Writing a good essay is a skill that combines syntactical discipline with a capacity for structured thought, but if you thought it was an art that has been lost now, in this age of hash tags and emails, think again. Back in 1874, more than half of first-year students at Harvard University failed an…
Details
Graduating from school is undoubtedly one of the most significant milestones in our lives. When we begin the journey at the age of five or younger, it seems that moment of release will never come; and yet it does, even this year when much of what we take for granted has been swept off our…
Details
It is not often we have a chance to down tools and take stock of where we are, what we are doing and who we have become. Nor is there usually time to explore new avenues in our professional lives, honing a different skill set that will take us into the future. But, according to…
Details
There is no better time to focus our minds on healthy living than when the world is immersed in a sanitary crisis and the word “health” is on the tip of everyone’s tongues. No one is offering a magic shortcut to good health, of course. Rather it’s the usual suspects – diet, exercise, plenty of…
Details
French writer and keen traveller Xavier de Maistre once wrote a book called Nocturnal Expedition Round My Room. The point of it was to notice all the ‘ordinary’ things around him that he overlooked when planning trips further afield. In one scene, he looks up at the night sky from the window and muses, “How…
Details
Just as we have been thinking lately about our own lungs in the shadow of Covid-19, World Oceans Day celebrates the lungs of the entire planet, which are being assaulted by the fallout from climate change, chemicals from agriculture and plastic waste. The planet’s lungs are of course linked to the health of our own.…
Details
Exactly 40 years ago, a band called Village People belted out a song that could have been composed today: “You can’t stop the music, nobody can stop the music!” For 40,000 years, music has played an integral part in human life. It provides the soundtrack to almost all of our experience and there are few…
Details
Sometimes thinking can be a pain and independent thinking can be scary. Many of us claim we don’t want to be told what to do, but this often turns out to be untrue. After all, the alternative involves shouldering responsibility and it can be easier if someone other than ourselves has that job. While it…
Details
While we might be confined to our homes during this period of quarantine, our lack of liberty could be providing the perfect conditions for escaping another kind of confinement – that of conforming to social norms and peer pressure. Sometimes, particularly during adolescence, the desire to fit in makes it hard to separate what we…
Details
Both children and adults equate play with freedom, a time when you can become immersed in something of your choosing, with fewer boundaries and instructions. But what happens when our freedom has been curtailed and we find ourselves in lockdown? Can play still be as carefree as it was before the coronavirus took over our…
Details
