The kindness that wipes away the effects of daily stress

Daily stress is a good excuse to avoid other people's needs, but this choice is a double loss. The kindness we display to make other people's days better is a very strong antidote to the high level of stress we experience daily.

COVID-19: What people on the front line think and feel

While most of us have been staying inside for several weeks, many leave the safety of their homes every day to help us live our lives as normally as possible.

The absurd maths of inequality

Since 2020, the wealth of the world's five richest people has doubled. Over the same period, almost five billion people in the world have become poorer[1]. Such an absurd expression of equality is, sadly, not unique and shows once again where injustice has reached in a society that thinks it is on the cusp of progress.

Blood is (not always) thicker than water | Sibling estrangement, from causes to solutions

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.

People get ready

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,...

Children’s leisure time: then and now

I grew up on an unpaved, quaint side street in Ploiești, Romania. After school or during summer vacations my neighbours, M. and C., and I were an inseparable trio. We were almost always outdoors. If it wasn't too hot or raining, you could find us in one of our backyards.

How well are you protected against scammers?

Most of us want to trust. We assume that others possess our own level of honesty and goodwill. Sadly, this is neither a sensible nor a safe attitude anymore.

Children’s finances

Mel Rees, a contemporary Christian author, observed that “money [...] is life [...] in a tangible form.” He reasoned that life is “an expenditure of time and talent,” while money is “the result of the use of time and talent.”

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.

My mechanism of resilience

When I was four years old, my younger brother was born. My parents focused on my brother and spent less time with me. It was only 40 years later that I discovered how this had affected me.

Vanishing freedoms

“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

How to restore someone’s dignity

Have you ever wondered how the homeless people you encounter on the streets ended up in that situation? The answer could be much more complicated than you think, and their situation much easier to fix, if we, all those who see them, did not behave as if their lives do not matter.

“Honour your father and your mother”

I once heard on the radio a recommendation to help us understand the elderly: to attach some weights to our backs, hands and feet, put some blurred glasses on our noses, cotton wool in our ears, and then go to the market...

The surprising effects of music on the brain

People have always loved and cherished music, investing time into both composing and listening to it. Journalists from The New York Times sought to find the reason behind our deep attachment to this intangible thing that, for most of us, yields no material gain.

The Holocaust and the maths of an absurd history

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.