All posts filed under: video

Olympic Games, 388 BC style

What would it have been like to spend five days attending the ancient Greek Olympics in 388 BC? That’s what Neil Faulkner‘s book sets out to explore. You can listen to the interview, which I recorded with Neil in the spring of 2012, shortly before the London games, by clicking on the media players above or below. And there’s more information about the book on Yale University Press’s website here. In the interview, Neil tells me: ‘Ancient Greece is a highly divided and competitive world, and it’s a world that puts huge emphasis on sport, partly because all of Greece’s city states depend for their armed forces on a citizen militia made up of their adult male citizens. So there’s a sense in which Greek sport is war without the shooting. It’s preparation for war in a highly divided and competitive world.’ And we also produced a short video of Neil talking about the book: Neil Faulkner on his Visitor’s Guide to the Ancient Olympics from George Miller on Vimeo.  

Julian Baggini: The Philosopher in the Kitchen – 1. Practical Wisdom and hummus

Here is the first of four short films I made with Julian Baggini last summer and released last month to coincide with the paperback edition of his book, The Virtues of the Table. In this first film he asks: Do we really need to follow recipes?   Julian Baggini: The Philosopher in the Kitchen – 1. Practical Wisdom (Hummus) from George Miller on Vimeo.

Of fathers

As this series, Talking about Photographs, continues, I think it’s a fairly safe bet that fathers will feature prominently as a subject – fathers gone and fathers barely known in particular. Here, Sabrina Hazelwood reflects on a picture of her father with some navy friends taken in Cuba in the 1960s.

First in a series…

The idea is very simple. I ask an interviewee to talk about a photograph with special significance for them. The video lasts less than two minutes. And at the end you get to see the photo. Talking about Photographs: 1. Philippa Vick from George Miller on Vimeo.

Eva Illouz on Why Love Hurts

“The grand ambition of this book is to do to emotions – at least to romantic love – what Marx did to commodities: to show that they are shaped by social relations; that they do not circulate in a free and unconstrained way; that their magic is social; and that they contain and condense the institutions of modernity… “Men’s and women’s romantic unhappiness contains, stages, and enacts the conundrums of the modern freedom and capacity to exercise choice.” – Eva Illouz Few of us are spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we’re abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged – these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience. Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, …

Robin Dunbar on the Science of Love

Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar has spent many years investigating human mating strategies. What that means is that he can spend time pondering why we kiss, what the point of high heels is, and why a GSOH is so often on the shopping list of desirable traits in a partner. Here in under four minutes he tackles some of those questions.