The Haitian Revolution of 1791 was the only successful slave rebellion in recorded history. Without access to guns or ammunition, the rebels defeated Napolean’s army with the only tool at their disposal: the machete, which they used to toil sugarcane fields.

Thus was born the martial art of machete fencing. Known as Tire Machet, it is shrouded in secrecy; only a select few Haitians have mastered the craft. In Jonathan David Kane’s short documentary Papa Machete, we meet one such master. Professor Avril shares the contours of what he describes as a gift that works through him. “I don’t use this gift to kill people,” says Avril in the film. “But I have it. So if you attack me, you’ll be in a bad way.”

“This martial art is generally practiced in secrecy, and that secrecy dates back to its origins,” Kane told The Atlantic. “There were even moments during filming where Professor Avril was reticent with aspects of his own practice. What he shows us in Papa Machete is a rare gift—one which my team and I are truly fortunate to have been allowed to document and share with the world.”

Just a few years ago, Tania Georgelas was living in Syria and married to John Georgelas, who would become the most influential American member of ISIS. Together, they traveled the globe, befriending jihadis and grooming their children to become “assassins.” But after ten years of living on the run, Tania began to fear for her family’s safety. That’s when she says her husband abandoned her "to become the next Osama bin Laden.” In a new documentary from The Atlantic, based on original reporting from Graeme Wood, the former extremist details her experience returning to the United States and building a new life in Plano, Texas.

“I told the little ones, ‘Your dad joined the dark side of the force,’” Tania reveals in the film. “I told them, ‘Mommy was part of the dark side of the force, but now I’m a dark Jedi.’”

For more, read Graeme Wood’s article, “From the Islamic State to Suburban Texas.”

From 1950 to 1990, Communist East Germany imprisoned thousands of women for committing political crimes against the state. (Among the punishable offenses: demonstrating the desire to travel, criticism of state politics, and participating in public demonstrations.) Hoheneck, a 700-year-old castle, was the most notorious women’s prison in the GDR. Many inmates did not survive their sentences, during which they endured torture and forced labor under harsh, unrelenting conditions.

Gabriele Stoetzer and Birgit Willschuetz lived to tell the tale. The former inmates share their harrowing stories in Broken: The Women’s Prison at Hoheneck, a Sundance-winning animated short documentary from Volker Schlecht and Alexander Lahl. In the film, one of the women remembers how after just days at Hoheneck, “your entire face changed. It dissolved. It was broken.”

“The pain told me what time it was,” recalls the other woman. “We had no watches or anything.”

The filmmakers conducted more than 100 pages of interviews over the course of their research. As a result, Lahl told The Atlantic, “rather than create a traditional story with a beginning, middle and end, we decided to make something more conceptual—a film that seemed more like a painting.”

Jimmy Chin may be best known as a professional climber, skier, and mountaineer, but his recent foray into photography and filmmaking (Meru) affords him the ability to share what he describes as “some of the deeper meanings and ideas behind climbing.” In this short animation, excerpted from an interview with The Atlantic, Chin describes how a great photograph or film has the unrivaled power to capture the imagination and move people. “In the mountains, the stakes are really high and the risks are very extreme,” says Chin. “My career as a photographer...became part of my obsession to share these incredible stories.”

More than 80,000 people currently rest in peace in San Francisco’s Victorian-era columbarium, a repository for urns and a living museum of memories. Some of San Francisco’s preeminent public figures are among those buried in the walls, including Harvey Milk (the city’s first openly gay politician), Chet Helms (founder of the “Summer of Love”), and Jerry Juhl (The Muppets).

Tyler Trumbo, director of the short documentary The Columbarium, invites us to experience the building through the eyes of its 30-year caretaker, Emmitt Watson, who “understands the power of storytelling through remembrance.” Watson has painstakingly restored the building to its former glory. He now regales visitors with stories of the people respectfully interred there.

