Social

The possibility of completely rewriting the rules by which we organise our lives has always captured people's imagination. However, such a reorganisation has materialised, at best, in the pages of a philosophical book and has remained, for the most part, a utopia. But there are exceptions, of course.

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.

Many years ago, while I was still in high school, our Romanian language and literature teacher assigned us the task of writing a framed story, complete with characters and a plot of our choosing.

“What is mankind that you make so much of them, that you give them so much attention, that you examine them every morning and test them every moment?” (Job 7:17-18)

Arguments must be convincing and, in order to convince, they must be valid—the minimum requirement of persuasion.

Nelson Mandela, one of the most iconic figures in the fight against apartheid—the system of racial segregation enforced by South Africa’s white minority government—spent 27 years in prison for his commitment to dignity, equality, and justice.

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.

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.

It is said that it takes a village to raise a child. It's folk wisdom acknowledging that the development of a person requires the contribution of the whole community. What value does the community add, especially when the community in question is the scientific one?

One night while checking on his patients in a palliative care centre, the therapist risked asking a confusing question to a person whose universe had shrunk to the size of his sickbed: “What brought you joy today?” The answer was immediate: “Being alive.”

I love books as much as I love people, but if I’m honest with myself, sometimes I find a little more comfort in the company of books than in the presence of my fellow humans.

“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

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

Are you tired of feeling guilty for letting your kid play with an iPad or watch a show on Netflix? Perhaps you’re worried about the impact screen time has on them.

“To be fearless may be a gift. However, the most precious one is, probably, the courage resulting from developing the habit of not allowing fear to dictate your actions”, says the renowned Nobel Peace Prize winner and democracy activist in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, in her essay titled “Free from fear”.