u/SunAdvanced7940

Why are birthrates collapsing across the world — in almost every culture and society? This documentary reveals the surprising answer. Based on the research of data scientist Stephen J. Shaw — published and peer-reviewed in Nature Portfolio (Scientific Reports, August 21, 2025) — Birthgap challenges conventional wisdom and ignites a critical debate about our shared global future.

Premiering exactly nine years after filming began, this two-hour feature spans 24 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa — weaving gripping personal stories with cutting-edge data science, animations, and breathtaking footage. From bustling megacities to remote villages high in the Andes and Himalayas, it uncovers a hidden reality that is reshaping the future of humanity. Discover what it means for the 21st century — and beyond.

Handwritten letters seem like a remnant of pre-online life, but they connect us to ourselves and each other like nothing else.

P. S.

If anyone wants to send each other random letters about life and everything in between, please send me a dm with a brief introduction.

For his celebrated short documentary Bouncy Brothers, the US director Nicholas J Santore chronicled his uncle Anthony Glazier’s pursuit of the American dream – that deeply entrenched national notion that anyone with a worthy idea and sweat to spare can succeed. Attempting to escape the confines of suburban Chicago and the nine-to-five grind, Glazier upended his life in his 50s, moving away from his extended family to run an inflatable bouncy house business in central Florida.

Santore’s film captures Glazier’s hopes for self-sufficiency colliding with harsh realities. Unreliable help, fickle clients, thin margins and his easy-going personality make it difficult to turn a profit despite his dedication to making it work. With his business barely staying aloft, his brother Ted moves to Florida for the summer to try to help him save it. Framed by intimate cinematography and Santore’s connection with his subjects, what emerges is a nuanced portrait of brotherhood that subtly challenges what it means to succeed in a capitalist system.

Is there a limit to how large a supermassive black hole can grow? Beyond TON 618 lies Phoenix A*—a candidate for the largest black hole in the universe. One galaxy cluster. One failed executioner. One upper-end black hole estimate so extreme it sits at the edge of what our physics can comfortably explain. The Phoenix Cluster lies about 5.7 billion light-years from Earth and is one of the most X-ray-luminous galaxy clusters ever found. At its core, something has gone badly wrong: instead of fully suppressing cooling and star formation, the central black hole appears to sit inside a system where cold gas is still pouring inward and stars are still being born at a furious rate. In this contemplative space documentary, we trace the physics, the scale, and the dread of Phoenix A*.

RETIRE TO SOMETHING

Think about the people you know who've retired well. What do they have in common? Now think about the people who haven't. What's the difference?

Most people answer that quickly. The ones who retired well had something to retire to.

It doesn't have to be grandiose. It doesn't have to be a second career or a nonprofit or a passion project. It can be taking care of grandkids, working part-time at your favorite bike shop, or building something you've always wanted to build. But it has to be something; something that puts structure back in the day, gives direction to the week, connects you to other people, and answers the question of what you're actually for now that the job isn't doing that anymore.

I wanted to outrun my thoughts. But in the stillness of prison, I had no choice but to face myself

Devin A Giordano is an incarcerated writer in New York State and a student in the Bard Prison Initiative. He co-founded You Are Not Alone, a nonprofit focused on addressing violence against women and changing how men engage with it. His writing explores mental health and the human cost of incarceration. Inside, he works as a tutor, mentor and programme facilitator, committed to the kind of change he writes about.

The ‘godfather of tiny homes’ has spent a lifetime changing his mind

Amid the countercultural movement flourishing in his home city of San Francisco in the 1960s, Lloyd Kahn left what would have been a comfortable life in his family’s insurance business to forge his own path as a homebuilder. As this film from the short documentary series Portraits of Another Life chronicles, that change in direction ultimately led him to become a deeply influential thinker on the meaning and making of the modern home through his emphasis on functionality and practicality.

For his portrait, the California-based British filmmaker Emil Lozada interviews Kahn at his hand-built homestead in Bolinas, California, just north of San Francisco. Reflecting on his lifelong dedication to learning, teaching and remaining open to changing his mind, Kahn, now 91 years old, shares his views on what makes an ideal shelter, a successful life and why the two are deeply intertwined.

In the shattered aftermath of war, Sartre delivered a formidable lecture on freedom and meaning. Its urgency remains.

On 29 October 1945, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre emerged alone from the Paris Métro. He was about to deliver a lecture titled ‘L’existentialisme est un humanisme’ (‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’) at the Club Maintenant. No one had any idea it was going to become one of the most famous lectures of the 20th century. As Sartre walked towards the venue, he saw a huge crowd of people gathered outside. He wondered if Communists were protesting him and whether he should go home. He pushed ahead – really only because he’d made a professional commitment.

While the crowd parted for celebrities, no one knew what Sartre looked like. He didn’t tell anyone who he was, and as he slowly nudged his way towards the front, he was jostled about by brutal scrimmages for seats. The room was overheated and overcrowded. Fifteen people collapsed. An hour late, Sartre climbed to the stage to defend existential philosophy against his critics and argue that existentialism is a humanism. He had no notes, his hands remained in his pockets, but he was well prepared. He said what he came to say and then left.

The hosts of Sartre’s lecture, Jacques Calmy and Marc Beigbeder, had a modest budget. They bought simple ads in newspapers. Their wives posted fliers in Latin Quarter bookstores. Calmy worried: ‘With a title like that! Existentialism!’ Just two months earlier, Sartre had publicly stated: ‘My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don’t even know what Existentialism is.’ (Still, Simone de Beauvoir writes in her autobiography: ‘In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us [existentialism] and used it for our own purposes.’) Along with recent accusations that Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938) was anti-humanist, they hoped the title might at least be a ‘paradoxical provocation’.

To all the founders here,

I would love to know what you are working on.

The compound buy-and-hold return to the entire U.S. stock market over more than 100 years was 1,504,057%. Yet the median individual stock lost money.

Hendrik Bessembinder has spent years asking one of the most important and counterintuitive questions in investing: if the stock market creates enormous wealth in aggregate, why do most individual stocks fail? In his March 2026 study “One Hundred Years in the U.S. Stock Markets,” Bessembinder extended his 2018 research, “Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?” to cover a full century of U.S. market history every common stock listed between January 1926 and December 2025.

The study encompassed 29,754 stocks issued by 29,081 firms, drawing on the Center for Research in Security Prices database. The picture that emerges is humbling.

https://www.wealthmanagement.com/investing-strategies/a-century-of-stock-market-winners-and-why-most-stocks-failed-to-deliver

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck any of us will ever experience.