“Death has always been a curiosity to me,” Trumbo said. “How do we remember those who have has passed? How do we distill a loved one's life? It’s an often overlooked and fascinating form of storytelling.”

While making the film, which he shot with a Bolex film camera, Trumbo was surprised to learn “how the collective history of the city could be amassed from observing individual niches. The entire place formed a mosaic that told a unique story of the city, spanning decades.”

In “Walking Distance,” one of the most critically acclaimed episodes of The Twilight Zone, an overextended ad executive takes a reprieve from his stressful life in the city to visit his hometown in upstate New York. Upon arrival, he encounters his 11-year-old self, who he finds riding a carousel. He realizes he has traveled back in time. The man spends the episode trying to find closure with his deceased parents and coming to terms with his bygone innocence.  

“That was one of the most autobiographical scripts that my father wrote,” says Anne Serling, Rod Serling’s daughter and biographer, in Jonathan Napolitano’s short documentary. The Carousel is a tribute to Serling—who created The Twilight Zone and wrote most of its episodes—by way of the carousel that he painstakingly recreated for “Walking Distance,” based on the one in Serling’s hometown of Binghamton, New York.

Now, nearly 60 years later, artists Cortlandt Hull and Bill Finkenstein are bringing it all full circle. Practicing the “forgotten art” of carousel-making, they’re restoring the original Binghamton ride complete with striking paintings based on episodes of The Twilight Zone. Serling, who, according to his daughter, “felt it was the writer’s job to menace the public conscience,” would be proud. Napolitano, for his part, “hopes that this short will be something most Twilight Zone fans will appreciate.”

“Never underestimate a vegan hippie chick with a race car,” says Leilani Münter in a new video by The Atlantic. Münter, who drove the first-ever vegan-themed race car in the world, is gunning for a future in which NASCAR runs on 100 percent renewable energy. In the video, she challenges NASCAR stereotypes and explains why the sports world needs more activists.

Jessica Wing was a healthy Stanford University student when she was paid to donate eggs on three separate occasions—funds which she allocated toward her student debt. Less than ten years later, she died of colon cancer. Because Jessica had no family history of the disease, her mother, Dr. Jennifer Schneider, wondered if there might be a link between the many hormone injections necessary for egg donation and Jessica’s cancer. But to her surprise, Dr. Schneider discovered that not a single study has been done on the long-term health risks of egg donation.

“The consent form for egg donation reads, ‘There are no known risks,’” says Dr. Schneider in this short film from The Center for Investigative Reporting, directed by Emily Harger and Olivia Merrion.  “That is true, but the problem is the significance of the word ‘known.’ There are no known risks because nobody has ever looked into it.”

“I don’t know for sure if the reason that Jessica got colon cancer is the hormone stimulation,” Dr. Schneider continues, “but I think it’s a very real possibility that’s got to be investigated.”

Oklahoma has the highest female incarceration rate in the country—more than twice the national average. This short documentary, produced by the Glassbreaker Films initiative from The Center for Investigative Reporting by Olivia Merrion and Emily Harger endeavors to find out why.

In the process of the investigation, the filmmakers encounter an inmate named Robyn Allen, who received a 20-year sentence for trafficking in illegal drugs. Interviews with Robyn and her mother lead to a shocking revelation about Robyn’s past—a life event the inmate believes underlies her transgressions.

“The biggest challenge was telling this story in a way that was not exploitative,” said Merrion. “We were extremely moved with both women opening up to us, and we felt a great responsibility. We made sure our overall message was clear and this was not just a large pry into someone's life—that it had a purpose.”

“After the interview with Robyn,” added Harger, “she told us that despite our conversation being very difficult for her, she knew talking about it was a part of her healing process.”

For more information on Oklahoma’s high female incarceration rate, read Reveal’s article.

