Social

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force." (Ayn Rand)

Every generation of parents loves their children and searches for the best ways to support them and prepare them for a successful start in life. Modern parents, however, often take this effort to extremes, complicating their children’s lives (and their own, just as much) in an attempt to clear a perfectly smooth path for their still-uncertain steps.

One of the most overused metaphors for our human experience of life is that of the journey.

There are times when life sets before us an opportunity for radical change. Such a moment led Narayanan Krishnan to dedicate his life to feeding the poor and the mentally disabled on the streets of India.

A week before he left for college, megachurch pastor Steven Furtick’s oldest son asked him, “Out of everything you’ve taught me, what’s the best advice you can give me right now?” 

"My exploration of the nobility of the spirit . . . began with the realisation that, following 9/11, many intellectuals were desperate to justify what had happened, failing to distinguish between being highly critical of their own Western society and legitimising a crime, no matter the reasons. I asked myself, 'What use are so many intellectuals who know all the books and music,...

There are many reasons why your daily interactions may become tense and even fractured, but if you decide to mend a relationship, you could also take a few extra steps to improve it.

We often associate divorce with the unhappiness of adults who reprehensibly decide to go their separate ways. For under-age brides Noora and Nujood, however, divorce was their escape from a nightmare of domestic violence and abuse, into which they were thrown at a young age by their own families.

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.

When professional activity causes constant stress, it is necessary, as part of a strategy for better communication, to identify the traits of a toxic boss and decipher problematic behaviours.

The song, “People Get Ready” was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr’s march on Washington and his “I have a dream” speech. In writing it the following year (1964), Curtis Mayfield not only captured the spirit of the march but created a song that caught the mood of the times and injected hope: “There’s a train a-comin’… . You don’t need no ticket,...

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.

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day. – Emily Dickinson

#vanlife . . . it’s the aesthetic trend we’ve seen sprawled across the internet in the past decade. The reservoir of photographs framed by flung-open doors or windows onto a glorious, unpeopled view has stirred many an individual’s curiosity.

Many years ago, while I was still in high school, our Romanian language and literature teacher assigned us the task of writing a framed story, complete with characters and a plot of our choosing.