Social

One of the small joys of my childhood was to visit my maternal grandmother at the house on the hill.

"If there is anything more heartbreaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from hunger for the light." (Victor Hugo)

Women work an average of 68 hours per week, while men work 55 hours—a total that includes both professional commitments and household responsibilities. This was the conclusion of a 2007 study conducted by sociologists at the University of Cambridge across European Union countries.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, every nine seconds, a woman is assaulted or beaten in the United States. Which means that by the time you reach the end of this paragraph, yet another woman will have tragically become a victim of violence.

Every day, we are surrounded by the resilience of developing characters and it’s almost impossible not to be touched by their beauty and fragility.

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” (Rudyard Kipling)

The wisdom of friendship consists in finding those who do not require a price, or ask you to change.

Close your eyes, cover your ears, and imagine that all your life you will need to get by without being able to see or hear much. Perhaps merely imagining this makes you shiver, and in no way can you associate such a life with joy, independence, or travel. Tony Giles is one of those people who has managed to successfully remove all these...

Happiness must come naturally – and this is true for success: you must let it happen simply by not obsessing over it.

"Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations, that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than...

Seeing a team care for remote villages in the Solomon Islands showed me how small donations can make a real big difference.

Aside from fuelling jokes about how women impose unrealistic standards on men, or how men are just grown-up children who want their wives to be their mothers, the expectations couples place on their relationship define how they relate to each other, and influence marital satisfaction.

Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a counterpoint to the previous article in the Declaration that recognises the right to work and to do so in fair conditions. After affirming the human right to work, Article 24 reads, “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” It is a...

JS: What is NAIDOC Week? Why is it significant?  DG: NAIDOC Week celebrates Indigenous culture—Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, their achievements and their contribution to the nation.

I have two reasons for writing this article on identity crisis. First, I am the father of four children, three of whom are very different teenagers (14, 17 and 19 years old) and I think I have a vague idea of what it means to deal with teens. Second, in the studies I’ve recently taken up, I was surprised to discover that most...