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After the Mistake: Baggio and the Kindness That Gets Us Moving Again
Read more →: After the Mistake: Baggio and the Kindness That Gets Us Moving Again17 July 1994, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. After 120 minutes Italy and Brazil are still goalless and, for the first time in World Cup history, the final is decided on penalties. The last to shoot for Italy is Roberto Baggio, and his kick goes high over the crossbar. Brazil are champions. Baggio had got…
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The Opera House and Why We Always Underestimate How Long Things Take
Read more →: The Opera House and Why We Always Underestimate How Long Things TakeOn 20 October 1973, Queen Elizabeth II opened the Sydney Opera House. For many people it is the building that stands for Australia. But its story is also a perfect example of something we all know: projects, building works and deadlines almost always take longer than we expected. According to the Opera House’s official website,…
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When a Parent’s Phone Enters the Room: What a Meta-Analysis Says About Children
Read more →: When a Parent’s Phone Enters the Room: What a Meta-Analysis Says About ChildrenIt is eight in the evening and dinner is on the table. A work notification buzzes and, almost without thinking, a hand reaches for the phone. It happens to nearly everyone: parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. But what do young people see when a screen lights up in place of our gaze? Jinghui Zhang and…
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Flo’s Week, 12–17 October: Six Stories for Starting Again from Small Acts of Care
Read more →: Flo’s Week, 12–17 October: Six Stories for Starting Again from Small Acts of CareThis week we talked about a bedtime ritual, thirty-three miners, a garden, a hug, a Paralympic champion and porcupines looking for the right distance. Different stories, one common thread: small, concrete gestures, repeated with care, that help us feel better with ourselves and with others. Here is the recap, day by day. 12 October —…
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The Porcupine’s Dilemma: How Close Should We Stand to Others, According to Schopenhauer
Read more →: The Porcupine’s Dilemma: How Close Should We Stand to Others, According to SchopenhauerPicture a freezing winter day. To avoid dying of cold, a group of porcupines huddles together. But the quills prick, and soon each one moves away. Then the cold returns, and they come close again, and prick each other again. Until they find a middle distance: close enough to keep warm, far enough not to…
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Francesca Porcellato, the “Flying Redhead”: Changing Road Is Not Giving Up
Read more →: Francesca Porcellato, the “Flying Redhead”: Changing Road Is Not Giving UpAt eighteen months, a life can change in an instant. Francesca Porcellato, born in Castelfranco Veneto on 5 September 1970, was hit by a truck, and the spinal cord injury left her paraplegic. From that day, her road has had wheels. The wheelchair, which she received as a child, was not a limit for her…
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Does a Hug Really Help? What a Large Meta-Analysis Says About Affectionate Touch
Read more →: Does a Hug Really Help? What a Large Meta-Analysis Says About Affectionate TouchSome days a hand on the shoulder is worth more than a thousand pieces of advice. A baby falling asleep on a parent’s chest, a hug when we come home: these gestures are so common that we rarely ask whether they really do us good. A group of European researchers asked exactly that, and pooled…
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Cultivating Our Garden: Voltaire and the Art of Starting Again from What We Can Tend
Read more →: Cultivating Our Garden: Voltaire and the Art of Starting Again from What We Can TendThere are days when the world seems too big and we too small. The news weighs on us, worries pile up and we do not know where to begin. In 1759 a French philosopher gave a surprisingly simple answer. That year Voltaire published Candide, a short and fierce novel. Young Candide, raised on his teacher…
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Sixty-Nine Days Underground: What the Story of the 33 Copiapó Miners Teaches Us
Read more →: Sixty-Nine Days Underground: What the Story of the 33 Copiapó Miners Teaches UsOn 13 October 2010, a little before ten in the evening, Luis Urzúa steps out of the Fénix capsule in Chile: he is the last of the thirty-three miners to return to the surface after sixty-nine days spent about seven hundred metres underground. The whole world is watching. It had all begun on 5 August…
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The Bedtime Ritual at 3 and Health at 15: What a Study on Routines Says
