December 29, 2016 The Birth of Saké In a world where most mass produced goods are heavily automated, a small group of artisans must brave unusual working conditions to preserve a 2000-year-old tradition that we have come to know as saké. THE BIRTH OF SAKÉ is a cinematic documentary that reveals the story of passionate saké-makers and what it takes to make world-class saké at Yoshida Brewery, a 144-year-old family-owned small brewery in northern Japan. The workers at Yoshida Brewery are an eclectic cast of characters, ranging from 20 to 70 years old. As a vital part of this cast that must live and work for a six-month period through the brutal winter, charismatic veteran brewmaster Yamamoto (65) and the brewery’s sixth-generation heir, Yasuyuki Yoshida (27), are keepers of this tradition, and are the main characters who bring the narrative forward.
December 28, 2016 What Happens to Our Bodies After We Die? Since the dawn of humanity, an estimated 100.8 billion people have lived and died, a number that increases by about 0.8% of the world’s population each year. What happens to all of those peoples’ bodies after they die? And will the planet eventually run out of burial space? Farnaz Khatibi Jafari traces the evolution of how humanity has treated bodies and burials.
December 27, 2016 Max Cooper - Order from Chaos Maxime Causeret selected this track to work with, under the brief to map the emergent rhythm to an exploration of emergence in living form. His video shows the raindrops initially, then going into simple cellular forms and then showing the important idea of cooperation between simple cells to form more robust colonies of life. This develops into a visualisation of the idea of endosymbiosis, where simpler smaller organisms can live inside larger cells, each providing a benefit to the other, and eventually forming parts of the same organism as they evolve to be entirely dependent on each other.
December 26, 2016 Field of Vision - Relatively Free Journalist and activist Barrett Brown is released from prison after four years. On his drive across Texas to a halfway house, he discusses his extraordinary case and considers what the future now holds for him and other radical journalists.
December 23, 2016 L.A. Glows “That light: the late-afternoon light of Los Angeles—golden pink off the bay through the smog and onto the palm fronds. A light I’ve found myself pining for every day of the nearly two decades since I left Southern California.”
December 22, 2016 Lunch Atop A Skyscraper We don't know their names, nor the photographer who immortalized them, but these men lunching 800 feet up show the daredevil spirit behind Manhattan's vertical expansion in 1932.
December 21, 2016 How Stamps Get Designed Antonio Alcalá is one of the US Postal Service's four art directors, a job he began in his fifties after a career designing books and museum installations. Learning to design for such a small canvas required a new way of thinking and approaching his craft. Hear what goes into designing a stamp for the U.S. Postal Service, using real examples from his career. Stamps feature artwork by Jessica Hische, Yulia Brodskaya, Gail Anderson, Martín Ramírez, Petra and Nicole Kapitza, Michael Doret, Michael Dyer, Gregory Manchess, R. Gregory Christie, and Ron Spears.
December 15, 2016 The Correct Way To Pour Engine Oil From A Bottle It seems that nearly every photograph, commercial, and TV show shows people pouring engine oil with the bottle turned the wrong way. It may seem trivial, but when used properly, the smart design of an oil bottle will prevent glugging and spilling. ALSO - you can also hold the bottle "flat" as well, which will help.
December 13, 2016 The City of the Dead: Colma, California In this small city near San Francisco, the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one. There's some gruesome history here - and a few questions for the future.
December 8, 2016 Feynman's Building Blocks of Thermodynamics Professor Andrea Sella recalls Richard Feynman’s illustration of the first law of thermodynamics with a child’s building blocks and wily mother.
December 6, 2016 Why There Are No Viable Alternatives to Capitalism "Behind every rise of fascism is a failed revolution," said the Frankfurt School thinker Walter Benjamin. Here, Slavoj Žižek revives that statement in the context of the failed left. Zizek's latest book is Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors: Against the Double Blackmai.
December 2, 2016 A Marxist for Trump Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian psychoanalytical philosopher and Hegelian Marxist, received widespread criticism over his support of Donald Trump during his promotional tour for his most recent book, “Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors.” Given Žižek’s far-left views, his support for the Republican presidential-elect seemed contradictory.
December 1, 2016 Donald Trump: Magician-In-Chief "It's time for all of us to start thinking of our own attention as a limited and valuable resource, because when you do you can be a little more certain that the card you're choosing is actually yours."
