An inadvertent discovery, a film about listening, and a conversation on Kierkegaard

Pioneer Works offers a vast array of original writing, video, and more on Broadcast—our online magazine for adventurous and unexpected discourse across music, technology, science, and the arts.

Discover Dead Starts with Dame Bell Burnell

In a beautifully animated video by Micah Ganske, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell narrates her inadvertent discovery of pulsars: dense, rotating neutron stars that emit swinging beams of light, like astrophysical lighthouses.

WATCH THE VIDEO

Learning to Listen with Annea Lockwood

“Tuning into the sounds all around us can root us in the present moment.” Filmmaker Sam Green on the friendship that inspired his acclaimed new work of live cinema, 32 Sounds.

READ MORE

Graveyard Shifts: Circuit des Yeux

Reflecting on her performance at Green-Wood Cemetery, Haley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux offers a set of poems: "Learning to dance through loss." Read more.

Because Love Keeps Stabbing

For the first installment of Embedded, a new series of writings on the moving image, Minh Nguyen writes on the popstar who shares her name. Read more.

Rip it up and start again

Bradford Nordeen on Charles Atlas’s 1991 video Son of Sam and Delilah, filmmaking in the AIDS crisis, and the legacy of New Queer Cinema.

READ MORE

Elif Batuman on Life as Literature

The beloved novelist joins Joshua Jelly-Schapiro in a conversation on Kierkegaard, sex, and her new book Either/Or.

WATCH THE VIDEO