“When you first start writing, you’re going to suck,” says David Sedaris in a recent interview with The Atlantic. In this animated video, Sedaris reveals that he kept a diary for seven years before he started writing stories and sharing them publicly. “More people are documenting their lives now,” he continues. “The difference is the degree to which they’re sharing. And there’s a lot to be said for not putting things out there.”

Have you ever caught yourself daydreaming? Turns out that humans predict the future by using their memories. In this video, based on a recent article, The Atlantic science writer Julie Beck explains how functional MRI scans have allowed researchers to determine that the same brain structures involved in remembering the past are also utilized in forecasting. This means that when we envision the future, we are simply rearranging and reconstructing our memories—an ability known as "mental time travel."

In 1997, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration discovered an unusual, ultra-low-frequency sound emanating from a point off the southern coast of Chile. It was the loudest unidentified underwater sound ever recorded, detected by hydrophones 5,000 miles apart. It lasted for one minute and was never heard again.

The Bloop, a mesmerizing short documentary by Cara Cusumano, investigates this unknown phenomenon with Dr. Christopher Fox, Chief Scientist of the Acoustic Monitoring Project of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Lab. “I took it to the very classified innards of the United States Navy intelligence,” says Dr. Fox in the film. “It wasn’t theirs. It’s captivating because we don’t know what it was. I am glad there are still mysteries on earth and in the universe.”

100 million pieces of “space junk” currently orbit our planet at 17,500 miles per hour. Adrift investigates the fate of these interstellar objects, which threaten to collide with and destroy satellites and spacecraft.

Director and producer Cath Le Couteur recruited Sally Potter to narrate the film from the perspective of the oldest piece of space junk, a solar-powered satellite lost in 1958. Adrift also features interviews with astronomers and scientists, such as NASA astronaut Piers Sellers, who dropped a spatula in space during a repair mission in 2006.

“Space junk,” says Le Couteur, “has become an intriguing but potentially serious and destructive museum of space exploration hurtling above our heads.”

According to Yascha Mounk, an author and lecturer on Political Theory at Harvard University, millennials in America are six times more dissatisfied with the democratic system than they were in 1940. In this video, Mounk explains how in previous generations, many Americans supported liberal democracy because it made them wealthier. Now, that’s no longer the case.

How do consumers decide what to buy? The truth is that stores know you better than you do—both online and offline. The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson reveals how retailers consistently manipulate customers into shelling out more money than a given item is worth. In this video, Thompson details three major psychological biases that retailers exploit and offers lessons on how to counteract each one.

In 1939, the German American Bund organized a rally of 20,000 Nazi supporters at Madison Square Garden in New York City. When Academy Award-nominated documentarian Marshall Curry stumbled upon footage of the event in historical archives, he was flabbergasted. Together with Field of Vision, he decided to present the footage as a cautionary tale to Americans. The short film, A Night at the Garden, premieres on The Atlantic today.

“The first thing that struck me was that an event like this could happen in the heart of New York City,” Curry told The Atlantic. “Watching it felt like an episode of The Twilight Zone where history has taken a different path. But it wasn’t science fiction – it was real, historical footage. It all felt eerily familiar, given today’s political situation.”

Rather than edit the footage into a standard historical documentary with narration, Curry decided to “keep it pure, cinematic, and unmediated, as if you are there, watching, and wrestling with what you are seeing. I wanted it to be more provocative than didactic – a small history-grenade tossed into the discussion we are having about White Supremacy right now.”

“The footage is so powerful,” continued Curry, “it seems amazing that it isn’t a stock part of every high school history class. This story was likely nudged out of the canon, in part because it’s scary and embarrassing. It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget.”

We may think of Leonardo Da Vinci as an artist, but he was also a scientist. By incorporating anatomy, chemistry, and optics into his artistic process, Da Vinci created an augmented reality experience centuries before the concept even existed. This video details how Da Vinci made the Mona Lisa interactive using innovative painting techniques and the physiology of the human eye.

Read more about the science behind the Mona Lisa on The Atlantic.

