Dumbo Feather

Dear friends, In the early months of 2017, I experienced romantic love for the first time. Being the ripe age of 31 it felt like a long while coming, and I’d built quite a few expectations as to how it would play out. But the reality didn’t quite mat

Ah, love. It’s one of those words, isn’t it? We routinely use it to refer to romantic passion, or the bonds of familial affection, or close friendship, or even our emotional response to music, food, travel, pets, or poetry. We can say, “I love your s

In the past 15 to 20 years, a profound change has taken place in the way we think about and find romantic love. The internet has completely transformed the landscape from the one that I, a Generation-Xer, encountered when I started dating as a young

Esther Perel Relationship therapist Berry Liberman Tawni Bannister New York, US November 2017 Romantic consumerism Speaks nine languages Through her best-selling books, TED Talks and now famous podcast, Where Do We Begin?, Esther Perel, a Belgian-b

Miranda July Actress, artist, film director, writer Sarah Darmody Elizabeth Weinberg Los Angeles, US November 2017 Convention Works on vacation I told my daughter I was interviewing Miranda July. My daughter is four and doesn’t know what that means,

Erich Fromm invites the patient into his office and asks them to sit down and talk. “Just say whatever comes into your mind,” he says. Erich doesn’t make demands. Society makes enough of those. The patient—without realising it—is trying to meet these

Stephen Jenkinson Farmer, writer, teacher Pierz Newton-John Ian MacKenzie Ontario, Canada March 2017 Denial Rejects hope Having taught classes on grief and dying, I’ve read many books on the subject of death, but nothing quite like Stephen Jenkinson

Sit on the shore while everything else goes on by you, and get through the low-level anxiety and the boredom and the feeling that you’ve already seen it all. That’s a good time to learn. Here’s what’s there to see. Everything we do and don’t do makes

Rachel Callander Photographer and speaker Nathan Scolaro Nathan Maddigan Perth, Australia October 2017 Deficit language Has worn yellow for seven years Rachel Callander has a room of healthcare workers in tears when I hear her speak for the first t

For The Super Power Baby Project, Rachel travelled the breadth and length of New Zealand meeting ordinary families being made extraordinary through the journeys their children have taken them on. She photographed more than 70 children with genetic an

Helen Fisher Biological anthropologist Sarah Darmody Tawni Bannister New York, US June 2017 Generalising Nothing like her identical twin The day before my interview with biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher, I had read Delia Ephron’s piece in Th

Over 14 million people in 40 countries have taken Helen’s personality test, which assess the degree to which a person expresses four broad styles of thinking and behaving, each associated with a basic brain system: Explorer: primarily expresses trait