Item category 1: Society & Culture

Africa south of the Sahara is a land of wide-ranging traditions and cultures. This collection offers a hefty cross-section of evocative tales, from the Yoruba people of west Africa to the San people of southern Africa. Legends of the gods, origin stories, trickster exploits, animal fables and par...

'I just want to warn you. You're going to dive to the end of the cave. You're going to see these kids. They're all looking healthy and happy and smiley. Then, you're going to swim away, and they're probably all going to die.' In June 2018, for seventeen days, the world watched and held its breath...

When a bestselling author and a much-esteemed painter meet at a party, they soon cook up the idea to collaborate and make a book about the life cycle of a woman. From birth onwards, no topic is skirted around.

Artificial intelligence not only powers our cars, hospitals and courtrooms: predictive algorithms are becoming deeply lodged inside us too. Machine intelligence is learning our private preferences and discreetly shaping our personal behaviour, telling us how to live, who to befriend and who to da...

Would you kill for love? True-crime master Ron Franscell tells the grisly story of Alice and Gerald Uden, a loving couple who murdered at least four people, and live happily ever after—while cops try for decades to piece together a petrifying tale of murder and secrets. The appalling details are ...

Today's "machine-learning" systems, trained by data, are so effective that we've invited them to see and hear for us -- and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide...

The story of Edward Rulloff, a serial murderer who was called 'too intelligent to be killed' and the array of 19th-century investigators who were convinced his brain held the key to finally understanding the criminal mind. Rulloff was a brilliant yet utterly amoral murderer, some have called him ...

Seen any ghosts on your smartphone lately? As we're compelled to capture, store and share more and more of our personal information, there's something we often forget. All that data doesn't just disappear when our physical bodies shuffle off this mortal coil. If the concept of remaining socially ...

This is the true story of the Devils of the Bassa Modenese -- the most notorious Satanic Panic investigation in the history of Italy. In 1997 a six-year-old boy questioned by authorities relayed disturbing stories of abuse. The more he talked, the more people were implicated in his shocking revel...

We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. How are we supposed to know what we're so afraid of, when we are never given the chance to look? Fuelled by a childhood fascination w...