In a recent article for The Atlantic, writer James Fallows argues that no other society has allowed gun massacres to keep happening. For example, in the wake of a mass shooting in Australia in 1996, the country introduced a swift overhaul of gun legislation. Although Fallows acknowledges that stricter gun laws aren’t a panacea for every possible attack in America, he believes that gun control could significantly reduce the carnage. “Politicians offer their ‘thoughts and prayers and support,’” says Fallows. “But not their actions: to change our implicit decision to let mass shootings go on. And it is a decision.”

“The average citizen is starting to feel more and more like, ‘I’m not sure that I feel good about the way technology is interacting with my life,’” says Anil Dash, an entrepreneur, activist, and the CEO of Fog Creek Software, in an interview recorded at the Aspen Ideas Festival. As trust in the tech world continues to erode due to increased vulnerability to hacking and the proliferation of misinformation across Google and Facebook, Dash believes tech giants have a responsibility to society to be ethical. Says Dash: “If you’re the CEO of a major tech company, you are a political figure whether you choose to be or not.”

“I don’t think the human mind is able to understand the suffering we’ve experienced,” says a man in Matthew K. Firpo’s short documentary, Refuge. Filmed on location in 2016 in four different refugee camps across Greece—outside Athens and on the islands of Lesvos and Leros—the film allows victims of the Syrian Civil War to share their experiences. One man describes how his sewing factory was completely destroyed, leaving him penniless and starving. Another man says he was jailed and tortured for attempting to distribute food; his brother was killed shortly thereafter. Some lost everyone and everything. “Wherever I went in Syria, I saw the injured and the dead,” yet another refugee recounts. For Firpo and his production team, Refuge was a passion project fueled by “wanting to know more about the people living these headlines. I wanted to know more about their stories, about what they had lost, what they had left behind, and where they hoped their lives were headed. While news coverage focused on the problem, it often forgot about the human being.”

For more information on the film, visit the Refuge website.

In America, beef accounts for 37 percent of all human-induced methane released into the air. Methane is 23 times as warming to the climate as carbon dioxide. In a recent article, Atlantic senior editor James Hamblin highlighted research that found one dietary change—replacing beef with beans—could get the U.S. as much as 74 percent of the way to meeting 2020 greenhouse-gas emission goals. As Hamblin notes, it’s worth being reminded that individual choices matter.

“We clearly are not post-racial,” Michele Norris, the celebrated former host of NPR’s All Things Considered, claims in this interview filmed at the 2017 Aspen Ideas Festival. That’s why she created the Race Card Project: to “examine and interrogate America’s racial DNA.” Participants are tasked with condensing their experiences, questions, or observations about race and identity into just six words, which Norris then publishes and archives for posterity. So far, she’s received more than 50,000 submissions, including: “Why do I do that when I see a black man?” and “I’m only Asian when it’s convenient.”

“The foundation of Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in his feature for The Atlantic’s October 2017 issue. In this animated excerpt from a recent interview with Coates about his article, the writer explains how tribalism and white supremacy paved the way for Trump. Gallup research shows that white voters overwhelmingly supported the candidate across demographics.

“My position is not anti-technology, it’s pro-conversation,” asserts Sherry Turkle the director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self in a short interview at the 2017 Aspen Ideas Festival. Turkle believes that technology is an important part of modern life, but also that people need time away from their phones to cultivate the best relationships with other people. She argues that there should be spaces in everyone’s home and life where there are no phones at all.

In the 1950s, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short story that he never published. Recently, editors of a Vonnegut short story collection discovered it while researching old papers. The Atlantic is printing “The Drone King” for the first time this fall. This piece is an animated excerpt of a passage from the story where an intrepid businessman named Sheldon Quick tries to sell his associate on the idea of using bees as inter-office communication. The story showcases Vonnegut’s early dry wit and seems more relevant than ever in an era where communication is constantly changing.

For more, read the full story here.