Social

More than 19 years ago, the Netherlands experimented with legalising prostitution, an approach that many countries looked at with interest and curiosity. After all, after the failure of the "noble experiment" of American prohibition, people wanted to see the result of the opposite approach with regards to sex.

In my humble but literary-educated opinion, Tim Winton is Australia’s finest living novelist. Since winning publication of his first novel in a competition for young writers in 1981, he has had 10 more novels published, as well as collections of stories, plays, books for younger readers and a handful of non-fiction works. Winton has won Australia’s top literary prize—the Miles Franklin Award—on four...

Facebook is dead! Long live Metaverse! So proclaimed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to thousands of followers who tuned in to a livestream last Friday announcing the company’s rebrand.

Some say that of all the opinions we can have in life, the most important is the opinion about ourselves.

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

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.

This year, Yom Hashoah,[1] or Holocaust Remembrance Day, begins on the evening of April 27th, and ends on April 28th, at sunset. In Israel, entertainment venues are closed from sunset to sunset, sirens sound long, and the six traditional torches are lit, a symbol of the nearly 6 million people who perished in the atrocities of World War II.

Let’s begin by extrapolating Paul’s assertion: “...but test them all; hold on to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

We sometimes find ourselves surprised by how other people think about moral issues—how they distinguish right from wrong and choose to do what they think is right.

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.

Happy couples are not spared from marital conflict, but the crucial thing is that they have simple but effective tools to strengthen their relationship in a way that does not allow the conflict to destroy the emotional connection between them.

A cold flash, like the strange, icy feeling after a burn, runs through his body with every breath. He feels his heart racing. It feels like it is counting down to the moment when it will explode—or, mercifully, to the moment when he will turn his pillow to the cooler side, and finally fall asleep.

Five decades ago, when the World Organization for Social Psychiatry was established, many thought it was a joke. Others, being more analytical, tried to prove that mental illness can only be an individual experience; that the problem always exists only in an individual and never in a group.

We often do it without even thinking. Labelling our children as shy, cheeky, fussy or even smart. In the right context, calling our children these things is innocent enough. It even helps explain certain types of behaviour. 

What we think about ourselves, over time, becomes our reality. This is a good enough reason to identify thinking errors left running in the background and to seek out strategies for healthier thinking.