Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

But the answer isn’t just to intimidate people into consuming more ‘serious’ news; it is to push so-called serious outlets into learning to present important information in ways that can properly engage audiences. It is...

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness…

Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the...

Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot...

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully...

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with particulars involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social...

Jarenlang kwam ik bij het boodschappen doen langs een huis dat weliswaar een van de lelijkste gebouwen was dat ik ooit heb gezien, maar me ook meer over architectuur heeft geleerd dan menig meesterwerk.

Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.

Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.

The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent.

It is this idea ‘decency’ should be attached to wealth -and ‘indecency” to poverty – that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money...

He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life – so he stayed, and did just that.

What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between...

At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick...

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.