“Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers,” NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam wrote in his extraordinary exploration of society’s hidden biases, “[and] those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.” That’s precisely what French filmmaker Eleonore Pourriat brings to life with imaginative vividness, elegantly waltzing between the hilarious and the heartbreaking, in her brilliant and pause-giving short film Oppressed Majority — a day in the life of a man who faces subtle sexism and unabashed sexual violence in a mirror-image society dominated by women. Laugh, cry, think twice:

For a deeper look at the serious issue beneath the comic veneer, see Vedantam’s indispensable The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives — a perspective-shifting even, if not especially, for those of us who consider ourselves well-intentioned and are thus most susceptible to unwitting biases.

Thanks, Julie