work

A Swedish expat in the Philippines wonders: what’s up with people sleeping at work?

14 minutes

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Rituals and celebrations

Meet the entrepreneur whose business is crafting perfect peak experiences

12 minutes

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Work

Does capitalism make ‘non-playable characters’ of us all? An uncanny exploration

21 minutes

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Race and ethnicity

Battling implicit bias

Training is a cheap solution to a hard problem. It is the systems that allow for biased behaviour that need to change

Jeffrey To

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video

Personality

Why cleaning up crime scenes requires a rare mix of grit and empathy

9 minutes

A shirtless man in jeans lies sleeping beside his 1970s era car on the sandy beach
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Work

Disengage

Modern life subjects us to all-consuming demands. That’s why we should reflect on what it means to step away from it all

David J Siegel

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video

Mood and emotion

Moments of poetry pierce through the mundane at a small-town grocery

13 minutes

Peach Twig (Prunus Persica) (1918) by Royal Charles Steadman
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Biology

In 1886, a US agency set out to record new fruit varieties. The results are wondrous

5 minutes

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Work

Freedom at work

There is always a demand for more jobs. But what makes a job good? For that, Immanuel Kant has an answer

Tyler Re

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Anthropology

Lessons from the foragers

Hunter-gatherers don’t live in an economic idyll but their deep appreciation of rest puts industrialised work to shame

Vivek V Venkataraman

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video

Making

From log to Go board – the world’s oldest game, made the old-fashioned way

20 minutes

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Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Pondering the peculiar one-sided intimacy of the client-therapist relationship

3 minutes

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Music

Enter the conductrice

Will a new generation of women on the podium perpetuate the tyrannical charisma of their male predecessors or overturn it?

Xenia Hanusiak

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Medicine

What is it like to be a paramedic, navigating human emergency?

17 minutes

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Demography and migration

How the world’s harshest lockdown hit India’s millions of migrant workers

27 minutes

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Subcultures

The cast of ‘misfit toys’ who keep life on an idyllic tourist island afloat

7 minutes

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Dance and theatre

From calluses to burnt shoes, the elegance of ballet is built from the ground up

4 minutes

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Work

Living out of a truck, Maikhuu finds promise and peril on Mongolia’s ‘coal highway’

25 minutes

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Work

Catch those idle moments of connection between coworkers on a smoke break

10 minutes

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Personality

Why a journeyman boxer finds contentment in the art of losing

6 minutes

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Politics and government

What lies beneath government

Buka Town in Bougainville shows how bureaucratic states could be reimagined, not as concrete buildings but as living gardens

Gordon Peake & Miranda Forsyth