Books, films, series and music worth your time: what they say and why they matter today.
Banksy's film tells how French immigrant Thierry Guetta, who spent years filming street artists, became the artist “Mr. Brainwash” himself and sold almost a million dollars' worth of work in a week, offering a sharp commentary on the hype surrounding art.
Pink Floyd’s eighth album, released in 1973, explores the pressures of modern life, greed, time and mental illness, and became one of the best-selling albums of all time.
HBO’s five-episode miniseries dramatizes the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the cleanup efforts, focusing on the cost of lies and the suppression of criticism.
Netflix’s first nature documentary series, narrated by David Attenborough, focuses more than traditional nature documentaries on human impacts on the environment and climate change.
Carl Sagan's documentary about the universe and the origins of life, broadcast in 1980, became the most popular series in the history of American public television and established a new standard for bringing science to a wider audience.
Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson's non-narrative film explores impermanence and human spirituality through images from 25 countries, without words, as a form of cinematic meditation.
The 1992 film, shot in 65 mm at 152 locations across six continents, juxtaposes natural landscapes, human rituals and technological phenomena without words, and remains a milestone in image quality.
Godfrey Reggio's 1982 documentary, with no narration or dialogue, combines footage of nature and cities with Philip Glass's music to portray a life out of balance; it is considered a cult film and is preserved in the US National Film Registry.
Simon Singh's book recounts the search for a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, from its formulation in 1637 to Andrew Wiles's proof in 1995 — and how it became the first mathematics book to reach number one on the UK bestseller list.
In his book “The Emperor's New Mind”, Roger Penrose argues that consciousness is non-algorithmic and that quantum mechanics plays an essential role in understanding it.
Two workers, a shared dream and a tragic ending: John Steinbeck's classic work about friendship, loneliness and powerlessness in the face of circumstances.
Eighty-seven years after its publication, John Steinbeck's novel about the Joad family and their journey as displaced people from Oklahoma to California remains one of the most important works of social fiction in American literature, because it connects ecological disaster with economic injustice and human dignity.
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