Read more →: The Bedtime Ritual at 3 and Health at 15: What a Study on Routines SaysIt is nine in the evening, your child still has a thousand questions and you have a thousand things to do. You take them to bed: two pages of a book, low light, goodnight. It looks like nothing. But what can remain, years later, of such a small ritual? Carol Duh-Leong and colleagues asked exactly…
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Thinking for yourself, speaking up for yourself: Hannah Arendt and silence in meetings
Read more →: Thinking for yourself, speaking up for yourself: Hannah Arendt and silence in meetingsA meeting, a project drifting off track, and one person who notices. They know there is a mistake in the numbers, or a risk nobody has named. They stay silent. Why? Hannah Arendt (Hanover 1906 – New York 1975) asked a similar question in the most radical way. Following the trial of Adolf Eichmann in…
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Flo’s Week, 5–10 October: Six Stories to Look Again at What We Take for Granted
Read more →: Flo’s Week, 5–10 October: Six Stories to Look Again at What We Take for GrantedThis week we talked about tired parents, stale bread, a cave with shadows on the wall, children telling dinosaur stories, an Olympic champion and an eighteenth-century philosopher. Different topics, one common thread: stopping to look more closely at what we take for granted, and then taking one concrete step. Here is the recap, day by…
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Kant and the Courage to Think for Yourself
Read more →: Kant and the Courage to Think for Yourself«Sapere aude»: dare to know, have the courage to use your own understanding. With this motto Immanuel Kant answered, in 1784, a question posed by a Berlin magazine: what is Enlightenment? His reply, in the short essay «An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?», is still one of the most quoted pages in philosophy,…
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Fanny Blankers-Koen, the «Flying Housewife» Who Won Four Golds at 30
Read more →: Fanny Blankers-Koen, the «Flying Housewife» Who Won Four Golds at 30London, 1948. A thirty-year-old woman, a mother of two, steps up to the starting blocks. The British athletics manager, Jack Crump, had already said she was «too old to make the grade». Part of the Dutch press argued she should stay at home and look after her children. Her name was Fanny Blankers-Koen. At those…
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Answering Children When They Talk: What a Large 2026 Study Says
Read more →: Answering Children When They Talk: What a Large 2026 Study SaysA child tells you, for the fifth time in ten minutes, the story of a dinosaur. You are cooking, you answer with an «mm-hmm» and keep stirring. It happens to everyone. But what happens, in the long run, when adults really respond to what little ones say? A study published in 2026 in Frontiers in…
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Plato’s Cave: The Shadows We Mistake for Reality
Read more →: Plato’s Cave: The Shadows We Mistake for RealityImagine a group of people who have always lived in a cave, chained so that they can only look at the wall in front of them. Behind them a fire burns, and between the fire and the prisoners objects are carried past, casting shadows on the wall. For the prisoners those shadows are all of…
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Stale Bread: From Waste to Recipe
Read more →: Stale Bread: From Waste to RecipeHow many times does yesterday’s bread end up in the bin because it has gone hard? It is a small, almost automatic gesture, yet multiplied by millions of households it becomes a huge number. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Food Waste Index Report 2024 estimates that 1.05 billion tonnes of food were wasted in…
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Parenting Stress and Wellbeing: What the Science Says
Read more →: Parenting Stress and Wellbeing: What the Science SaysEarly wake-up, rushed breakfast, homework, work, dinner, laundry. Every parent knows what it feels like to reach the evening having given everything and with nothing left for yourself. It is not just tiredness: research has tried to measure how much the stress of parenting affects the wellbeing of the people raising children. A 2025 meta-analysis…
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Aristotle and phronesis: when rules are not enough in work decisions
Read more →: Aristotle and phronesis: when rules are not enough in work decisionsA customer asks for an exception the policy does not foresee. No procedure says what to do “in this exact case”. More than 2,300 years ago Aristotle had a name for the ability needed in moments like these: phronesis, practical wisdom.
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Thoreau and the True Cost of Things
Read more →: Thoreau and the True Cost of ThingsIn 1845 a man builds a small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in Massachusetts and lives there for more than two years. His name is Henry David Thoreau, he is just over twenty-seven, and he is not running away from the world: he is running an experiment. He wants to find out what…
