I Love You, I Hate You

Ball bearings — these mechanisms are all around us, inside our wheels and motors. Hidden away, we rarely see them, and most people don’t even know what they are. In this episode, Scott Carrier reveals the overlooked role this engineering marvel has played in human history. 

In search of inefficiency in an overly efficient digital world, Jakob Lewis entered the ‘typosphere,’ an online community of typewriter enthusiasts. Several typewriters and a letter to Tom Hanks later, Jakob is a convert to the analog life. 

Long ago, German immigrants brought their brewing traditions to the United States. More recently, brewers from the U.S. have begun bringing American-style craft beer to Germany. Sally McGrane and Axel Scheele look at two breweries on opposite sides of the pond. 

Germany’s colonial history isn’t something many Germans like to talk about – Some argue they weren’t as “bad” as other European colonialists or that focusing on German colonialism draws attention away from the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II. But critics of G ... Show More

In his new book, East German Intellectuals and the Unification of Germany: An Ethnographic View (Palgrave 2017), Dan Bednarz, Assistant Professor at Bristol Community College, examines the impact of German unification on East German intellectuals. Through a series of interviews c ... Show More

Is Europe ‘nostalgic for a racist past’ when it didn’t have to apologise for its colonialism?  In this week’s episode of The Big Picture, we sit down with renowned Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage.  Hage is currently fighting against the prestigious Max Planck Society in Ge ... Show More

Berlin artist-duo Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock talk with Samantha Rose Hill about the work of memory, Holocaust memorials in Berlin, and Walter Benjamin. “Hannah Arendt: Between Worlds” is a coproduction of the Goethe-Institut and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Th ... Show More

In Germany, beginning in the 1960s, a major population shift took place. The reason for it was the German guest worker program. Due to the German ‘economic miracle,’ the country was in growing need of cheap labor, and it found it in places like Turkey. Although it was assumed tha ... Show More

Cette semaine, la Grande Librairie conjugue le verbe « aimer » à tous les temps, avec quatre écrivains qui le pensent, le racontent et le vivent… passionnément : Adeline Dieudonné, Marianne Chaillan, Tahar Ben Jelloun et Jacques Weber. 

Berlin is ranked as one of the three unhappiest states in Germany. What role does a shortage of therapy play? And is there a way to get around that shortage if you need help? Guest host Eden Brockman explores the accessibility and quality of mental health care in Berlin and acros ... Show More