The film Your Day is My Night is especially notable for the unexpectedly personal monologues the residents of this insular community deliver, which are based upon her interviews with them. How an outsider got a group used to staying out of the public eye to open up is largely the subject of our conversation.

It is arguably not possible to imagine human stupidity on a grander scale than what Rudolph Herzog has stockpiled in his new book A Short History of Nuclear Folly. In it he details some of the most absurd, disturbing, and woefully misguided ways we dealt with, or failed to deal with in many cases, the most destructive technology in the history of humankind.

Despite the threat of a six-year prison sentence and a 20-year ban on filmmaking, renowned Iranian director Jafar Panahi premiered Pardé (Closed Curtain) at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Silver Bear for best screenplay.

Hitler and Goering are standing atop the radio tower in Berlin. Hitler says, “I’d like to do something for the Berliners to put a smile on their faces.” Goering says, “Why don’t you jump?” In the summer of 1943 Marianne K. was executed in Berlin for telling this joke.

A European city abandons all forms of timekeeping and is eventually forgotten by time. An entire island population, exposed to toxic waste, becomes so hypersensitive to light that a slight shock from a doorknob becomes “a splendid miniature lightning storm.”

Savage, a well-known music critic in the UK and author of England’s Dreaming, a definitive history of British punk, offers strong theories about how the concept of adolescence emerged after WWII as a stage independent of childhood.