Analysis

11pm and I am worried my patient will not make it till tomorrow morning, says Dr Glenn Wakam. Twelve hours after intubation, the COVID-19 patient's condition deteriorates dramatically, and Wakam knows that an even more difficult intervention follows: to explain to the patient's wife, who begs to be allowed to say goodbye, that the hospital does not allow her this sad privilege.

Almost a century ago, writer Virginia Woolf noticed people’s tendency to approach books “with clouded and divided minds, asking fiction to be true, poetry to be false, biographies to be flattering and history to chime with prejudices.”

A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones, says a well-known biblical proverb. We don't have to be practicing Christians to recognise its truth.

On May 19th, 1780, a strange phenomenon turned a sunny morning into an unexpected night. The event, known as the Dark Day, was seen as a sign of divine judgment by contemporaries and as a means of ridiculing apocalyptic expectations by sceptics.

When a process is thought to be too slow or impractical to test experimentally, simulation science is a valuable tool for testing its validity.

Many times we don’t have the patience to wait for an answer to our prayers, and other times we don’t even know when we've received it. For the ten Boom family, the answer to some prayers came 100 years later.

Tim Urban knows that you're reading this article instead of dealing with that project for which the clock is ticking relentlessly towards the deadline. But Tim Urban understands you. The blogger who founded the long-form platform Wait But Why gave a TED presentation on procrastination a few years ago, and most of us will recognise ourselves in it.

Too tired to even touch hands, my husband, Bernie, and I crawled into bed. It was the end of a day in which we’d hardly spoken to each other, except to ask where things were or say where we were going—or had been. Our house had been full of guests for several weeks. To make matters worse, we’d just moved in and there...

I’m going to be honest with you. I find prayer really hard. If I had to give reasons for all my tears over the past few years, most of them have come during conversations with God.

Romantic love is easily hurt and somewhat pretentious, especially when faced with direct honesty. Friendship is more solid.

Hendel Butoy was born in Brazil and raised in southern California. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts, and was then offered a position as an animator at Walt Disney in 1979.

The appeal to ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam) is an error in thinking which argues that a conclusion is true because there is no evidence against it, or that a conclusion is false because there is no evidence in its favour.

There are many moments when, in situations that seem to have no solution and everyone has given up believing, especially the one who needs the solution, help comes in a completely unexpected way. For James Bowen, his rescue came in the form of an injured ginger cat.

Rudyard Kipling referred to ants in his famous poem, recommending these fragile creatures as a kind of didactic exhibit. What can one learn from ant colonies?

One of the most powerful pieces of literature illustrating the proper preparation for a financial crisis comes from antiquity. More precisely, from the Bible.