Bullying: Effective strategies to put an end to it

Children who fall prey to bullying cannot save themselves, just as the children who have become accustomed to bullying others will not give up this behaviour without outside intervention. As the phenomenon of bullying spreads, with harmful consequences on children's development, the need to know and apply strategies to combat it is becoming more pressing.

COVID-19: Defending ourselves against fake news and panic

The fight against the new coronavirus is accompanied by several parallel fights, including the fight against fear, which can turn into panic—one of the most dangerous social phenomena.

Tricks by which supermarkets get you to buy more

Big chain stores know them and use them to make a profit. What is more, they are willing to pay a lot of money for studies on how to improve them. We're talking about the secrets of optimal product placement.

“Divine Providence: God’s Love and Human Freedom” | Book review

Bruce Reichenbach's book, Divine Providence: God’s Love and Human Freedom is impressive first of all due to the author’s total disinterest in impressing his readers. Instead, he has a legacy to pass on.

Dante’s imaginary translation of the torments of Hell

At the age of nine, the young Dante Alighieri fell hopelessly in love with Beatrice Portinari, a young woman of about the same age, whose image would haunt him for the rest of his life and inspire one of the most famous female characters in universal literature.

How to manage “good debt” and “bad debt”

Almost half of Romanians are in debt, while 39% say that they don’t pay their debt on time, and 29% never create a budget. These figures, based on the most recent national studies, reflect Romanians’ values and financial literacy, but they can also represent the starting point of a conversation about "good debt" and "bad debt."

The secrets of a successful failure

Few books about management can be read with as much pleasure as a novel, because few are as pleasantly written. Donald Keough's book[1] falls within this exclusive bracket. It is a book about business management and, strangely, was written for people who want to fail in this field, but do not know how.

31 days of Christmas

I love Christmas, and opening Nathan Brown’s book, Advent: Hearing the Good News in the Story of Jesus’ Birth, reading each page, is like opening a carefully wrapped Christmas present, undoing the gift card attached with ribbon and bow, folding back the bright cellophane wrapping and lifting the lid off a curious little box containing the Gift itself. The gift in this case...

How well do you know your heroes?

In 2016, I noticed advertising for a new quiz show called Hard Quiz coming to ABC TV in Australia.

The wellness expert amateurs who sickened us

In Europe, few people know Gwyneth Paltrow as anything other than an American actress. In the United States, however, her "modern lifestyle" wellness brand called goop is growing her reputation—in a negative way.

Misleading bridges, and better prayers

Bridges seem to be the emblem of existential stress for Romanians. In the face of a difficult situation, even Romanian folk wisdom recommends: "Make a pact with the devil until you have crossed the bridge."

Mothering in times of anxiety

The young generations of women raised with the ideal of the family in which the man and the woman are team partners, equal both at home and outside it, discover that their expectations have taken precedence over the real course of society. The most surprised are, unpredictably, women who are highly educated.

Teenagers and religion

In A History of Young People in the West, Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt posit that, in the West, adolescence is first and foremost a social-cultural construction, and therefore a cultural product. They considered it at most subsidiarily as a stage in the physiological process of growing up.

COVID-19: Let’s not go back to normal

Let’s not go back to the abnormality of before! This is one of the messages which the French hung from their balconies on May 1, when the activities that would usually happen on this national public holiday could not take place. What can we change and what is worth changing after COVID-19?

Are we smarter than previous generations, or do we simply think differently?

Researcher James Flynn of the University of Otago identified a surprising phenomenon: “We get far more questions right on I.Q. tests than each succeeding generation. (...) Indeed, if you score the people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an average I.Q. of 70. If you score us against their norms, we would have an average I.Q. of 130. Now this...