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Gentle parenting—how did this seemingly wholesome phrase come to elicit such strong negative reactions as contempt, sarcasm, and condescension?

I once invited the cashier at my local 7-Eleven petrol station to join me and my friends on a beach couch made of sand to eat hotdogs after his shift. To our surprise, he not only came but continued to join us for months after.

"Loneliness irritates me like a broken nail," says a line in a Romanian poem. The truth is, loneliness stings, pulls apart, and resembles the coffee dregs left at the bottom of the pot in which joy and love once brewed. Although the fear of loneliness is natural, we can choose to see solitude as something more than a "flowering wilderness" and embrace it...

These days, we are free to believe anything and to be anything, at least in theory. However, if we gave history a closer look, we would realise that it is not beneficial for us to believe or be just anything. We agree with the biblical exhortation, often distorted by popular lore: "...test them all; hold on to what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

Changing habits is like tightrope walking: an exercise in which the balance is always fragile, but it is the small changes that pave the way to truly remarkable results.

On any given day, a typical person checks the clock several dozen times.

Making any choice denies the possibility of at least one other choice. When confronted with this truth, young people often find themselves unprepared for life’s big choices.

What Indigenous peoples have long understood about our relationship with the natural world.

Among the greatest disappointments of life is having our expectations unfulfilled; not by politicians, or publications that promote false news or weather forecasts, but by those close to us—people in whom we have invested our confidence.

All COVID-19 statistics lead to the same conclusion: the young ones, our children, are at the lowest risk of getting ill or dying from the virus. That’s comforting. But the pandemic does pose a certain danger to them.

Joaquín Carmona had 16,000 followers on Twitter, and his posts about Spanish athletics were appreciated even by sport professionals. None of his followers had ever met him in person, and when silence fell on his account for three months, people began to look for him, write to him and ask who Carmona really was.

A famous saying asserts that the devil is in the details—in the small things we often deem unimportant. But life revolves around the little things. They take up most of our time, betray our vices and virtues, reveal our limits and courage, and divulge our preferences and dislikes. It is in the trivial moments that we are the most authentic: when we eagerly...

A friend carries within him our identity’s safe box.

Ever since ancient times, people have been interested in the origin and purpose of dreams. The initial theories relied heavily on the supernatural and dreams were seen as mental meeting places for gods and mortals, where gods could express their will to mortals, reveal the future to them, or deliver messages from the afterlife.

Big tech companies are slowly gaining more control over our lives, leading some to call them “Digital Lords”. But how do they stack up against the actual Lord?