Received wisdom
It’s difficult to say when and how my children first became aware of the concept of a prison. It was certainly very early, well before they started school. There were imaginative games, where one or both of them…
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The price of immortality
The Continental adventure was not going to plan for John Polidori. A young English doctor dreaming of literary acclaim and resentful of his father’s…
Akin to mindfulness
Ellen J. Langer is a social psychologist, writer, and Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, widely regarded as the founder of the psychology of…
Winners of the 50 prizes for our 50th edition
To celebrate the publication of our 50th edition, we're giving away 50 prizes to subscribers, with first prize a 50-edition subscription (up to our…
From Being Human
Taking flight
Award-winning wildlife and landscape photographer Michael Poliza Zan Boag: You have spent many years of your life on the road, moving from one…
Travelling identities
Over the last few years Scott had vacationed to countries like Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia and other destinations in Asia. He hunted out new vistas…
Lessons from stupidity
It is unclear just how the “Man from Song” (Songren) acquired his reputation, but classical literature is replete with stories of his stupidity. These…
Invisible experience
In our current cultural moment, when the boundaries between public and private have been largely erased, Calle’s investigations are prescient. In…
NFN: Seeing
“To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.” – Marilyn vos Savant A botanist and a…
NFN: A blink of an eye
“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that…
NFN: A form of power
“No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” — Niels Bohr In quantum physics, the ‘observer effect’ refers…
The fourth wall
It seems that Erving Goffman was not a nice man. He liked to ruffle feathers and watch the fallout. One time he invited a…
Impossible choices
There is a famous paradox, the paradox of Buridan’s Ass, named after the 14th century French philosopher Jean Buridan. Imagine an ass which is…
