A staple of rural Indian festivals for decades, the Well of Death features motorcyclists – and the occasional car driver – performing death-defying stunts while circling 18-metre-high walls. In ...

While their stories are distinct, overlapping themes of loneliness, agony and elaborate mental escapes run throughout. Beyond making a forceful case against the use of solitary confinement, the film ...

Light is one aspect of the Universe that, for most people, holds a deep and noticeable value in everyday life, helping them ...

A documentary connecting two Singapores: the Asian country expanded on imported sand and a town in Michigan buried by dunes ...

From fluffing feathers to washing skins, a museum taxidermist shows the hidden art behind creating an ‘illusion of life’ ...

Since Plato, a dominant strain of Western philosophy has understood human beings primarily as rational thinkers, a view typified by René Descartes’s conclusion: cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I ...

In his short film Papers (1991), the Japanese artist Yoshinao Satoh assembles thousands of newspaper images into a transfixing animation. Moving through a flurry of Japanese characters, moon phases, ...

In the early 1960s, quantum physics was regarded as one of the most successful theories of all time. It explained a wide range of phenomena to an unprecedented level of accuracy, from the structure of ...

More than a century before Carl Linnaeus set out to categorise the natural world, the 16th-century Flemish painter and polymath Joris Hoefnagel began to render the creatures around him in ...

For the vast majority of human history, we’ve relied on the Sun to tell time – a reliably unreliable method, given the body’s tendency to disappear behind clouds and the horizon. This animation from ...

is professor of early modern British history at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She is the author of The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France (2023). Yet Descartes was not ...