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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.

In 1867, when Edson White was 18 years old and working at the Adventist type-room in Battle Creek, Michigan, he had a transformative conversation with Mr Bell.

John the Baptist's call—"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near"—succeeded in bringing Jews "from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan" to the desert where the prophet preached, to confess their sins and be baptised. Two thousand years later, the exhortation to "repent" is buried under a mountain of pejorative associations.

Rape, torture, extrajudicial executions, and starvation are common practices in the North Korean prison system, dehumanising detainees to the point where they believe they deserve this treatment, according to a report published by a human rights monitoring body.

It’s been said that porn and the internet rose together. As technology develops, the pornography industry finds new and even more instant ways to entangle consumers. I saw a video on social media where a young woman was talking about her subscription account (where people subscribe to access exclusive content of her) making $350k a month.

When Reader's Digest asked readers to share a time when someone took care of one of their needs, the stories poured in, proving that our world is still full of ambassadors of generosity.

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.

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

Adults who choose not to have children are often portrayed as selfish people, so preoccupied with their own lives that the prospect of the sacrifices that raising a child would entail seems repulsive to them. Is this view fair or is it just an unfair judgement?

A former drug addict and a woman with a dark past are not exactly the kind of people one would look up to. However, Evgheni and Svetlana Isaev have shown that the past does not prevent anyone from completely changing their lives and becoming the pride of a nation.

For at least one party, sibling estrangement can be more painful than loss through death, writes Fern Schumer Chapman, who was excluded from her brother's life for four decades.

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful"—Samuel Johnson.

At night, the main boulevard in Las Vegas is so crowded that in order to move forward you actually have to push your way through the motley crowd. People of all kinds fill the space already suffocated by the construction conglomerate, which is equally diverse.

Under the burden of evil, often made public obsessively, insinuatingly, too often we perceive the world as an endless cycle of negative emotions and predictions. We lose the broad perspective that encompasses the initiatives beautifully woven by people whose hearts beat for God and for their fellow men, people who make this world liveable.

Loss begets pain, but pain is not one-size-fits-all, so there are no recovery methods that work in all situations. We do have at hand, however, explanatory models of pain, studies that dismantle myths about grief and, above all, "a psychological immune system" that helps us recover from painful experiences.